I slapped together a quick technology test using normal maps in AS3. You can check it out here. Gameplay is still a ways off, but hopefully a realtime graphics demo will be availible soon.

Yes, it uses a variation of the technique pioneered by UnitZeroOne, so don't worry. It's fast. In fact, it might be faster than his realtime demo, since his demo used AS2 and MovieClips, and mine uses AS3 and BitmapDatas.

I did end up using a lot of fullscreen Draw commands, though, so it may lag a little on slower machines. I guess we'll find out once I get an animated demo cobbled together.

Don't worry, though, I fully intend to make it possible to turn off all the normal-mapped goodness and just enjoy shooting monochromatic vector baddies on a simple textured background.

If you have any suggestions or ideas, please post them here. I intend to work closely with the Newgrounds community to develop this game and refine the gameplay.

Witching Hour sucked. Mostly it sucked because the gameplay was weaksauce. I was rushed to get it done in time for the competition deadline, and I only had a few people helping me playtest it, and they weren't very into video games, so they were easily impressed and din't expect much of a challenge.

We don't want a repeat of that. So help me out a little, and make your voice heard. :)

I wish NG Alphas was working.

It's done! I'd like to thank everyone who's given me feedback on this project, Especially Carol & Tom, SnowHart & "the Complex," the gang at DeviantArt, the very patient professionals over at Kuripa, and Inglor for (hopefully) being a good sport about the logo thing.

18 days, one Spanish Inquisition at Kuripa, hundreds of lines of code and three complete engine rewrites later, I'm finally at the point where I can just sit down and convert my ideas directly into AS 3.0. Not only that, but the game uses BitmapDatas exclusively, features a special effect I like to call "Magic Smoke," and it runs close to the goal of 25 FPS on almost any system. I'll be sure and include an option to disable Magic Smoke, just to make sure.

Other than MagicSmoke, the game uses simple BitmapDatas for everything and copyPixels() whenever possible. No lag accumulates due to Garbage Collection, collision detection is almost instantaneous, and I finally figured out how to kill those pesky #1010 warnings. (Here's a hint: if you're stepping through an array, and other parts of your program can modify that array, make sure the stuff you're grabbing from the array is not null before you try to do anything with it!)

I want my orange and black back! And no, I'm not talking about the Newgrounds redesign when I say this. I'm talking about Halloween.

Used to be, you'd see Halloween decorations in all the stores this time of year, but not anymore. Since 1957 they've been celebrating Christmas non-stop from September to Feburary, but now even that has been supplanted in favor of Paint The Town Pink Month.

It's friggin' everywhere. I wish I was being sarcastic. I mean, literally, there's big pink balloons and banners and ribbons everywhere in my area. Target. Wal-Mart. Grocery store. Any Halloween stuff is tucked away on a tiny shelf down some forlorn asile, as if it were out-of-season stock or something.

So, I'm thinking, if this goes on all month, what's gonna happen to Halloween? I'm guessing America's ever-ingenious consumers are going to see all the pink in the stores, go "You know? Let's have a Breast Cancer Awareness Party this year, Instead!" Kids will come by looking for candy, and instead they'll get pamphlets about checking their tits for tumors.

It's like they're replacing our last great irresponsible fun-fest holiday with some kinda crappy edutainment. What are they gonna do next? Make July "Fire Safety and Sensible Diet Month" so we can't have any fun on the 4th?

Even if the holiday survives, I'm thinking one night of the macabre just isn't going to be enough to wash the taste of an entire month of Pink out of my mouth.

I'm really not trying to be mysogynistic about this. Nobody loves breasts more than me, and I'd do anything to give them the support they deserve. I just don't see why we need to pave over a perfectly good existant holiday with an entire month of Pink crap on the walls.

I agree it's a good cause, but couldn't we move this Awareness thing to, I don't know... May? How about May. May has Mothers' Day in it, but paving over Mothers' Day wouldn't be as severe of a change. If anything, the two celebrations would probably compliment each other. Our Moms could enjoy looking at all the pretty pink decorations for a couple weeks, leading up to and following their big day. And guys would never forget Mothers' Day because there'd be pink reminders plastered all over literally everywhere we look. We'd see the pink, and think "Woah! It's that time of year! Mothers' Day must be coming!"

Right now when I look around, all I can think about is "Ugh. Pink!? It's supposed to be ORANGE." Every time I'm first exposed to the decorations, there's this "shit, my eyes aren't working right" moment. It's driving me crazy.

But more to the point, I already know ALL ABOUT breast cancer. And the REASON I know all about it despite not being a chick is, the hundreds of advertisements I've seen, heard, and read over the past several years during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It's just they did it without destroying Halloween, back then.

