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Thread: Retro reanimation contest WIP

  1. #281
    Neoteric Lukstr's Avatar
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    I just completed it without losing a life too
    - Lukstr

  2. #282
    Hype over content... Squize's Avatar
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    Sorry I'm about an hour or so late, but the source is up there now. Just go to the normal Delta front page and follow the link.

    If you want to post any questions you may as well stick to this thread ( Unless it turns into the "Delta Q&A" thread then I'll start a new one ).

    Have fun, and dial-up users, brace yourself ( Sorry ).

    Squize.

  3. #283
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    oh my god squize,

    I just looked at your source code, man, I can't believe how complex that code is: I understand now what you mean't about the movement of the enimies. I didn't realise that you were using sin/cos . Had I known that I would have had a muchbetter understanding. I must credit you for the ammount of work that has gone into this game (it's amazing) Whats more, It's a flash game I actually enjoyed playing!!

  4. #284
    Hype over content... Squize's Avatar
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    To be honest I've had a hard time getting my head around sin/cos ( The one thing I should have listened to in school ) that's why I had to use some code from Cyberfunk's prototype.

    Hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to just lift the baddie code from it and just paste it wholesale into your own game.

    There is a fair amount of code in there, and I think I only lifted the score plotting routines from another one of my games, everything else is newly written for this.

    Squize.

  5. #285
    I'm feeling supersonic kdsh7's Avatar
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    Can I just be among those to say 'bloody hell'?!! I mean, I thought it was impressive while playing, but seeing the code and reading through your tutorial/dev summary really rams it home. I mean, you've even created in essence a flash module player for the soundtrack! I think the method is ideal for flash, and I don't think I've seen it used before. The potential for interactive music is immense too, you can have the music speed up, or change instruments depending on what's happening in the game.

    I have a couple of points for thought though. You've doubled the size of all the sprites to reduce the need for the flash player to double them on the fly. If you had done it the original size, and specified the HTML export settings to double the size instead, what would be the effect on the frame rate?

    Also, you mention you didn't feel like rippping out several colour versions of the same font, and there are two work arounds that spring to mind (pointless using them in game though, since I believe they would impact the speed of the game). The first would be to rip the font as grey, and then use the colour change settings in flash to add the red/yellow/blue/green tints in actionscript.

    The other (much faster way) is inspired by the old Space Invaders arcade cabinet. During Christmas 2002, an excellent book was released in UK bookshops called 'Game Over: A History of Video Games' featuring many many great gaming stories and anecdotes, interviews with the stars of the industry (miyamoto, chris roberts, richard garriot even that whacko Jeff Minter if i'm not mistaken). Sorry, I digress (great book though) but the Space Invaders Arcade cabinet was believed to be the world's first colour arcade game, but in actual fact it was monochrome just like the rest. It had a piece of green transparent plastic on parts of the screen to colour that area of the screen green, which you could apply to flash by placing semi transparent rectangles over the high score table.

    I'm not going to comment on anything else, since it's all perfect and is way above my head anyway Fantastic job.

  6. #286
    Hype over content... Squize's Avatar
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    Thanks (again) Kev,

    The soundtracker isn't that good, the sample at the start of the main voice sounds really wrong to me when the "mod" loops and RipX pointed out about a 100 pages ago that it sounded slightly out of whack, and to be honest I think it does. I don't know if you need the framerate up to something like 60 or use setInterval instead of onsoundComplete to improve the change over between samples. I was having a play with it to be honest, more a proof of concept thing that a 100% mod re-player.
    Due to Flash's fairly limited sound commands you can't alter the pitch or play back speed I'm afraid. Be fantastic if you could though...

    You've doubled the size of all the sprites to reduce the need for the flash player to double them on the fly. If you had done it the original size, and specified the HTML export settings to double the size instead, what would be the effect on the frame rate?
    Well that's easy. I don't know I guess the flash player would have to be the one that doubles the size of everything so it would still have some sort of performance impact I guess.

    The first would be to rip the font as grey, and then use the colour change settings in flash to add the red/yellow/blue/green tints in actionscript.
    Wouldn't I have to have seperate colour ( ie white, main colour, dark colour ) mcs ? So for each character, say the letter "A" I'd have to break that up into it's three different colour componants and then use a seperate setRGB on each one ? That would mean having over 30x3 mc's for the whole character set ( And then converting the broken up vectors back to bitmaps and then porting them back into the game ).

    I know you can have a tint command from actionscript ( Is that in there or is it a brightness prototype for the fades ? Anyway Robert Penner wrote both of them ) but it does just tint the whole mc.

    It could be done, but the amount of time it would take would be better spent on debugging it/ adding more levels IMHO.

