Game Status and More...
Work is going strong but slow on our projects. I think it's best to just say when we stop
working on the game that's when it will be finished. Ha! We wanted to release it already
but unfortunately Flash is simply a pain in the ass at times.
We said in the last update that we ended up writing our own renderer that performs almost
20 times faster than the Flash rendering pipeline. This means once we get all the bugs
worked out our games will be able to handle more then the current Flash Player is capable
of when using MovieClips (or even bitmaps, for that matter.) Have you ever played Flash
games where the game starts to slow down when too many objects or enemies are on screen:
that's what we are trying to avoid.
There are some advantages and disadvantages to our renderer. While better performance is
one of the advantages, we also have to take a different approach for creating animations.
There is no concept of MovieClips anymore for the current game we are creating. In the past
I could create an animation inside a MovieClip and Flash would know how to handle it. Now
we are designing and programing like we would for console games, so it just makes practice
for when we start doing that. Ha! (Of course, finishing this game first would be a nice
start, wouldn't it?)
Example:
The above image is now how we tell Flash how to animate a certain character. We input width,
height, row, and columns. Then our new renderer handles the rest. There are a few more inputs
we use, but thats just to give you the idea of how we handle things.
In other news we have reworked our login/logout banner. We were using our Flash banner to sign
in and to sign out but this didn't work out too well - it was just too inconvenient to use it,
among other things. We now have seperate Sign In and Sign Out pages. It also works better for
you because the brower will now remember your information.
Finally, we have added a "Recent Articles" section to the right of the website. Now you will
know what the latest additions to our site are. Isn't that great.. we think so!
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