They say Aquarius is extremely calm, extremely rational. But somehow, come summer, I turn sentimental. Maybe only warm sunshine and scorching heat can melt a heart of cold, glassy stuff. Only when summer arrives each year do I suddenly feel like a living creature. Every year, my personal emotional eruptions happen in this blazing summer — the days when school lets out for vacation. Lately I’ve been feeling down, tinged with a faint sadness. I’ve realized I’ve wasted so much of my youth and accomplished nothing. Right now my biggest wish on the work front is to build an interesting game product.

I first crossed paths with Flash years ago, and it was love at first sight. I remember that several years back, small Flash games were hugely popular, and I was blown away by the Xiao Xiao series of Flash animations. Back then I played Xiao Xiao No. 4 over and over, and quietly made up my mind: one day I’d throw myself into the Flash world, build Flash pieces with real visual impact, and create games that are actually fun to play. After I started working, I did Flash website development and Flash virtual community development, and in my spare time I never stopped playing games. Through the day-in, day-out accumulation of work and play, I picked up a lot of inspiration and kept writing it down; some of those ideas gradually grew into a system, and I looked forward to turning them into a series of games and realizing the dream I once had. The reality, though, is no sponsorship and no return. Even though the games I design are ones I’d enjoy playing myself, I can only treat developing these mini-games as a hobby. I always hoped I’d find the spare time to finish them slowly, and hoped that one day my friends could play them and have fun with them. The result? The first few weeks I was full of energy, but then the daily job got busy, my own game inched forward, then stalled. I often felt I had no motivation — the moment I finished my day job, all I wanted was a couple of rounds of StarCraft II and then bed. Time always moves too fast. I watch helplessly as my long-delayed hobby game stays a dream.

Since the project needs to render a large number of characters on the same screen, I needed to improve Flash Player’s rendering performance. This afternoon I ran a rendering performance test and polished up the bitmap optimization library I wrote last year. Screen size 2880*2880500 vector character animation MCs (nested 2 levels deep), looping playbackNone of them removeChild off-screen regionsAll tests run with the Flash Player SA 10.0 debug build No optimization, straight addChild fps=4, CPU maxed out, memory 18M~29M Added cacheAsBitmap FPS=1, CPU maxed out, memory 156~196M, memory keeps fluctuating

In my recent project, since the team has quite a few junior ActionScript devs, what was supposed to be pathfinding got cut down to straight-line collision. And the tragic part is, they still tell me the straight-line collision is broken. Yesterday a guy was having the character do a per-pixel collision check after every step to decide whether it could walk. Let me repeat myself one more time: that’s both inaccurate and inefficient. Today I’m posting this example to show the recommended way to do straight-line collision: first draw a line and hit-test it against the walkable/blocked model, and only once you’ve confirmed the destination is reachable do you move the character straight there (speed control can come later, it’s unrelated to this example).

Woke up and the cat wasn’t at my feet. Weird. Come to think of it, I didn’t hear anything getting smashed last night either — could the cat have run off? So I flipped 180 degrees out of my groggy haze and got up to check whether the cat was still around. As usual, I pulled out the ham-sausage-slicing knife and slid it out of its sheath to make a noise. Normally that’s enough to summon the cat, who shows up demanding ham sausage. This time, nothing.

Question: How do you drag an object from a list onto the canvas? Approach The ability to drag an object from a list straight onto the canvas is something you often need in a scene editor. You put a List on screen, each item corresponds to a building, and the user can drag the building into the scene. It works the same way as dragging things from the Flash library onto the stage. We can store the ClassName corresponding to each item in that item; when dragging starts, we create an instance of it and let it follow the mouse. Only when the mouse is released over a valid area of the canvas do we add it to the new DisplayObjectContainer.

When you’re in a bind and ask for help, if you’re sincere, the other person will definitely sense it. Don’t expect to get help by using a flattering tone in a moment of crisis. Experienced people all understand: the more unusually ingratiating someone’s tone is, the more that person is a wolf in sheep’s clothing — and the more vicious they turn once the mask drops.

