This dick movie was made relatively recently (perhaps 6 months ago) when we (Scott & I) had a camera and some clay and bad ideas. Enjoy :)
Adobe Web Premium CS5 Review
Let me preface this review by saying that I’m a Flash developer & designer, and I’ve been using Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Illustrator for 10 years now. I also animate and photograph too, so I use just about everything in this package to a pretty thorough degree.
There are so many products in this suite that it wouldn’t make sense to talk about everything specifically, so I’ll just note some standout positives and negatives that I’ve encountered. I’m not going to comment on the differences between CS4 and CS5 because I skipped CS4 for a number of reasons, some of which were not entirely resolved in this upgrade either. Many in the industry feel like CS3 was the last “great release” by Adobe/Macromedia, so using CS3 as a benchmark works well for me. If you want an opinion on something specific just leave a comment and I’ll update the review.
Before getting into it, I would like to express a very specific concern and frustration that I have with this entire suite. Adobe is making a move to make all of its applications use a unique, proprietary Adobe interface, which although shiny and nice is neglecting a slew of standards and behaviors that people are used to on Windows or OSX. CS3 used windows and panels that were tied into the user’s operating system, so for example the scroll-bars in menus were the same ones you’d see in any other program. That means that they worked the same way, looked the same way, and felt the same way to click, roll your mouse wheel over, etc. CS4 and CS5 have moved away from this and in doing so caused a ton of headaches that you’ll soon learn about if you buy the suite.
Abandoned Projects #2: Graveyard Hunters (’01)
I can’t remember how many quarters and weekends I dumped into the Kahala Bowling Alley (may it rest in peace) during my middle school and high school years. I fell in love with a number of arcade games, including Metal Slug 2, Marvel vs Capcom, and Area 51, but Time Crisis 2 was what I always had to play. It inspired me to make my own game with similar shooting mechanics, and since I had never seen it done in Flash I was motivated to be the first to release something.
Game (click to play)
I can’t remember why I didn’t finish this, but I got pretty far along in development of my Flash 4 zombie shooting game. There are actually 3 different locations that are pretty decently fleshed out, as well as 3 different weapons that you can pick up as you go through them. For some reason I never brought myself to create that final boss fight that would’ve sealed the deal…
Anyway, it’s almost 10 years later and I still think Graveyard Hunters is pretty fun. Give it a whirl.
Cafe Spot Doodles: The Rebirth
It’s been many months since we got together and doodled (in fact, many months since some of us have drawn at all). So this happened (drawings by Scott, Chubbs, and I).
Abandoned Projects #1: Heavy Weapon (’06)
Through the years I have started and not completed a pretty big handful of projects, and it’s been a shame to see them collecting dust. What better way to show these fatherless games and animations some love than expose them to the entirety of the internet?*
* Sounds cool.
So, on to project #1.
Heavy Weapon
I started Heavy Weapon in my last year in college (2006-2007). I was taking Interactive Animation, and saw it as a good opportunity to force me to stop being lazy and do something that would take a bit of effort. Of course I didn’t finish the game… but I still like the idea behind it and hopefully I’ll pick it up again one of these days.
Intro (click to view)
The plot behind the game is as so: in the future, on a distant planet, a fat alcoholic mechanic lives in a junk yard making his way from his repair business. But this new planet is still wild – it is filled with bandits and scoundrels, and the majority of his work involves vehicles and weaponry. He’s not the nicest guy and has a quick temper (being a booze-head doesn’t help either), and on just another day of bandit raids and mortar fire he decides he’s had enough. Dun dun dun.
Gameplay is inspired by side-scrolling arcade shooters like Metal Slug and Alien vs Predator mixed in with RPG elements from games like Diablo and Castlevania SOTN. I’ve always wanted to see shooters take on customizable and collectable items, and it makes sense to give the player a customizable backpack to arrange what they’re carrying as opposed to letting them have an infinite number of switchable weapons. I also feel like it’s more immersive (even in an arcade shooter) to allow the player greater interaction with the environment and NPC’s, so a little bit of that is included in this demo as well.
How far did I get? The engine is there for much of the game mechanic (minus vehicles). There’s a good couple of minutes of play to be had, with jumping puzzles, some basic enemies, traps, hidden weapons, and a little bit of NPC interaction. The art is clearly rough (and the intro even rougher), but I think it gives you a good idea of where I was trying to go. I believe the concept was quite fun and worked rather well. What do you think?
Game (click to play)
WordPress get_bookmarks() bookmark return attributes
I haven’t seen this listed anywhere so I figured I’d give a little hand to the WordPress community.
As you may or may not know, the best way to retrieve bookmarks (listed as Links in the admin panel) is to use the get_bookmarks() method.
Here are the attributes of the bookmark object that it returns:
link_id (int) – ID of the link
link_url (string) – URL of the link
link_name (string) – link name
link_image (string) – link image URL
link_target (string) – link _target
link_description (string) – link description
link_visible (string) – visible Y or N
link_owner (int) – link owner ID (you can retrieve more information about the owner with get_userdata());
link_rating (int) – link rating (specified by you), 0-10
link_updated (string) – last updated date (in 0000-00-00 00:00:00 format)
link_rel (string) – link relationship (as specified by the Link Relationship (XFN) box
link_notes (string) – link notes
link_rss (string) – link RSS url
I hope you guys found this useful! If you ever need to figure out the attributes of an object in PHP, use var_dump(). It tells you everything there is to know about your given variable.
The Ayzenberg Whiteboard
Back when I worked at Ayzenberg, I stumbled upon a stray whiteboard which I took in and nurtured. Nurtured with my love and these drawings. Some pieces were collaborations with other employees, but the majority of these filthy things were done by yours truly.
Shortly before I moved on to my current job (at 65 Media), someone stole the board from me without warning. I had no other choice.
Flash 3D Transformations & File Size
Today at work we had a curious situation — a simple 40k banner was somehow using 23k of Actionscript bytes even though its only code was a number of stop()’s and some navigateToURL()’s and URLRequests. How was this possible?
Theory #1 was that tweens could have had something to do with it. Could the new tweening system actually be using AS? I created a test file including classic tweens, shape tweens, and “new” tweens. The result was 0 Actionscript bytes.
Theory #2 was that Blending Modes could be a factor. Again, 0 bytes.
Theory #3 was that 3D transformations could be the culprit. There was a simple 3D effect used at one point in the banner. To test this, I made an extremely basic AS3 file and applied a slight 3D rotation to its only MovieClip. I published and, voila, there were 23k of Actionscript bytes in the size report.
It’s odd that classic and “new” tweens hardly affect file size at all but 3D manipulations have to include a significant sized AS library. Unfortunately I don’t know what resulted in this decision by Adobe, but if anyone has some insight I’ll be sure to make an addendum to this post.