2008 June | Psyked

Archive | June, 2008

Internet woes fixed – thank you OpenDNS!

by James on 20th June, 2008 in General chit-chat

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;

Adobe AIR gets serious?

by James on 18th June, 2008 in Air

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.

Links for integrating Flash and Facebook

by James on 17th June, 2008 in Flash

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;

Launchball – an awesome Flash game

by James on 16th June, 2008 in Flash

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).

What’s up with Flash gaming?

by James on 11th June, 2008 in Flash

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’.