    And that's why the hi-score table is fake...

    Jeff Minter = God !

    Funny you should mention Space Invaders...

    Squize.

  7. #287
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    Due to Flash's fairly limited sound commands you can't alter the pitch or play back speed I'm afraid. Be fantastic if you could though...
    I think he meant, include a faster version of a looping sound and then play the fast one when an enemy gets close or your running out of time etc!


  8. #288
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    You've doubled the size of all the sprites to reduce the need for the flash player to double them on the fly. If you had done it the original size, and specified the HTML export settings to double the size instead, what would be the effect on the frame rate?
    I know the framerate is much higher! I did this with a couple of of the tile scrolling examples and it was quite significantly faster!

  9. #289
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    It's also what i'm doing on the current projectt too!

    http://www.retrobase.co.uk

  10. #290
    Hype over content... Squize's Avatar
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    I know the framerate is much higher! I did this with a couple of of the tile scrolling examples and it was quite significantly faster!
    So getting the browser to double the size of the swf actually increases the framerate as opposed to just having everything double sized ?
    I would have thought it would be the opposite ( Hence doing it that way ) 'cause the plug-in still has to re-calculate the size of all the images ( Bitmaps in the case of Delta ).

    Squize.

    PS. RipX, do you ever press "Submit Reply" and then remember something else ?

  11. #291
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    Yes, try it out!!! for example - if your gonna make a 550*400 movie and your gonna double up the pixels make the movie at 225*200 and use the browser to increase the size of the swf to the initial size. Also if you need to move things at 1pixel at a time on the bigger screen you'll obviously need to use 0.5!!!


    PS. RipX, do you ever press "Submit Reply" and then remember something else ?
    No

  12. #292
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    Well, pehaps sometimes!!!

  13. #293
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    Hey, Squize, have macromedia worked out a way to get rid of the crappy pixel bug yet where importing causes the graphic to look wrong in the player?? I downloaded the latest plugin yesterday and it still seems to do it!!

  14. #294
    I'm feeling supersonic kdsh7's Avatar
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    Due to Flash's fairly limited sound commands you can't alter the pitch or play back speed I'm afraid. Be fantastic if you could though...
    Sorry RipX, I meant something completely different I meant that since the music is being defined by an array, you could have 2 different arrays or program the arrays with a speed (or pause) variable. When you get to a boss you could increase the speed variable (or decrease the pause variable) to increase the tension. With a bit of planning you'd be able to create an "iMuse" system ala Lucasarts, though that would be time better spent making more levels..etc like you say

    Regarding the HTML "stretching" the reason I thought it might be faster is because the flash player is doing a simple zoom of the whole thing, it's not increasing anti aliasing (like it would when scaling each element by 2, then displaying it again and calculating the position of each pixel) and similarly it's not calculating double the number of pixels in a higher resolution movie (with aforementioned anti-aliasing in a high res movie). I remember reading that the flash player's level of anti-aliasing is what defines the low/medium/high quality modes in playback and scaling, so the question here would doubling the size in HTML constitute scaling with anti-aliasing or just scaling while keeping the same settings as the small movie?

    Wouldn't I have to have seperate colour ( ie white, main colour, dark colour ) mcs ? So for each character, say the letter "A" I'd have to break that up into it's three different colour componants and then use a seperate setRGB on each one ? That would mean having over 30x3 mc's for the whole character set ( And then converting the broken up vectors back to bitmaps and then porting them back into the game ).
    I know you can have a tint command from actionscript ( Is that in there or is it a brightness prototype for the fades ? Anyway Robert Penner wrote both of them ) but it does just tint the whole mc.
    If your original font is in greyscale, changing tints becomes very useful (and powerful). You could do it in actionscript using the 'setRGB' command, but at it's most simple you could create 4 movie clips (each with a dynamic text field), one for each position in the high score table, and then tint the movie clip using the 'tint' command in the properties tab. That way you get sliders to adjust it to the perfect colour.

    Speaking of Jeff Minter, his next game will be Gamecube exclusive. He's working with Peter Molyneux (Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Black & White) on a game called Unity. It should be interesting

  15. #295
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    Sorry RipX, I meant something completely different I meant that since the music is being defined by an array, you could have 2 different arrays or program the arrays with a speed (or pause) variable. When you get to a boss you could increase the speed variable (or decrease the pause variable) to increase the tension. With a bit of planning you'd be able to create an "iMuse" system ala Lucasarts, though that would be time better spent making more levels..etc like you say
    That's not possible - the arrays are just sequentially playing sounds, not notes!! So all your theory would achieve is gaps in between the sound loops. Flash cannot slow down a sound nor change the unless you were us

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