Very annoying if you ask me because I just want to work like I was used to without fla files growing in size with each new project (for no apparent reason).
Luckily I found a very simple solution: clear everything from your library you don’t need any more and then just hit “Save as…” and save as a CS4 file. Thiss step will remove most of the overhead. After this, saving it again as CS5 file will reduce the file-size even more!

This trick is a bit more work than before (and it would make more sense if Flash did it all by itself),  but atleast it gets the job done.

Hopfully an update for CS5 will get rid of this problem once and for all…

front / back (click for full-size on flickr)

You can listen to (and download) the EP here: http://www.ektoplazm.com/free-music/outolintu-boings-tickles/

As of February I quit my job and started as a freelance Flash-designer/developer (by the name of Power-up Media) so it was time for a fresh start all together; I finally made a decent main site (http://www.powerupmedia.nl/), I restyled this blog (hope you like it) and moved it to a new domain (http://blog.powerupmedia.nl/). The main site still needs a little tweaking and it needs a lot more content, but it’s a start…

At the moment I’m trying to figure out what to do with my labs section (http:/labs.powerupmedia.nl/).  I’ll probably combine it either with the main site or with this blog but whatever it’s gonna be, you can expect some changes there as well.

All said and done I’m now open for Flash- and/or design-jobs so if you got any work laying around please don’t hesitate to contact me…

The chalange was to create a new design for their “Tedde”. The shape of the tedde was a given and you were only allowed to use 3 colors (apart from black I guess because some early submission also had 4 colours)
Here is my submission to the contest:

You can check out the full version here:
http://www.tedde.com/store/?p=1007

If you like it please vote for it! (just one click)

Manny thanks

PS: While you’re at it, my colleague would be very pleased if you would vote for his submission as well:
http://www.tedde.com/store/?p=1011

I made this game in collaboration with a colleague of mine (Berthjan Achterop / http://www.berthjan.com/)
I started of with the coding of the engine and Berthjan made the design. After applying the design to the game I animated most of the characters to bring it all to live. The result is a “colums”-like game wrapped in a world of weird (but wonderful) creatures

Enjoy and let me know what you think of it…

PS: here is a nice wallpaper to accompany the game

After over a year of not listening to my nagging collegua (Away3D-team member Fabrice Closier) telling me to start working with (Away)3D, I caved…
I started to experiment a little in Away3D and turned my 2D jellyfish experiment into a 3D version. You can watch the result here: http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080603.htm

I added a couple of tricks I learned way back when I created levels for Unreal Tournament.
For example I added a second viewport for the skybox (in this case a sphere), because the Away3D Skybox-class is in fact not a real skybox but just a really huge cube rendered in the same viewport as the rest of the scene.
The camera in my skybox viewport points in the same direction as the camera in the main viewport but always stays at point (0,0,0). This way the camera will never approach the side of the skybox, giving the illusion that everything in this viewport is really far away.

All-in-all a good start in Away3D if you ask me. I hope to do some real projects with 3D in the comming weeks…

13×13 dudes, 13×13 pixels each – pixel – fireworks | download

The situation looks like this:


- The two shapes are siblings so they have the same parent (i.o.w. the two shapes can’t be nested).
- The blue oval is on top of the green rectangle.
- I want to know when the mouse leaves the green rectangle.

The problem is that the green rectangle dispatches a ROLL_OUT and MOUSE_OUT event as soon as the mouse hits the blue oval.

I tried all combinations of mouseChildren, buttonMode and enabled on the oval and on the parent of the two clips, but nothing seems to make the oval not “steal focus” of the rectangle.

Here is the source of the test: Rollout test (zip)

I can think of some workarounds (hitArea, using an invisible button, etc.) but I much rather find a straight way to handle this kind of situation.
Since this was never a problem in as2 I believe there should be a decent solution in as3 as well.