Problem: var loader:Loader = new Loader(); loader.loadBytes(byteArr); return loader; After that, trace(loader.width,loader.height) gives (0,0), and as soon as you change the width and height via lo...

This article was reposted here after I saw it on http://riaoo.com/?p=1658; the original content comes from http://blogs.adobe.com/xwlin/2010/04/flash_player_101_-_adobe_max_2009.html and http://blogs.adobe.com/xwlin/2010/04/flash_player_101_-_adobe_max_2009_1.html Speaker: Lee Thomason (lthomaso@adobe.com) Translator: Lin Xiaowei (xwlin@adobe.com) PrefaceTime: the 21st of this month. Location: Beijing International Convention Center. Adobe is about to hold a two-day Flash Platform technology summit. I’ll have the honor of joining Ely Greenfield as co-speaker for the <> session, handling both the speaking and the translation. Ely Greenfield is a Senior Principal Scientist in the Apollo Integrated Runtime group, and he gave a superb talk on this topic at Adobe MAX 2007. I googled up a comment from a guy who attended the 2007 MAX conference about Ely himself and his talk: “I think Ely’s topic (Flash Player Internals) was the best of all the topics at MAX…” “Ely is that legendary guy who wrote most of the Flex Charting Framework in three days with his eyes closed”… The 2009 Adobe MAX still has a Flash Player Internals session, but the speaker is Lee Thomason (another hardcore veteran — Flash Player architect, nicknamed Player Guy, said to be the number one Flash Player guy). This is a very in-depth topic, and the talk moves fast: in one hour he covers as many aspects of the player architecture as he possibly can. Here I’ve summarized and translated the gist of his talk for your reference.

Topic: Adobe Platform Technology Summit Date: April 21–22, 2010 Location: 2nd Floor, Beijing International Convention Center Way down south, so I won’t be there in person. But watching online is ju...

“Adobe CS5 Master Collection (Official Win_Mac Release)” (Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection) CS5 [disc image]: http://www.verycd.com/topics/2814048 Also, “Adobe Production Premium Suite” (Adobe.Creative.Suite.5.Production.Premium) CS5 [archive] http://www.verycd.com/topics/2818598/ 51AS’s CS5 download page: http://www.51as.com/as3/as3-268.html This post is a personal collection and will be updated over time. ps: Piracy hurts the industry — free resources should only be used for testing and learning.

Yesterday I saw 【The Most Unbelievable Pencil Drawings】 on Weibo 38-year-old artist Paul Lung created these amazing pieces with a 2B pencil and A2 paper. He doesn’t use an eraser, and each drawing takes him roughly 60 hours. That’s seriously impressive! Some netizens have jokingly dubbed him the “King of 2B”!

My Weibohttp://t.qq.com/RhettGao — come take a look.

Blizzard Entertainment® Offers Players a Choice of Multiple Payment Models**【April 9, 2010, Taipei】**Blizzard Entertainment® announced today that the highly anticipated real-time strategy game StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, in its Traditional Chinese version, is coming to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, priced at NT$1,950 (HK$488). After purchasing the game, players can join the newly updated Battle.net® for online matches at no additional cost. In addition to buying the product package, Blizzard Entertainment will also offer players a choice of other payment options so they can enjoy StarCraft II, with details of the relevant payment plans to be announced later.

Once upon a time there were two little kids, one named Guoguo and one named Zhuanzhuan. Because of an RP problem, Guoguo had been bitten by a wild dog when he was little, so there was a chunk missing from his face. Zhuanzhuan had been multi-talented since he was small, and since his foundation was rock solid, he lived up to the name “Zhuanzhuan.” Guoguo and Zhuanzhuan went to school together as kids and grew up together. Time flew by, and both Guoguo and Zhuanzhuan grew up. Because of his RP problem, even though his body grew up, the missing chunk of flesh was still gaping right there. By sheer chance, Zhuanzhuan ran into a talented woman named MM.