216 Chorlton Mills..

As some of you know im currently in the process of moving flats. As I have done a video of all the other places i have lived in I thought it would be fitting to do a video of this place before I move out for good. So here here is my current flat 216 Chorlton Mills, she's abit small but very cosey ;)

Flash Develop Plugin: Highlight Selected

Highlight Selected

Notepad++ comes with a feature where if you double click a variable it will highlight all other instances of that variable in the open document. I wanted this feature in FD so i decided to write this plugin.

This plugin is very simple and borrows much of the code from the quick-find plugin.



I wrote this little plugin an an hour or so last night, i hope others find it useful too :)

More info and download link on the FlashDevelop forums: http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4486

Spam, the mark of the devil..

666 spam in my inbox, what happens now? do i win a pize?

Particle Playground v1.0.4

I have made a few small changes to Particle Playground today:

v1.0.4 (20/03/09)
+ Ive had over 500 uploads to the first gallery (http://picasaweb.google.
co.uk/mike.cann/ParticleP layground) and the loading times were getting abit silly, so I have now made a second gallery (http://picasaweb.google.
co.uk/mike.cann/ParticleP layground02) all new uploads now go there.
+ Changed the full-screen button to open in _self

Im gettign alot of images uploaded to my picasa, some of them are really good, im thinking of implementing a "featured" image very soon :)

Some good ones again:

Particle Playground v1.0.3

I made some small heavily requested updates to Particle Playground last night, control C, control V log:

v1.0.3 (18/03/09)
+ Added this new popup at the start
+ Removed system reset on every setting change
+ Added Simulation settings

So far the game has been doing well on Newgrounds with a current score of 3.95 / 5.00 and and average review score of 9.5 / 10 it has managed to win the Daily 4th Place – 03/19/2009 :)

On a related note I came accross this on twitter yesterday: http://www.unitzeroone.com/blog/2009/03/18/flash-10-massive-amounts-of-3d-particles-with-alchemy-source-included/ it blew my head, there I thought I was being clever getting 20-40k of particles in 2D and this guy has managed 300k in 3D! Ive already started work dissecting the code so that I can improve PP some ;)

Oh also so far I have been very impressed with some of the pictures being created by people, so far there have been 157 of them! Some highlights include:

Particle Playground

Well this is the release of my latest little saunter into the world of particles and shaders in flash 10. It started off as and idea to use the new pixel bender shaders of flash 10 as a more efficient method of updating particle simulations.

Well after a few struggling evenings I managed to get a little prototype going. I was so amazed at some of the beautiful patterns and effects that the particles were making I thought it may be nice rather than just releasing a tech demo, to add abit more to it and release it for others to enjoy.

I will be releasing the source code in the coming weeks along with a blog post which should explain in detail how the technical aspects of updating and rendering tens of thousands of particles per frame works.

The tool features a gallery tab which you can use to take screenshots then upload them to my picassa account (proxyed via php). The hope is to get some realy beautiful images in here, perhaps if some are good enough ill get them printed and framed ;)

I hope to come back to this project regularly to add new features so stay tuned. For now some of the images I have made with this so far:

AS3 Loader.loadBytes() Class Name Collisions

Well I spent hours at work today scratching my head and getting generally very annoyed over this one so I thought I would share it with the world so others can benefit from my frustrations.

Basically I wanted a method of loading a SWF as a byte array then turning the byte array back into a SWF at run-time. This is quite handily catered for in AS3 with the use of URLStream and Loader.loadBytes().

So my flow looked like:

SWFA -> StreamURL.load("SWFB.swf")
SWFA -> Loader.loadBytes()

So off I went and coded my solution, to my surprise it worked great. Well kinda, the problem with using loadBytes() is that you have no way of passing flashVars through to the loaded SWF like normal (see this bug report for more info: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-445).

When you inspect the root.loaderInfo.url (_root._url in as2) property of the loaded swf it gives you the URL of the loader instead of the URL you want. My solution to this was to proxy the loading in another swf and then pass this swf all the params I want to go in the child swf.

So the flow looks like:

SWFA -> Loader.load("proxy.swf?someparam=22")
ProxySWF -> StreamURL.load("SWFB.swf")
ProxySWF -> Loader.loadBytes()

This way when you call root.loaderInfo.url from within SWFB it will give you something like: "http://www.mydomain.com/proxy.swf?someparam=22" which isnt perfect but atleast you have the params there to play with.

Unfortunately however when I implemented this nothing happened. The proxy loaded, it loaded SWFB fine, added it to the stage but nothing was displayed. No errors nothing. I found this very perplexing as the code was practically the same as before just in a different SWF.

Anyways, to cut a long story short I finally found out what was going wrong. The document class of the proxy was named "Main.as" and the document class of SWFB is was named "Main.as". I renamed one of them and suddenly bingo it worked!

What I presume was happening behind the scenes was that the Loader.loadBytes() method inspects the classnames in SWFB it see's that there is a class named Main, it checks to see if there is already a class in the loading swf called Main, yes there is so dont define the class and hence dont invoke it to contruct.

My other solution other than renaming one of the document classes was to supply a new application domain in the LoaderContext when calling loadBytes. I have provided an example below of this.

It doesnt use URLStream and a proxy.swf, rather it embeds SWFB directly in SWFA. For purposes of example it doesnt matter and still exhibits the same behaviour.

[code lang="actionscript"]
package
{
import flash.display.Loader;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.system.ApplicationDomain;
import flash.system.LoaderContext;
import flash.utils.ByteArray;

public class Main extends Sprite
{
[Embed("..\\lib\\SWFB.swf", mimeType="application/octet-stream")] private var SWFBClass:Class;

public function Main():void
{
var ba : ByteArray = new SWFBClass() as ByteArray;
var l : Loader = new Loader();
//l.loadBytes(ba, new LoaderContext(false, new ApplicationDomain())); // This puts the classes of SWFB in a new application domain and hence no collisions with this SWF
l.loadBytes(ba); // Classes will colide when loaded and hence will not execute
addChild(l);
}
}
}
[/code]

You can download this project here: http://www.mikecann.co.uk/flash/SWFA.zip

Although this makes sense from a flash structure point of view it would of been exceedingly helpfull if some sort of warning or error was thrown, rather than nothing atall.

Particle Playground Teaser

From ParticlePlayground

A little teaser of something I have been working on for a few evenings.. coming soon!

XNA Archive

I just realised some of my old XNAGPUParticles project videos have gone walkies. So I have reposted them on youtube. These are my old projects from my final year of uni, binary and source code can be found in the relevant post for each video.

http://www.mikecann.co.uk/?p=163
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxrg1YavBIg

http://www.mikecann.co.uk/?p=169
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wdIiCCAb9U

I have another reason for these old re-posts, something a little more flash orientated.. Stay tuned for more info ;)

Some picassa updates

Just added a few albums to picassa. Highlights include:

Quake Live

Last few lunchtimes a few of us at GameJacket have been playing the new online browser-based quake system known as Quake Live. If you fancy it then add "cannyshammy" as a friend and lets start fragging ;)