If someone has an answer to this problem or knows about a secret property I haven’t tried, please let me know…

I was inspired by the graphics of Dofus Arena and decided to try and create some similar tiles… Spending half a day fooling around with Fireworks I ended up with this image:

Another half a day later I turned the graphics into an animated terrain generator: http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080302.htm

The terrain is generated according to three small bitmaps (see top left corner). The first one determines the type of the tile. The second one is like a bumpmap and determines the elevation of eacht tile. The third bitmap determines where objects (plants, rocks, gold, etc.) should be placed.
In the future I might create an editor which can write the bitmaps.

Once I designed more versions of each tile-type (4 or 5 different grass tiles for example) the generator will be able to pick a random version of that tile. This way repetition in the structure should be avoided (at the moment the tiles are just mirrored at random).

Just fooling around I came up with this result:

Jolly jellyfish - vector animation | download

The movement and generation of the jellyfish is all actionscript (2.0), the “squezing” is timeline-animation…

owl on branch – pixel – fireworks | download

fishtank – pixel – fireworks | download

(Click download for a better view)

air critters – vector – flash cs3 | download

HOOT… – vector – flash cs3 | download

critters – vector – flash cs3 | download

no name - vector – flash cs3 | download

face – vector – flash cs3 | download

Hope you like ‘em. Feel free to use and/or distribute…

It turned out the (old) plugins were the root of the problem and I had to delete them all in order to get my blog up and running again.

Mad as I could be I tried to reinstall new versions of plugins, but since most of the plugins were not yet updated and compatible with the new WordPress version it was still drama and I decided to let it be and leave my blog a big mess (no syntax highlighting, broken tags, etc.).

After a week of snowboard fun I regained the courage to look for new plugins to replace the old ones. And whaddayaknow; I found just the right plugins for my blog. I’m not sure if it was the time plugin-developers needed to update their plugins or the time I needed to cooldown and start a fresh new search but I did it .

SWF and Youtube embedding
To show swf files, youtube videos and other mash-up stuff I now use xhtml-video-embed. This plugin lets you embed different content using a simple [tag] ... [/tag]-markup…
No more fucked-up embedcode in your post editor!

Syntax highlighting
To display my codesnipets in proper format without screwing up the layout of my theme I now use WP-Codebox. It turned out this plugin is even better than my old syntaxhighlighter-plugin!
This plugin uses a <pre lang="LANGUAGE"> ... <pre>-markup and supports a lot of languages (including actionscript). Very nice.

Tagging
For the tags of my post I now use the new tag-feature of WordPress. Since it doesn’t display tags with posts by default I had to find a way to show them anyway and I found the answer right here: http://richgilchrest.com/how-to-add-wordpress-23-tags-to-your-current-theme/
In short; you just have to add a line like the one below into the index.php, archive.php,  and/or single.php file of your theme:
<?php the_tags("<b>Tags:</b> ", ", ", ""); ?>
How easy…

In the end it turned out to be all worth the stress and nail nibbling… justGREAT!

PS: With my blog back in business I decided to change the header and footer of my theme as well. Hope you appreciate it

Whether you are fed up with your marriage (and/or life) or you just want to learn some new Photoshop tricks, you should check out the tutorials of Donnie Hoyle. This desperate guy has a tutorial series called “You Suck at Photoshop”:

Lesson #1:

Lesson #2:

Lesson #3:

Lesson #4:

Lesson #5:

Lesson #6:

Plz, somebody put this guy out of his misery

UPDATE (2008-03-09):
Two new lessons for your ass:

Lesson #7:

Lesson #8:

UPDATE (2008-03-27):
Another new lessons for you to chew on:

Lesson #9:

UPDATE (2008-04-15):
Putting it all in perspective:

Lesson #10:

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.

Since I should now have some actual readers I thought it would be a good idea to promote the labs section of my site once more.

So here it is: http://labs.justgreat.nl/

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet: check it out and be amazed and inspired by some very cool Flash experiments.
I’ll try to upload at least one experiment a week so stay tuned!

For those of you who are just looking for a short work break, you should give my latest (puzzle) game Bubble Schmubble a chance:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/417633 (or http://games.justgreat.nl/bubbleschmubble/)

Have fun!

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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4
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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

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

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 .

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