But I figure if I, the last person in the world who needs to worry about breast cancer, am AWARE of it, then it stands to reason that all the women must have heard about it a LONG TIME ago. Women are very efficient at passing along information. You don't need to paint all the halloween decorations pink to get the word out. All you need to do is drop a few gurellia marketeers in Times Square and have 'em couch all known breast cancer news, information, and medical advice in the form of secret gossip about coworkers. Within 24 hours, every female in the known universe will be an expert.

Merry friggin' Boob Day.

Update: Feburary would be another good one. It'd be all pink, pink pink, Happy Venerial Disease, pink, pink, pink, March.

Just when I thought Flash's garbage collection was inherently flawed, I suddenly figured out what I and everybody else was doing wrong.

The symptom of poor Garbage Collection pretty obvious, and very painful. I first saw this in the Bloons turret defense game a long time ago. Basically, the game gradually slows down and then suddenly speeds up, over and over again.

It turns out, Flash 9's garbage collection is just FINE. You just need to know how to use it:

As you know (if you're using AS 3.0 anyway) a typical main loop looks like this:

// Initialize main game timer
var gameTimer:Timer = new Timer(20);//20 ms = 1/50 second!
gameTimer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.
TIMER, gameMainLoop);
gameTimer.start();

//Main game loop
function gameMainLoop(event:TimerEvent):void {
//Game code goes here!
}

You set up a timer event listener, and then when the listener fires, your code gets run. In my example, I'm doing it every 20 milliseconds, which works out to 50 frames per second. So you'd think the natural thing to do would be to set the agme's Frame Rate to 50 fps so you can see every frame, right?

WRONG!

You need your main timeline's refresh rate (or I guess stage.framerate if you're doing it in code) needs to be LESS THAN the ammount of time between refreshes. So, for example, in my game, I used the timer code above to update my game state 50 times per second, but my SWF only updates the graphics on the screen 40 times per second. The game runs a lot smoother now.

Why?

Because it's using that extra fraction of a second's worth of downtime after every screen update to run Garbage Collection!

So, that explains the "uneven" frame rate issues I was having with my game. It runs silky-smooth now! Next time I see anyone's game on Newgrounds and it seems to suffer from GC issues, I'll be sure and link them to this post, so they know what's going on.

And I'm still a Flash 3.0 noob, myself, so if I got some of the technical details wrong in this post, and you know better, go ahead and post a Reply below.

Update: Looks like Bloons Tower Defense has already been updated to address the GC issue. They fixed it so you can't cram as many tack towers into the corners, too... oh well, just trust me, at one time, it was the poster child for GC problems.

It's taken me a long time to catch up, but I've finally started to make some headway into understanding AS 3.0. It's taken me a while to get into it, but can you blame me? The online tutorials are skimpy, the official tutorials seem almost deliberately obtuse, and the community, while enthusiastic, is kinda small. It doesn't help any that they made subtle tweaks to virtually every keyword you're used to using. Well, almost. Unary and Boolean operators still work the same, and the Math object made the transition strangely unscathed. But other than that, all of your old tricks are now illegal.

Here's a tip: Don't follow the tutorials blindly. You CAN still put code in the main timeline, or even (shame on you!) in movieclips on the stage, but you'll need to learn the new syntax in order to do it. You can't attach code to Objects anymore, which was one of the few elegant things about AS 2.0 (from a flash developer's point of view.) I'm 90% sure it's impossible to run a block of code per enemy per frame without creating an official class the OOP way. That's certianly how I did it. At least, for objects I spawn a lot of such as bullets and enemies. The player and lone background objects, I just implemented in the main timeline using AS3 as a scripting language. I may transition them to OOP later and see if the game gets even faster or not.

I understand the biggest speed boost in 3.0 is won by eliminating the MovieClip class from your game altogether, but I haven't quite figured out how to do animations with Sprites yet. The tutorials on Sprite games are absolute rubbish, by the way. They assume you want to store all your graphics in some damned web directory, thus making SWF-only portals like Newgrounds difficult to accomodate.

This is what happens when you try to turn a Graphic Design Utility into an Enterprise Language. It's just Adobe being greedy, of course. But in the end, Java's still slightly faster and better documented, so I can't see the professional programmers adopting it no matter how logical the API is. All they've done is alienate the community that put Flash on the map in the first place.

Well, despite the upgrade, I'm working on a little Halloween game right now. The AS 3.0 version runs faster than I ever dreamed... but the screen updates are a little uneven. Hopefully I'll improve upon that as I grow more experienced. I'd like to use screen flipping or double-buffering or something, but I think I read somewhere that that only works in full-screen mode. I don't remember. Oh well, I'm sure I'll figure it out.

