“Blitting is a higher-performance alternative to using the built-in display list in Adobe Flash for drawing objects on the Stage. This technique involves copying the individual pixels of an existing image directly on to the screen—a bit like painting all of your game’s spaceships and monsters onto a canvas.”

From a tutorial I wrote for Adobe Developer Connection: Blitting and Caching Movie Clips in Flash.

It’s an introduction to blitting for developers using the Flash authoring environment (Flash IDE); you’ll learn how to take a regular movie clip from the library, cache it as a series of Bitmaps, and draw it (blit it) to the screen.

Why bother? Because to blit an object is much faster than to use addChild().

Click here to start reading. If you’ve got a free Adobe account, you can comment on the article itself; otherwise, feel free to ask any questions in the comments to this post

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AS3, blit, caching, flash, movieclips, performance

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English, Spanish, Polish, and now… Italian!

Francesco Malatesta is translating my AS3 Avoider Game Tutorial (itself based on an AS2 tutorial by Frozen Haddock) into Italian.

Ciao a tutti, mi chiamo Francesco e sono un ragazzo di 20 anni, studente di Economia Informatica. Adoro l’informatica e la programmazione. Ovviamente anche i videogiochi. Nel tempo ho cercato di fondere insieme queste passioni e flash si è rivelato uno degli strumenti più potenti per questo mio scopo, specie se si è alle prime armi e non si hanno molti fondi o strumenti.

I tutorial di Michael sono fantastici, ben strutturati e facili da seguire. Per questo motivo ho deciso di tradurli nella mia lingua e condividerli con tutti gli aspiranti programmatori di giochi del mio paese.

Click here to start reading.

Thanks, Francesco

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AS3, Avoider Game Extras, italian, italiano, linguia italiana, translation, Tutorial

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Optimisation is about making your code more efficient. Usually you’ll optimise for speed — not to make the gameplay faster, necessarily, but to keep the game running smoothly, with no lag.

(If your SWF is a few MB larger than you’d like, you’d want to optimise for size, but that’s a different topic for a different post.)

The hundreds of tricks and techniques to do this boil down to one principle:

Don’t make Flash do more work than it needs to

For example, suppose you have a line like this:

var newX:Number = ( 47 * Math.sin( Math.PI * 23 / 109 ) / 121.88 ) + player.x;

…and you run that line every tick or every frame. Look at all the work you’re making Flash do!

It’s got to get the value of pi and multiply it by 23, then divide that by 109, then get the sine of that number, then multiply that by 47, then divide it all by 121.88, and finally add the player’s x-position.

If you grab your calculator, you can find that 47 * Math.sin( Math.PI * 23 / 109 ) / 121.88 is 0.237317256. That’s not going to change; we don’t need to make Flash keep calculating that over and over again. So that line can be rewritten:

var newX:Number = 0.237317256 + player.x;

Suddenly, Flash has much less work to do — you’ve done the work for it.

Let’s look at some better examples… (...)
Read the rest of Learn to Optimise your AS3 Code for Speed and Performance

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2010. | Permalink | 26 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: coding, optimisation, performance, speed

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Why Use Version Control?

Do any of these sound familiar?

• You have a bunch of different folders called MyGame, MyGame-backup, MyGame-February, MyGame-finished, MyGame-bugFix, MyGame-Mochi, MyGame-Kong, …
• You avoid deleting code in case you need it later, so you’ve got lines and lines of commented-out ActionScript, just in case
• You’re reluctant to experiment with new code in case you screw something up and can’t undo it later

Version control helps with all that. It keeps track of all the changes you make and lets you move back and forth through all the different versions of your project, even if the differences between versions are only tiny. It also allows you to split off separate “branches” of your project and work on them alongside your main code, which is really useful if you need to make different versions of a game for different portals or sponsors.

If you collaborate on code with other people, then you already know how messy it can be trying to copy and paste each other’s changes to keep everyone in sync. Version control helps here too, by merging everyone’s changes together. OK, sure, if two people try to edit the same function at once, there’ll be problems — but at least this can be detected and dealt with quickly.

Once you get used to using version control (also known as source control or revision control), you’ll find other benefits appear. For example, simply getting into the habit of noting down all your changes (as VC requires you to do) can make you more productive, and encourage you to be more organised when tackling problems.

Right. So VC is great, no arguments there. If you’d like to know more about what it is, check out this excellent post over at BetterExplained. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to get started using Git as a version control system for your Flash projects.

(...)
Read the rest of Version Control with Git, Flash and AS3

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2010. | Permalink | 15 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: git, intro, source control, tools, Tutorial, version control

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You may or may not have noticed, but I took this site down over the last couple of days to spruce up the design.

It’s not finished — I don’t think I’ll ever consider it finished — but I’ve made some changes behind the scenes that’ll let me tweak it over time without having to keep locking it down. (RSS and email readers, come check it out!)

Anyway, who cares about that? Let me tell you what’s in it for you.

