Psyked*

it’s easy once you know how.

Internet woes fixed - thank you OpenDNS!

Posted by James - 20/06/08 at 10:06:58 pm

Argh.  For a couple of days now I’ve been unable to connect to Psyked from my home internet connection, for some inexplicable reason.  I won’t claim to understand any of it, but it seemed like the whole internet worked except my domain.  I could even ping other websites on the same shared server, and access Psyked through a horribly slow open proxy server, but direct connection was a no-no.

Well, a bit of Googling into traceroutes, pings, hostnames and general techie mumbo-jumbo led me to reconfigure my home networks’ DNS servers away from Virgin broadband and onto OpenDNS. Restart the router and boom! we’re back online.

There’s a lot written about a lot of things (namely problems with Virgin broadband, and some contention over the OpenDNS project).  Here’s a few links I picked up, if you’re interested;

Continue reading Internet woes fixed - thank you OpenDNS!…

Adobe AIR gets serious?

Posted by James - 18/06/08 at 11:06:16 pm

Adobe have just released their first major update to AIR since its release, Adobe AIR 1.1 (catchy!). - The release notes of which you can read here.

Aside from a few tweaks and general updates, and a few requested features making an appearance, the focus for most people seems to be the multilingual capabilities. There’s a whole 10 new languages supported.

Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.

Strangely enough, that’s not very exciting. Well, I guess it makes up a large proportion of the target markets, and covers most of the character sets - but 10 languages seems a little low. Meh.

Continue reading Adobe AIR gets serious?…

Links for integrating Flash and Facebook

Posted by James - 17/06/08 at 05:06:23 pm

Ok, so I’ve been muttering a lot recently about Facebook and Flash. It’s something I’m interested in - because I believe it’s one great way to expose your Flash games to lots of users - but just not something I’ve had time to bring to fruition.

It turns out your basic requirements for integrating Flash and Facebook boil down to this - a server-side solution (asp, .Net, PHP, Ruby etc.) for building webservices, or some form of data service for Flash to work with. Most of the integration actually, will be done with server-side stuff. And then you just need to build a pretty standard Flash application that uses these webservices.

Beyond that fantastically helpful statement, here’s a couple of links to help you on your way;

• How To Build A Facebook Application (Digital Web Magazine)
• Integrate your Flash game on Facebook (Emanuele Feronato)

Launchball - an awesome Flash game

Posted by James - 16/06/08 at 10:06:43 pm

I’m very impressed with Launchball, a Flash game from the Science Museum.

I love the design, I love the interface - its unique, simple and very swish. Once I started playing the game I was staggered by how fully realised it is - no skimping on the programming here, we’re talking realistic physics and complete freedom, thanks to the Flade Actionscript dynamics / physics engine. (Launchball is AS2 - but incidently Flade is now called the APE and is available in AS3 format).

Continue reading Launchball - an awesome Flash game…

What’s up with Flash gaming?

Posted by James - 11/06/08 at 11:06:16 pm

I’ve been pondering Flash games for a while now, and it occurred to me that I don’t quite see so many as I thought I used too. I don’t know - maybe its because I just move in different circles now I’m in the ‘professional’ world, but it seems like there’s more emphasis on the practical things like applications or tools and everyones’ forgotten about the fun things like games.

So, where have all the Flash games gone - and has anything changed in the last 4 or 5 years?

Well, Newgrounds is the old one I remember - and except for a ‘Web 2.0′ facelift, it seems like the same old content is there - Stickman animations (StickDude Killing Arena 4), various impressive console-game-style conversions and a variety of time sucking Minigames (The Zombie Wars). Ok, you have to give credit to the guys who made this stuff, but it doesn’t seem like things have progressed at all on the ‘wow factor’.

Continue reading What’s up with Flash gaming?…

(Flash/Javascript) problems in a .Net Content-Managed Website

Posted by James - 08/06/08 at 01:06:13 pm

I have been trying to figure out how to set get a session cookie from Flash via Javascript. Yes, Flash does have a limited ability to set its own ‘cookies’ with something called LocalStorage, but there are a few advantages to actually creating ‘real’ cookies and working with those - not least because people understand browser cookies a little more than LocalStorage areas.

The solution itself is pretty simple - you create a Javascript function to manipulate the cookie data, and then Flash uses the ExternalInteface.call function to access these javascript functions. If you want to go even more advanced, you can leverage getURL to create your Javascript functions in the first place - my favorate because it doesn’t need any external javascript.

( Sometime I’ll clean out the code and post an example, but for now we’re going to concentrate more on the problems encountered when using this solution. )

As I said, the solution is great and works in most situations however, this doesn’t work in the CMS we’re using and I couldn’t figure out why. It turns that our problem was;

DOM Access

.Net pages put all the html inside a form and apparently this means that objects like embedded swfs become hidden from the Document Object Model in Internet Explorer.

The solution to this is to “elevate” the object to be part of the window rather that the document. It seems that by creating a reference and using a different element in the heirarchy fixes DOM visibility issues. i.e.

window.objectID = document.getElementById(objectID);

A strange solution, huh? Ben Waldron has more information on this solution here.

The Terminator: Fiction?

Posted by James - 07/06/08 at 08:06:52 pm

Surfing BBCi’s interactive tv services, I couldn’t help take notice of one ominous sounding news report - “Skynet military launch postponed” - yee gads!
Skynet ?!

It gets better with this quote;

Software on the launch vehicle did not behave normally during a test sequence.

Did not behave normally (!) Suddenly I feel less worried about America’s Cyber warfare division (due to become active on October 1st) and more worried about our own military systems. I’ve always thought that the best way to make people believe reality is fiction was to make a movie about it (nobody believes movies are real, right?) and here we are, tempting fate. Uh oh.

See the full BBCi report here.