SRJM.co.uk » Flash and Actionscript

Added sIFR to the Site

Simon — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 14:50:06 +0000

Tired with the poor antialiasing observed in big header fonts, I decided to introduce sIFR to the site. Here’s a preview shot allowing me to use High Tower Text as my page heading:

Completed a Flash Drag and Drop Demo

Simon — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:11:48 +0000

Following applying for a position at spongeuk I had to produce a demonstration Adobe Flash and Actionscript piece from a sample brief creating a drag and drop e-learning game.

This involved forming an interface based on the style of their website and creating actionscripted animation for button and label motion, as well as learning a bit about SLR cameras myself in the process! I await to see if this demonstrates suitable skills for the position.

Update: the company was suitably impressed by this demo however my application was too late before they had to hire another person.

Narrative Project Begins

Simon — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:02:50 +0000

Over the weekend I made an effort to get as much of the body of my Narrative Project done. Essentially the concept will be a parody of traditional fantasy/fairytale like storytelling, and an opportunity to let off some steam from the formal writing required for my Dissertation.

To go with this, my story needed an image for use as background (or cover), so I seized the moment to do a quick sketch of my concept.

My ‘book’ will be based on rewritten code for my gallery, and made to look as tangible and booklike as possible through the use of styles and fonts.

Game Screenshot

Simon — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:41:31 +0000

Having finished linking animations to actual realtime world movement I thought it was time for another screenshot since the game is really coming together. Here you can observe a character jumping down from a height while the blocks get revealed by the map movement mid-transition.

Also below are a couple of power up objects.

More Game Icons (and Update)

Simon — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 09:12:59 +0000

I spent a huge amount of time over the weekend attempting to build a ‘rotateWorld’ function that animates the flipping of the world on its head, while inverting all the controls, collisions and gravity etc. to cope with being upsidedown!

More icons

Meanwhile however here are some additional collectible/buttons/mechanics icons for the game:

In order: Blank, Gravity, Vision, Random Teleports, Jump Strength and World Flip.

I’m busy

Simon — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:38:07 +0000

That’s right, busy writing a game engine and considering level designs as I add functionality to what the game should be able to do. Additionally, I’m adding towards my dissertation full draft. Hence there hasn’t been much in the way of blog posts lately.

Here is the game with both players fully functional and able to move around the same map independantly:

The latest demo of the game can be seen here: http://www.srjm.co.uk/i-dat/idat310/

Scripting Finished

Simon — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:57:26 +0000

So as of Friday the scripting module will be over, done and finished. This is also the first ‘traditional’ hand-in I’ve had in a very long while, so I note now that the uni sends an email the very minute you hand your work in as a receipt.

Screenshot of the Piece

Finishing Scripting and Update

Simon — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:11:43 +0000

I haven’t posted in a few days because I have been busy rounding off the rough edges to my scripting coursework, most of which was completed a long while ago. I have solved a couple of the persistent issues, one of which was a depth problem where randomly half-way through a gallery the depths of the images after the one being displayed would reverse their order (a pretty unsightly effect).

Following this I’ve withdrawn some light reading for my dissertation… and of course I need to concentrate on dealing with C++ and DirectX.

Gallery Menu Image

Custom Flash Player Menus

Simon — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 15:44:54 +0000

I’ve posted a little tutorial here on making custom Flash context (right click) menus because when I learnt to do it (a long while back now though) there was very little out there describing how.

First of all you need a function to take the menu action. It can do absolutely nothing, but it does need to exist for the menu item to work. For the example here though it will link to a website:
function menuClick() { getURL("http://www.srjm.co.uk", _blank); }
Next, declare the menu variable, it’s good practice (and incredibly helpful) to do it this way because then whenever you add to the menu you get the Code Hints.
var menu:ContextMenu = new ContextMenu();
Finally, hide the existing menu (unless you wish to keep the play/rewind and other options) and add your own options instead, and apply it to the root context menu:
menu.hideBuiltInItems(); var menuItem1:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("http://www.srjm.co.uk/", menuClick); var menuItem2:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("SRJM Design", menuClick, true, false); menu.customItems.push(menuItem1); menu.customItems.push(menuItem2); _root.menu = menu;
The second ContextMenuItem has additional parameters to give it a horizontal line above and also make it unclickable.

Game Development

Simon — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 11:30:42 +0000

Here is a little screenshot of what I’ve been developing for our Games Module game. Basically it’s been world generation and character control, and lots of difficulty getting a decent collision system going.

I started off with using a hitTest function on all the surrounding cells only (9 in total for the sake of using hardly any CPU), but this led to issues where the character would get permanently stuck a little-way into one of the walls. Not good…

Instead I’ve implemented my own system where I have a function that tests whether the target location, ie. where the player wants to go, is solid or not, and returns true or false as to whether they can move there or not.