(...)
Read the rest of New Site Design

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2010. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: meta, site design

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I don’t have any books about Flash or AS3 on my bookshelf. Yet I can read Making Things Move, Essential ActionScript 3.0, and Actionscript 3.0 Design Patterns any time I like. It’s all thanks to Safari Books Online.

What is it?

Basically O’Reilly have taken a whole bunch of books, scanned them in, and put them online. And for a monthly fee, you can read them in your browser.

OK, there’s more to it than that, but that’s the basic idea. It’s like Netflix for books.

The selection is pretty good; on the right you can see three of the books that came up in a search for “ActionScript” — the one at the top hasn’t even been published yet, but you can read it online. Most of the well-known books about Flash and AS3 are in there, but there are a few notable exceptions, like Real-World Flash Game Development.

[EDIT: A few weeks after I posted this, Real-World Flash Game Development was added to the site! Fantastic.]

In fact, there’s a general lack of newer books on game design. Some of the classics are there, like Chris Crawford on Game Design, but A Theory of Fun isn’t in there, and neither’s The Art of Game Design. The focus is really more on programming, graphic and web design, business and management, and general software development. Having said that, there are some books on other topics (including electronics, neuroscience, maths, food photography, and even ghost hunting). Just don’t expect to find a huge selection outside the core topics.

How Much Does It Cost?

There are two pricing schemes:

1. Safari Bookshelf, which allows you to “borrow” up to ten books per month
2. Safari Library, which gives you total access to every book in the system, as well as videos and unpublished books

At time of writing, Bookshelf costs $23/month and Library costs $43/month (each has discounts if you buy a year’s subscription at once). The current pricing is available here.

I used to be on the five-book version of the Bookshelf, which was a real bargain at $10/month, but when it got discontinued I switched over to the Library. I’ll outline the less-obvious aspects of each:

(...)
Read the rest of Review: Safari Books Online

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2010. | Permalink | 24 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: review, safaribooksonline

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So let’s say you’ve started work on your latest awesome game, and you’ve come up with this level design:

Graphics taken from Danc’s Miraculously Flexible Game Prototyping Tiles, which are awesome and free!

How are you going to store this map layout in code? (...)
Read the rest of Multidimensional Arrays in AS3

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2010. | Permalink | 40 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: arrays, AS3, as3 concepts, nested loops

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A little while ago I linked to Nicolás Lamolina’s Spanish translation of my AS3 avoider game tutorial.

Now, Marcin Horoszko has started translating it into Polish!

He’s made some changes: he’s using FlashDevelop, which is my preferred editor for AS3 code, and has drawn brand new graphics. Here’s an introduction from Marcin:

Nazywam się Marcin Horoszko i prowadzę własny blog poświęcony tworzeniu gier w technologii Flash w języku ActionScript 3.0. Jestem także zaangażowany w tłumaczenie poradnika napisanego przez Michaela James Williamsa, który uczy początkujących programistów jak stworzyć swoją pierwszą grę. Jeżeli znasz język polski i chciałbyś nauczyć się pisać własne gry w ActionScript 3.0, to zapraszam na mój blog. Znajdziesz tam już pierwszą część poradnika, a w najbliższym czasie – kolejne. Pozdrawiam

Click here to start reading.

Thanks, Marcin

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AS3, Avoider Game Extras, polish, polski, translation, Tutorial

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Here’s a new tutorial about the Papervision3D engine for Flash, which allows you to create 3D scenes. I wrote it for ActiveTuts+.

It’s actually a two-parter. The first part is a very quick beginner’s guide to Papervision3D, to help you get to grips with it. You don’t need to know anything about 3D rendering to follow it, and it’ll walk you through downloading and installing PV3D, too.

The second part is where things get more interesting. It’s all about anaglyph imaging, the trick that makes those 3D glasses work. Once you finish that, you’ll understand how the technique works, and you’ll be able to apply it to your own projects to make objects appear to stick out from the screen (even in other Flash 3D engines).

I hope you like them, and (as with my parallax scrolling tutorial), I’ll be following the comments over on ActiveTuts+ rather than on this site. Let me know what you think

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 3d, activetuts+, anaglyph, AS3, papervision3d, Tutorial

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I wrote a tutorial for ActiveTuts+ (previously known as FlashTuts+) about parallax scrolling, an effect you can use to make 2D games appear to have more depth. You can see the effect in the little demo above.

Click here to check the tutorial out.

Actually, it explains a few more things beyond the parallax effect, like how to make your game’s “camera” (or “viewport”) appear to follow the player, and how to create infinitely repeating backgrounds á la Scooby Doo

It’s pretty long, so I tried to lay it out in such a way that you don’t have to read the whole thing to benefit from it. For example, you only have to read the first half or so in order to understand how to make a side-scroller.

I’ll be following the comments there in the same way that I follow comments on my own blog, so if you have any questions, please post them over on ActiveTuts+.

And if you make anything cool with the effect, I would love to see it

© MichaelJW for Michael James Williams, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: activetuts+, backgrounds, depth, parallax, scrolling, Tutorial

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