Raceportal, our 2nd iPhone App

Hey people,

Another quick note to let you know that our 2nd app "Raceportal" has been approved for the appstore and is now available to buy :)

Check it out here : http://itunes.apple.com/app/raceportal/id396109306?mt=8

My first Iphone App

Just a quick note to tell you guys that my first Iphone app is now available for free on the itunes appstore.

click here to download

It's a webcomic reader for Dutch webcomic artists (some comics can be in English)

Artists can upload their comics on my website webcomicsnl.omg.bs and get their comics featured in the app :)

Hope you guys (those of you who have iphone/ipad's or ipod touches) enjoy it :)

Definefont error

Changing the look and feel of a game I developed in FlashDevelop, I suddenly got the following error when trying to compile the project in FlashDevelop:

WARNING: end of tag DefineFont3 is @55343, should be @58327
Build halted with errors (swfmill)."


To make a long story short, this was caused by a textfield that didn't embed any characters. Thanks to Philippe for providing the answer.

So, If you get this error (the numbers after the @ will probably be different) check your movieclips for textarea's without embedded characters.

And to make this short story a little longer: (for those of you who are still reading ;)
My problem in finding this was that I used 1 font library, and had all my textarea's set to use that as the font...
But I still had 2 buttons, with the same font, but not using the font library.
So the error occured when I changed the font in the library.
Now the 2 buttons didn't share a font that other textarea's used, and had characters embedded for them.

And due to the fact that it wouldn't compile, I couldn't visually verify all textarea's to be the same at runtime.

Click here to see my thread about it on Flashdevelop.org.

Lightning strikes!

I bought a Casio Exilim EX FH-100 camera a while ago because it could shoot video at highspeed.

Yesterday we had a pretty heavy thunderstorm here in the Netherlands, and it turns out that you can make some pretty nice video shots of lightning with the highspeed camera function. check it out : http://tinyurl.com/37gccks on youtube.

UPC Racing Game

Just a quick post today.

We've just finished working on a racing game in flash for UPC, a big Cable internet company in Holland.

Technically the game is a nice mix of optimization and user (designer) friendliness.

My Collegue Martin Strieder was responsible for all the artwork, and I did the all the programming.

It's Actionscript 2 code (Due to time restrictions and my relative noob-ness in As3)

The game prerenders all frames to bitmaps for the scenery at runtime during the 'loader' you see after clicking "start". So the artwork in the FLA file are just vectors, no bitmaps, and are easy to modify in the timeline. (which is good for re-use of gfx building blocks)
This gave us a BIG performance boost during the game.

The opponents have a simple AI to keep the speed up and only do basic avoidance of eachother and the player (if they're behind you)

Since this is a pretty cpu intensive game, I've also added a framerate watcher, which will turn down the renderquality of flash a notch when it detects a low framerate.

On my develop and testcomputer (which is a lot slower) this meant that I could keep playing the game at 30 fps.

Click here to play the game

Let me know what you think :)

Opensocial Flash Example

UPDATE 6/18/2009 Hyves does no longer accept parameters in its opensocial xml-url's so the trick I describe below, won't work anymore.


One of our clients wanted a flash widget to be embedded by OpenSocial.
Try as I might, but I couldn't find a website that gave just a simple example of embedding a flash movie on your page/blog, without trying to communicate with it.

So I've searched around a bit more and got the code out of some existing widgets and I'm placing it here to maybe help some other people, who are also trying to look for a simple tutorial :)


In short, to make a widget for OpenSocial, you need to have an XML file that contains xml and javascript that actually loads and places the widget on the blog/community page you desire.

I've put up an example XML file Here

Example, Adding it to IGoogle

• In your Igoogle homepage, click on 'add stuff'
  
• then enter the url to your xmll file there.
  For example : http://tinustekent.whizzkid.nu/files/widget.xml
  

If you want to pass through parameters to your widget, you will need to make a script on your webserver which will put the needed parameters into the xml in the flashvars.
Note for Hyves users, Hyves expects the url to end with .xml
So it will fail when you put parameters in your url, but this is easily fixed if you just add &mode=.xml to your url.
The "mode" name doesnt matter, Hyves only checks the entire url-string to see if it ends with ".xml" :)


The xml for this widget (which is a little commercial for my comic site, plug plug):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
<Module>
<ModulePrefs title="Square and Circle" title_url="" description="Square and Circle" author="Martijn Croezen" author_email="sacwidget@whizzkid.nu" author_link="http://tinustekent.whizzkid.nu" height="190" width="160" scaling="false" scrolling="false" screenshot="" thumbnail="">
<Require feature="dynamic-height" /> 
</ModulePrefs>
<Content type="html">
<![CDATA[ 

<div id="wdiv__MODULE" style="width:190;height:160">Loading...</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
 function SetWidgetContent(div, content) {
      div.innerHTML = content;
    } 
     window.onload = function(evt) {
            var content = '<embed src="http://tinustekent.whizzkid.nu/files/widget.swf" width="190" height="160" quality="high" bgcolor="ffffff" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">';
            var div = GetDiv();
            if (true)
            {
              SetWidgetContent(div, content);
            }
           _IG_AdjustIFrameHeight();
    }
 
 function SetWidgetContent(div, content) {
      div.innerHTML = content;
    }


function GetDiv() {
        return document.getElementById("wdiv__MODULE");
    }
 
</script>


  ]]> 
  </Content>
  </Module>
 

We're digital too

For those of you who can read Dutch, the tutorial Rob and I wrote for Webdesigner Magazine has now been posted online on their website.

Click here to see it.