mike
ginger binger
TwitterEntry #20
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending Flash Camp Philadelphia. It was a great conference -- nice atmosphere and interesting people! I'm looking forward to it again next year.
I was also invited to speak at the conference, so I gave a talk on ActionScript 3 game programming. I spoke about how games are built, the pros and cons of the standard game inheritance hierarchy, and a few alternatives to it. I also talked about some techniques such as:
- Timing using getTimer()
- Decoupling game logic and animation from Flash Player's frame rate
- Rolling your own display list for benefits such as depth sorting
- Using the Flex Builder profiler to optimize your game
A lot of these techniques are used by the newer game frameworks such as Flixel, so it's good to have an understanding of what's going on behind the scenes!
I've uploaded the slides and sample code. Hopefully someone finds it useful!
ActionScript3.0 Game Architecture - download slides and sample code
- 49 comments
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3/3/12
I didn't understand a word you said, but you look smart. :P
1/2/12
Oh, cool!
10/31/11
Trick-or-Treat!
10/31/11
Trick-or-Treat!
7/28/11
dork
7/17/11
Why don't you post anymore?
5/22/11
Yo Mike, it's 2011.
-Richie
5/14/11
Keep on keeping on.
Peace.
2/12/11
Akuma is going to hadoken you to Denmark
1/3/11
Shit are you really have a doctorate in computer science!?
11/8/10
Noone likes turtle!
11/2/10
Dropping by to say "Hi" to one of the coolest people on NG.
10/31/10
Happy Halloween, mike!
10/31/10
Happy Halloween!
10/31/10
Trick or treat? :3
9/21/10
3D programming in Flash 9? That's impossible!
8/19/10
ITS SCORPION!!!!!
7/21/10
this is great. thanks!
7/19/10
are you dead?
5/17/10
no one likes turtle.
5/5/10
Do you think you could re-upload the slides to that presentation? =) I'd love to take a look!
4/13/10
so did you help code newgrounds? is that why you have a red name??
4/1/10
In honor of Kevin Bacon Day Gobblemeister will now list his filmography
Film
National Lampoon's Animal House
Starting Over
The Gift
Hero at Large
Friday the 13th
Only When Kevin Bacon Laugh
Diner
Forty Deuce
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Footloose
Quicksilver
White Water Summer
End of the Line
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
She's Having a Baby
Criminal Law
The Big Picture
Tremors
Flatliners
Pyrates
Queens Logic
He Said, She Said
JFK
"A Little Vicious"
A Few Good Men
The Air Up There
The River Wild
"New York Skyride"
Murder in the First
Apollo 13
Balto
Sleepers
Picture Perfect
Destination Anywhere
Telling Lies in America
Digging to China
Wild Things
Stir of Echoes
Kevin Bacon's Dog Skip
Kevin Bacon Married Margo
Hollow Man
Novocaine
Trapped
Mystic River
In the Cut
"Imagine New York"
The Woodsman
Cavedweller
"Natural Disasters: Forces of Nature"
Loverboy (also directed)
Beauty Shop
Where the Truth Lies
Death Sentence
Rails & Ties
The Air Kevin Bacon Breathe
Frost/Nixon
"Saving Angelo"
Taking Chance
The Magic 7
Kevin Bacon's One and Only
Television
Search for Tomorrow
The Guiding Light
The Demon Murder Case
Mister Roberts
The Little Sister
Lemon Sky
Frasier Vic
Will & Grace
3/30/10
dork
3/22/10
dork
3/13/10
Hey mike, look to your right!
2/7/10
Well, I know jackshit about Actionscript, but have fun with it, peoples.
2/6/10
lol love your pic
2/5/10
There's a camp for flash? :/
1/28/10
mike WHOOOOOOOOOOOO
1/28/10
Is Luis going to be on /staff?
1/20/10
Quite interesting.
I like your object-oriented explanations, especially the implementation of GameObjects.
1/17/10
Your admin level icon. Do you really look like that?
1/13/10
Definitely gonna check this out. For someone who always hits a roadblock a few hours into game development, hopefully it'll help.
12/23/09
can i make a suggestion. on the personal user account page, can you fix it to were you can customize and organize and separate favorite animations from games? and possibly be able to make genre based sub-sections to find personal favorite flashes? this is a much needed improvement for the site to be much more user friendly. it would be awesome if these changes can be made. thanks for listening and i would appreciate a reply if you can find the time.
12/18/09
It was nice talking to you there - very insightful stuff
12/15/09
Congrats one being invited to speak at the conference. Shows that you are very skilled at what you do. Cheers
12/13/09
Was useful, most of it though was what i already do put into words. The idea of the game object, game character, then player hierarchy was a good idea though that I don't really use.
Also I've never really bothered using manual updates, they just never really fit in with the way I like to code, which is probably badly, but there we go.
12/13/09
Sometimes these complicated sounding words and phrases just make me want to cry.
12/12/09
Youre overrated Mike!
12/12/09
Why did you not speak of the majesty of cock jokes? Or was that Jeff's job?
12/12/09
I can't stand AS3
12/12/09
Neat, you know you can force flash to skip rendering for you by playing a sound set to "stream" in the background? Taking over the updating of flash's clips can be a pain if there's a lot of nested stuff, so if it's really an issue sometimes just streaming "silence" in the background can be a lot easier
I've had some bad experiences trying this where Flash would skip frames in odd ways. There was actually a bug in Time Fcku where a stream sound playing accidentally over the game caused the game to run super turbo speed. It was really bizarre, and I'm not sure why Flash wanted to skip so many frames so quickly!
It's a pain in the ass to implement, but manually controlling the animation does give you some nice benefits, like easily slowing or speeding up animations for doing things like bullet-time.
12/12/09
I'm probably gonna benefit from the list, I just started trying to learn AS3. Thanks
12/12/09
Always nice to hear from you Mike.
12/12/09
Flixel games are fun and I never knew that about it so thanks for the heads up
12/12/09
I wish i could say i think the above is awesome, really I do - but i can't, cause i don't know much of what you're talking about... :)
i'm currently taking a java-course, basic programming. goal is to get started with programming, and as soon as i can i'll start cracking with AS3.
just downloaded the sample-codes, but i need to get a showckwaveplayer to read it some files, and my flash-demo is outdated.
darn, i'll get to it later on. thanks for sharing though, in a few years when i've hopefully learned AS3, maybe i'll be able to judge the value of the content... :)
12/12/09
It's a shame that flixel isn't AS2 compatible.