January 21, 2006
Open source Flash development gaining momentum
I've been keeping an eye on the flash development community for a while, as it seems to be gaining momentum. Several tools are actively being developed, and what seems to be the most interesting evolution is that you can develop entirely in open source tools, without touching the Flash IDE (which IMO has allways been developer unfriendly).
The site to watch is OSFlash. Some quick links to interesting tools :
MTASC : A standalone Actionscript compiler.
Flashdevelop : An Actionscript IDE
swfmill : an xml to swf generator, often used as an asset library generator.
Posted by Dominique at 12:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 09, 2005
Flash 8 as a game development platform
Flash 8 gets anounced. On this site you can find some interesting demos & descriptions. Looks like flash 8 is becoming an (even more) viable game development platform, especially with development tools like NeoSwiff and MTASC.
Posted by Dominique at 08:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 12, 2005
Neoswiff : Developing flash content in C#
Now here's an interesting product in the works that allows you to compile C# applications to SWF. It's available as a stand-alone compiler, or as a plugin for Visual Studio.NET 2003. It has a .NET compatible SDK, making it suitable for winforms development. It surely looks interesting for game development, as it allows you to make flash applications in a real development environment!
You can download the beta from this link.
And als check out Darron Schall's blog for some interesting real life examples of neoswiff, e.g. this article about a port of a C# winforms application to Neoswiff.
Posted by Dominique at 08:36 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 07, 2005
Gamedev Technology? Get over it!
Most game developers probably have spent some time in the often under-estimated 'technology phase' in which you are building a library, platform or engine to write your next great game in. Browse various game development forums, or flipcode's 'Image Of The Day' gallery, and you'll see lots of engines, scripting languages, ray tracers, tutorials, IDE's, etc. etc... All the technology you (and everyone else out there) will ever need to design and implement a game. Sometimes, someone will post a screenshot or a beta of a game, but it seems lots of aspiring game developers (most?) are still inventing tech.
Speaking for myself, I know I have poured lots of valuable energy in various frameworks, most of which are collecting electronic dust on my hard disk. Did I gain experience by doing that? Sure. Did I finish lots of games with it? Nope.
2 years ago, I made the move towards professional game development, since then I have been working on downloadable/casual games for/with nuclide, and guess what? Writing games has little to do with implementing technology! Sure you can write a library that fits your own programming style best, or has an über-elegant design, or makes better use of the latest pixel shader API, or has a way-cool software fallback, so your game can run on a 8086 too! But you have to ask yourself, do you want to write games, or do you want to write libraries? If the former, choose an existing library or framework, there are lots of high quality open source and or commercial alternatives out there. Pick one, and start writing that game! Get over it!
Posted by Dominique at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)