[casual_games] Recommendations for a book on Flash games creation?

[Andy Makely]

On 10/5/05, Phil Steinmeyer <psteinmeyer at newcrayon.com> wrote:
>
>
> My beefs with Flash 7 were (roughly)
> 1) Terrible IDE
> 2) Slow
> 3) Limitations in terms of making stand-alone EXEs that fully exploit the
> native OS (i.e. screen resizing and such).




The Flash 8 IDE hasn't changed much over 7. So if it drove you crazy before,
it still would. They fixed a few issues with panels remembering where you
put them. If you're a coder, you'll still want to write ActionScript in some
external program, like SEPY, since the IDE's script editor has not advanced
much.

The drawing speed is a lot better now that they have added bitmap
operations. So instead of having to attach or duplicate a bunch of
movieclips, you can simply manipulate graphic regions on a pixel basis.
Scrolling backgrounds become MUCH faster, for example, by copying a bitmap
region from a source image in the library to a rectangle on the screen,
instead of the old way -- changing the _x of some huge movieclip or managing
a bunch of background tile clips. You can also tell the Flash8 player to
cache particular movieclips as bitmaps, which makes them update MUCH faster.
They also added bitmap filters for doing blurs, bevels, dropshadows, etc. in
real-time via script.

As for standalone EXEs, there appears to be little or no new functionality.
You will still need a projector tool, like MDM's Zinc, to build your EXE in
order to get access to a writeable file system, registry keys, screen
resolution manipulation, etc.

--
andy makely
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