This blog is moving

This blog will be discontinued here at wordpress and will be moved to blogger, so please update your feed to:

http://www.gamedevjuice.blogspot.com/

Cheers.

Martin.

GotAPI.com

www.gotapi.com

I wanted to share this incredibly useful web site. No matter in what language you program this site is the equivalent to a Victorinox Swiss army pocket knife for a programmer. GotApi is a web language reference for a lot of languages and APIs. This is the supported stuff:

HTML / CSS / JavaScript HTML at htmlhelp.com <!– HTML at msdn.microsoft.com –> HTML at w3.org CSS at htmlhelp.com CSS at msdn.microsoft.com CSS2 at w3schools.com JavaScript/DOM at w3schools.com JavaScript/DOM on Firefox at mozilla.org AJAX and Frameworks Google GWT Prototype.js v1.5 sergiopereira.com Prototype.js v1.5 prototypejs.org -Dusan Maliarik New jQuery 1.0.3 - Rich Manalang Yahoo! UI – Misha Peric MochiKit – Arnar Birgisson XML XSL at w3schools.com XPath at w3schools.com Schema (XSD) at w3schools.com XML DOM at w3.org DITA XML at oasis-open.org DocBook at docbook.org C/C++ C, C++, STL at cppreference.com RogueWave at roguewave.com Dinkumware C/C++/STL – Jason Petrone Berkeley DB XML – Michael Driscoll OpenGL 2.1 – James Darpinian

PHP PHP at php.net PHP Tutorials 600 from misc. sources CakePHP at cakephp.org Symfony at symfony-project.com Ruby / Rails Ruby / Rails at ruby-doc.org & rubyonrails.com Ruby Standard Packages at ruby-doc.org RMagic simplesystems.org – K. Adam Christensen Python Python at docs.python.org More Programming Languages Sicstus Prolog Perl at activestate.com – Rowan Nairn Erlang – Matthew Pflueger Adobe / Macromedia ActionScript ActionScript (frames) ColdFusion Tags/Functions Flex 2 Groovy Groovy 1.1 beta 1 - Marc Dexet Updated Drupal CMS Drupal 4.7/HEAD - Z.Karman Flickr Flickr API - parhuzamos Orb API Orb API – Orb Networks

Databases MySQL at mysql.com PostgreSQL at postgresql.org Oracle9i Oracle10g Java J2SE v1.3.0 J2SE v1.4.2 J2SE v1.5.0 J2SE v1.5 faster without AWT/Swing J2EE Struts Spring Framework Hibernate Castor Log4J Apache RegExp Apache Commons Net Application Testing JUnit HttpUnit DbUnit Selenium – Tom Smyth Java2ME expand… CDC Connected Device Conf v1.1.2 MIDP Mobile Inf. Device Profile v2.0 CLDC Connected Ltd Device Conf v1.1 FP Foundation Profile v1.1.2 PBP Personal Basis Profile v1.1.2 Bluetooth and OBEX v1.1 Web Services v1.0 Mobile Media v1.2 Apache Ant Ant at ant.apache.com

BitmapMovieClip

In some cases in a project, we need to use striped sprites, it means an an animation of bitmaps which has their frames arranged in rows or columns like the examples below:

Sometimes the output of some graphic tools are this kind of sprite, for example this explosion generator: http://www.geocities.com/starlinesinc Actionscript do not brings anything built-in to handle this kind of sprites what I called Bitmap MovieClip, so I created a handy class to handle this situations where we need want to create an animation from an array of frames on an image.
The result is something like this:

Got DS

Finally after a long wait I got a Nintedo DS.

I also bought a R4, so after a long season of gaming I will start to diving into the nuts and bolts of DS game programming.

Considerations in Collision Detection with PV3D

use left and right arrows.

The collision detection in Papervision3D is not a big deal. Is easy to detect collision between two DisplayObject3D for that task PV3D provide us with two methods

public function hitTestPoint( x:Number, y:Number, z:Number ):Boolean

public function hitTestObject( obj:DisplayObject3D,multiplier:Number=1 ):Boolean

The first method is to test if the current DisplayObject3D is hitting a point in the scene and the second one is to detect if the current object is hitting another DisplayObject3D in the scene.
This is quite similar to the display architecture used by flash and its DisplayObject the difference is when we have a main DisplayObject3D with other objects 3D as childs.
In that case we would be tempted to use hitTestObject assuming that the collision test will be tested using the parent DisplayObject3D and their childs but that is wrong.

Particle System for Papervision3D

A few weeks ago I made some modifications to the Zeus Lab particle system for Actionscript made by Josh Tynjala . The Josh’s particle system is neat, simple and if you combine the particle system with the use of filter you can obtain beautiful visual effects. I wanted to continue using it while experimenting with Papervision, the only problem is that it is 2D, so I made the port of the particle system to make it usable in a 3D environment, the result was some kind of distribution of the particle system because I didn’t touch the 2D code I only extended to be usable with the display architecture and classes in PV3D.

In the following example I will explain how to use it combined with the Effects branch to obtain something like this:

Bump mapping in flash

I’ve been playing around lately with Papervision3D 2.0 which still in alpha yet. But this new version has a lot of new cool features one of the new features are shaders. So make things look like this:

Seven tips about performance optimization in Actionscript 3

This post is a list of tips and tricks for tunning performance in Actionscript 3. Keep in mind the following quote while reading this:

“Premature Optimization is the root of all evil.” – Hoare and Knuth