Archive for the 'ActionScript' Category

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Mahjong: making progression

Published on February 1, 2008 in ActionScript, Graphics and Power-up Media. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

This week I made some designs for my Mahjong game (read more) and the game is gonna be just great! Here is a little preview of the tiles and the style of the game (I’ll upload more designs later on):

Mahjong tiles

Besides the designs I also needed a nice transition between the background and a map that will be shown somewhere during the game (as some sort of level selection). Because the style is kind of “old” I thought it would be a good idea to make some sort of dissolve transition.
Whaddayaknow; I managed to get a decent result in just a couple of hours.

Despite the fact that I used a perlinNoise and a copyChannel the  result runs pretty smooth. Check it out:
http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080201.htm

To accomplish the dissolve effect I used an alpha mask on the top image (in this case the “map”-image). The mask itself is created by combining a perlinNoise and copyChannel. The perlinNoise creates the randomness and the copyChannel transforms the randomness into a transparent layer.
The size of the mask is half the size of the image and stretched to match the size of the image. This way only a small perlin noise has to be created which increases performance.

0.1*3 = 0.30000000000000004

Published on December 20, 2007 in ActionScript and Power-up Media. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Isn’t this just great? I stumbled upon this problem in actionscript a while ago, but at that time I just worked around it and never bothered again… until today. A colleague came to me with the same problem and I decided to investigate a little more.

Apparently it is some weird bug when it comes to multiplying decimals values by 3. Take this little script for example:

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var j:Number; 
for(var i:int=0; i<10; i++){ 
	j = i/10; 
	trace(j+"*3 =\t"+(j*3)); 
}

It outputs:
0*3 = 0
0.1*3 = 0.30000000000000004
0.2*3 = 0.6000000000000001
0.3*3 = 0.8999999999999999
0.4*3 = 1.2000000000000002
0.5*3 = 1.5
0.6*3 = 1.7999999999999998
0.7*3 = 2.0999999999999996
0.8*3 = 2.4000000000000004
0.9*3 = 2.7

And it doesn’t stop just there. The same problems occur when adding a decimal value to the double of it’s value:

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trace(.1+.2) //0.30000000000000004 
trace(.2+.4) //0.6000000000000001 
trace(.3+.6) //0.8999999999999999 
trace(.4+.8) //1.2000000000000002

The problem occurres in Javascript as well as in Actionscript (and probably some other languages too) so it’s probably caused by the way decimal values are treated at byte-level. Because it’s not likely there will be a fix for this soon, here is a little workaround:
i = int(i *10)/10; //use int() in favour of Math.round() to speed up the code

Tiling my Mahjong engine

Published on December 19, 2007 in ActionScript, Graphics and Power-up Media. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , .

Just great; a new week and I have only one spare evening do a little experimenting :|
Since my goal was to put up at least one decent experiment a week and since I have little time this week, I decided to upload an experiment that’s almost a year old. It’s an engine for a Mahjong game:

http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp061203.htm

At the time I made the engine I didn’t feel like creating nice graphics so the experiment still looks a bit boring.
Because the engine works fine I thought it would be a wast not to use it, so tonight I created some graphics for the tiles (check them here).
The symbols are taken from a photo of real Mahjong stones. so they should be quite accurate.
The tileset is not 100% complete yet and the current tiles still need a little work on the coloring as well, but I’m sure I’ll finish it somewhere next year :D

Bubble Schmubble beta update

Published on December 14, 2007 in ActionScript, Check this! and Power-up Media. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

It’s just great to know that after all these years I still got some of my php-programming-skills left. Today I added online highscores to the Bubble Schmubble game using a little php-script which reads and writes the highscores in an xml file. This means you can now compete with your friends or colleagues. Isn’t that justGREAT!?!

I also moved the game to a new location. From now on you can check the game here:
http://games.justgreat.nl/bubbleschmubble/

Besides the online highscore option I also added some sounds (again)  and I animated the creatures inside the bubbles a little (quick and dirty).

Last but not least I removed the MochiAd from the game because it was way too annoying and I needed at least a 1000 players a day (!) to make just a little profit from it :( . Instead of the MochiAd I added normal google-ad-banner though,  in the hope it will pay me off some day :D .

I hope you enjoy playing against each other because your highscore will be visible to everyone who plays the game.

Bubble Schmubble beta

Published on December 13, 2007 in ActionScript, Check this! and Power-up Media. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

Tonight I launched the first beta version of Bubble Schmubble and it’s justGREAT!

You can try it here: http://games.justgreat.nl/bubbleschmubble/

I already added some functionality to the game like local highscores, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done:
- some bugfixes on the current code
- overall highscore
- better tweens and animated creatures
- sounds
- a splash screen
- a setting page
- a credits page (so far it’s only gonna contain my own name :P )

I added a MochiAd just to check how it works. If the ad becomes too much of a nuisance or doesn’t bring in enough money (according to the number of players) I will remove it again.

Let me know what you think of the game so far. Also suggestions are always welcome…