ACE Solitaire, 2009 Resolution, Happy New Year
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Published
Saturday, January 03, 2009
at
9:22 AM
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Ahhhhh the first post of a new year, Happy New Year! During the long holiday I decided to do something very different with my idle time and focused on finishing a Flash game I have worked on quietly for about 3 months called ACE Solitaire.
Become a FAN of ACE Solitaire
ACE Solitaire was build using ActionScript 3 and leverages some earlier code written by Darron Schall during the early IFBIN and ActionScript 3 days. The codebase has been almost entirely rewritten to support the features needed in ACE Solitaire and will soon leverage the full social aspects of Facebook. Currently the social aspects are limited but there is a lot more code to release in the next 2 days before I return to work.
The game is written in pure Old School AS3 using ActionScript Project in Flex Builder. The output SWF is 19K and that includes the card graphics made in Flash CS4, tiny tiny! The game is specifically designed to allow for long gameplay (4hrs in same session) and I tested the game running for 48hrs without any memory leaks or abnormal behavior. I also had some fun building forms with just Sprite, TextField, and Drawing API which is way fun if you haven't tried it, I just love TextEvent.LINK (later post)! One unique element is that I added in imaging support into the game so the app can upload screen shots to Facebook ( bug reports, high scores, shared games ). The game is also unique in that it supports FullScreen to allow you to play ACE Solitaire taking advantage of the full desktop real estate.
My recent work at Adobe (MAX+Groups+Video+Community) has really limited my ability to write software and this project scratched a huge itch for me personally. It really made me realize that in 2009 I need to write and blog about the code I write much more often. It is my top resolution for 2009 and I get so much enjoyment out of writing code that it really isn't work for me, it is fun. I guess once an evangelist, always an evangelist. With this project in particular it really helped to be a Solitaire addict. Over the holiday I think I played over 500+ games of ACE Solitaire.
Back to code, 2 more full day sprints!
Ted :)
There is a beautiful property called mouseChildren that I had completely forgotten about. mouseChildren=false turns off all mouse events at a node in the DisplayList so that event on children only reach the actual object where mouseChildren is set to false. Essentially this allows you to enable certain graphics/objects to be invisible to the DOM Event phases and behave as part of the object they are parented to.
Why would this be important?
Say you are writing a game or component and you make these amazing skins for all the elements in the game. If you do not set mouseChildren to false (default is true), you will get events within the skin and need to detect what Object you are working with when events occur. You will see code start to appear that reads:
//within event handler
if( event.target is Card ) do this...
//then the madness begins as you hunt up the DisplayList for the object in question
event.target.parent blah
event.target.parent.parent blah blah
By setting mouseChildren to false, events on any mouseChildren are given to the parent automagically.
ok back to coding...
Ted :)
SlideRocket up for Best Design at Crunchies on TechCrunch
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Published
Monday, December 29, 2008
at
9:03 AM
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Congratulations to SlideRocket for being nominated for Best Design in the Crunchies on TechCrunch. Mitch and his team have done an amazing job making SlideRocket easy to use and look great. They more then deserve to win this one.
VOTE FOR SLIDEROCKET (BEST DESIGN)
ted :)
MAX SESSIONS on AdobeTV - Added 25 sessions
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Published
Friday, December 19, 2008
at
10:44 AM
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Today we are pushing out 25 new MAX sessions onto AdobeTV for a total of 41 of 295 sessions posted. Having ironed out the video issues last week, explanation below, we are pushing forward with posting videos regularly. To catch up we are posting a batch today.
MAX SESSIONS on AdobeTV
Cheers,
Ted :)
MAX SESSIONS on AdobeTV - Update and MRSS Feeds
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Published
Monday, December 15, 2008
at
9:23 AM
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We had a bumpy launch of the MAX sessions on AdobeTV. It seems that we have 10 videos with malformed headers that caused all sorts of problems in the Akamai streaming service. We have fixed the headers in the FLV files, uploaded new FLVs, and everything is working perfectly. In addition we have added MRSS feeds for use with Adobe Media Player for each track of the MAX conference. This way you can sit back and let the videos come to you!
TRACK FEEDS:
http://rsstv.adobe.com/Max2008Design
http://rsstv.adobe.com/Max2008Develop
http://rsstv.adobe.com/Max2008Envision
TRACK URLS:
MAX 2008 DESIGN
MAX 2008 DEVELOP
MAX 2008 ENVISION
These feeds provide direct access to the FLV files themselves so you can watch the vidoes offline 100% vs online viewing with high quality streaming on AdobeTV.
We will be pushing out a schedule of the upcoming videos given we are past our technical issues with posting the videos. Again sorry for the delay!
Special thanks to the teams on AdobeTV, Akamai, and Digitally Speaking for working through this initial issues. Getting 300+ hours of video posted is a big task and they have done an amazing job!
Spread the word, MAX Sessions are on AdobeTV without restriction!
Ted :)