Carving a cutout (a circle or ellipse) out of a large dark shadow: once a sub-shape cache has been built, bitmap channel subtraction is cheaper than drawing a Shape with blend mode ERASE — but buil...

Bookmark this award-winning game, Monster Tower Defense — A novel tower defense game themed around monster evolution, putting your strategy, raising, and prediction skills to the test. It’s currently an early access version — races like the Star Spirits and the Undead will be showing up later, so stay tuned! Basic controls: W, S, A, D to control direction, left mouse button to attack, E to devour, F to cast a skill, R to spend 500 gold to restore 2000 HP to your base, ESC to cancel during the tower-building phase, and to upgrade a tower just click the icon of a tower you’ve already built.

Today I discovered that in jQueryMobile’s listview, to link to a page in the same directory with the mobile style applied, you must use ./xxxx.html instead of xxxx.html. Otherwise, the target ...

A few days ago NASA’s press conference got a lot of people intrigued — guessing 2012 along with NASA, and the next day it turned out they’d only announced a 30-year-old black hole. I was hoping for something new and exotic — no such luck, huh. Just as I was about to put the NASA suspense thing behind me, today I came across this video — the Gulf of Aden stargate opening. Holy crap, has modern technology really come this far? Can all those sci-fi speculations actually come true in this century? Is it a relic of ancient wisdom or the product of modern technology? Psychic warriors and a whole pile of other mysteries have netizens speculating.

Team Introduction This team is a group of game development professionals who came together after working on three products across two companies. l Team strengths: 12–36 months and more than three products of working together; solid rapport, workflows, and development habits. (The longest-serving member has over 35 months of joint development behind them; the shortest, no less than 12 months)

Just discovered that Flash’s DisplayObject/getBounds can’t work out the correct size in a tween that contains only vector graphics — it always returns the shape region from the previous keyfra...

Problem description: After switching systems, I found that I’d moved to the new Chrome 6. I wanted to use the debug version of the flashplayer plugin, so I installed “flashplayer 10.1 plugin debug” as usual. Once it was installed, I restarted Chrome and opened http://www.flashplayerversion.com/ and saw that the version was the latest one — but it wasn’t the debug version. That struck me as odd. Later I went into the Control Panel and uninstalled the flash plugin outright, but Chrome could still play flash! It turns out that both Chrome 5 and Chrome 6 ship with flashplayer built in, and it’s the latest version. That’s a good thing in itself, but for flash developers what’s needed is the debug build of fp, so you have to find a way to swap Chrome’s built-in fp for the debug version.

Problem description: After switching to FDT4 M3, I pointed the workspace straight back at its old location, and of course a fair number of errors showed up that needed fixing. One of them, though, ...

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.