It was a pain in the ass to learn, but the worst is behind me. From here on in, Things can only keep getting better and better. :)

And after seeing the improved performance, I don't think I'll ever want to go back to 2.0.

Well, it finally happened. Almost a decade since it was in any way relevant, I finally saw the Matrix, plus both sequals. I scored them at a GameStop for less than it would cost to rent them.

I guess that explains every fight sequence ever seen on Newgrounds.

I had some problems with the series, of course. I choose to believe that Morpheous was simply ignorant about the fine details on how humans are being used for energy, and that it's not some alledged biological energy output (if they could tap waste heat, there are much easier ways to get it) but simply the human brains being used as paralell processors for monitoring and controlling the fusion reactors that power the machines. (You know, without slaving something valuable like an AI to the task.)

I was annoyed at the use of bullet time in the orgy/mosh pit scene when a simple establishing shot was enough to get the point across. I got sick of Morpheous constantly landing on the very edge of that semi, over and over and over again. I thought the skirmishes against the machines in the third movie were cool, but the war as a whole dragged on a bit.

But there's one thing about the Matrix movies that really stuck in my craw. It's sitting there, in the back of my mind, slowly driving me crazy. I'm almost afraid to talk about it, it's so disturbing, but here goes:

I didn't hate the last two movies.

I actually enjoyed the fuckers.

I know! I know! I can actually hear my nerd credit dropping as I type this. Every review I can find says Matrix was okay, the sequals sucked. Matrix Reloaded was only 2 bucks to buy... I'm pretty sure it's a violation of FCC regulations for me to enjoy that movie. But I enjoyed 'em anyway.

Granted, I didn't think they were any better than the first movie. And they certainly took the action in a different direction than the first movie. Maybe critics and theatre-goers were expecting them to just be bigger, badder carbon copies of the first movie. But coming to the series as late as I did, I had the opprotunity for my first watching of them to be all three movies, back-to-back. I was able to absorb them as one long story.

And really, I kinda suspect that's how they were meant to be seen. God knows I would have been bored with Matrix Revolution, if I'd come into it expecting to see non-stop bullet time kiung-fu action, and instead I got this stuff about robots and ships and seige warfare. But that's not the way it went down.

God help me, I was even able to take Keanu Reeves seriously in this role, as long as he kept the glasses on.

Maybe I'm just brain dammaged.

But, I don't know, if you own all three movies, and were disappointed with the sequals, maybe you should try watching them all three back-to-back in a marathon some night. You might just find that they're more watchable that way.

Seriously, that's as far as I read before deleting the bitch. And I can't immagine anyone else here at Newgrounds doing otherwise.

I mean, you either believe in them of you don't. If you do, you're functionally retarded, and thus can't figure out how to access the internet in the first place. If you don't, then you read the first sentance, realize that what you're reading is a chain letter, and therefore a waste of your time, and delete it. There's no reason for anyone with an I.Q. higher than cheese to read any further.

The other thing I've noticed is, a lot of this is being perpetuated by throw-away shill accounts with nonsense names like "jklsjh" or "aetedf." I can think of two possible explainations. One, it could just the latest wave of circle-jerk griefing we've all come to know and love here at Newgrounds. Two, (and this one's the truly scary thought,) regular users could be signing up for garbage accounts so they can forward the chain mail without hurting their own reputations.

Is that depressing, or what? Just think, there could actually be someone out there savvy enough to realize that everyone else thinks chain mails are garbage, but gullible enough to just do what the junk mail says so nobody gets hurt.

Needless to say, winning that contest was quite a windfall for me. Naturally, the first thing I did (before even getting my check,) was to purchase Flash CS3.

Let me tell you, the transition is HARD. Mostly because all the examples are presented as friggin' classes that you can't really use for anything without building your own test case. I'm interested in doing OOP eventually, sure, but not while I'm still trying to learn all the new commands. Sheesh.

Fortunately, AS 3.0 still works as a scripting language, it's just that a lot of the old ways of doing things have been replaced with classes, and sometimes one simple thing, such as a movieclip, has been divided into numerous classes, so you need to understand each component class and how they fit together, before you can really use one.

So yeah, I'm still learning the individual building blocks, but with luck I should soon have enough knowlege to start work on a simple AS3 game.

You know those really fast games with all the crazy ammounts of geometric shapes flying around? Yeah. I'm pretty sure you can't do those in Flash 8. They leverage the new Shape class, and I'm pretty sure they don't even contain the underlying code for timelines at all. It really is a totally different beast.

Flashkit has been a tremendous help, so far. With any luck, I should know enough to start seriously working on a game in a couple of days. :)

Yep, I made a ClockDay movie. Not only that, I did it all in one day. And not only both of those things, but also it was halfway decent.

Happy Clock Day, everybody!