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Mike Welsh @mike

Age 38, Male

stupids

Penn State

San Diego

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ActionScript 3.0 Game Architecture

Posted by mike - December 12th, 2009


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


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Comments

It's a shame that flixel isn't AS2 compatible.

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just downloaded the sample-codes, but i need to get a showckwaveplayer to read it some files, and my flash-demo is outdated.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... :)

Flixel games are fun and I never knew that about it so thanks for the heads up

Always nice to hear from you Mike.

I'm probably gonna benefit from the list, I just started trying to learn AS3. Thanks

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.

I can't stand AS3

Why did you not speak of the majesty of cock jokes? Or was that Jeff's job?

Youre overrated Mike!

Sometimes these complicated sounding words and phrases just make me want to cry.

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.

Congrats one being invited to speak at the conference. Shows that you are very skilled at what you do. Cheers

It was nice talking to you there - very insightful stuff

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.

Definitely gonna check this out. For someone who always hits a roadblock a few hours into game development, hopefully it'll help.

Your admin level icon. Do you really look like that?

Quite interesting.
I like your object-oriented explanations, especially the implementation of GameObjects.

Is Luis going to be on /staff?

mike WHOOOOOOOOOOOO

There's a camp for flash? :/

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