Author Archive

• By Rich

  Tags

  MunsieGames, Retro, retroshoot, shmup

  Posted in

  New Releases

  3 comments

  Awesome Retroshoot 360 preview video

  8th Jan 2010

  3

  Dave Munsies classic Retroshoot is coming back in full force as “Retroshoot 360 – Return of the Retronauts”. Here’s a special preview video. Watch it in HD if you have the bandwidth, because this is smegging awesome!

• By Rich

  Tags

  ActionScript3, air, doc?, documentation

  Posted in

  Software

  9 comments

  Access LiveDocs locally with Doc v3.0.1

  6th Jan 2010

  9

  Although the code-insight features of FlashDevelop help a lot, you can’t beat a good AS3 reference – and I use Adobe LiveDocs almost exclusively for this. Although I have a Firefox search plugin that gives me quick access to it, I have still always wanted a decent local copy that offered the same benefits my browser does, but faster.

  Thanks to the magic of Twitter (cheers @kode80) today I found such a beast in the shape of an AIR app called Doc?

  

  Doc? allows you to view, search and bookmark all your favourite ASDocs. But the biggest feature for me is that on-line docs can be downloaded and stored locally too. This means that the docs for things like Away3D, Flint, Papervision, Adobe CoreLib, TweenMax or anything else that has ASDoc documentation can be added to your local books collection.

  Adding a remote ASDoc

  Adding new books couldn’t be more simple. Just start-up Doc?, click the settings icon in the top-right and select “”Add Remote ASDoc”. You’ll be asked for some details. Here they are for the Stardust Particles system:

  

  Note: when adding URLs be sure to specify a directory, and don’t have the index.html on the end.

  Doc? will then download and index the files, storing them locally.

  

  Be advised that on large sets of documentation this can take a while. Indexing the AS3 Language Reference took nearly 10 minutes, and that’s on an Intel Quad Core Q9950 @ 2.83GHz with 8GB RAM. Doc? stores the indexes in a local SQLite database.

  Once downloaded and indexed the docs are available from the Books menu, ready for easy and fast local searching!

  

  Here you can see I searched for “Radius” specifically in the Stardust book, and am viewing the CollisionRadius page. You can search across all books, highlight results in the text, include title and/or content in the search and even bookmark sections you know you return to often.

  The tree view display has icons depending on the style of result – the green “C” circle icon means it’s a Class, but it also shows packages, methods, constants, interface and others.

  AS3 Language Reference

  One of the first things I recommend you do is download the ActionScript3 Language Reference zip from the Adobe web site (5.8MB). Unzip it somewhere and use the “Add Local Book” Settings option to add it. It will still need to be indexed (and this takes a long time), but it’s better to grab the zip as it can often have more up to date docs vs. those installed with CS4.

  I’m quite sure that this app will save me a lot of time vs. digging through browser bookmarks.

  Visit the Doc? web site

  All I’d like to see now is this built into FlashDevelop, so F1 searched within Doc? 🙂

• By Rich

  Tags

  atari, Quotes

  Posted in

  Cool Links

  5 comments

  A lot of people have ideas …

  3rd Jan 2010

  5

  “The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”

  Nolan Bushnell

• By Rich

  Tags

  demo, Retro, zx spectrum

  Posted in

  Demoscene

  3 comments

  Mescaline Synesthesia by deMarche (ZX Spectrum Demo)

  1st Jan 2010

  3

  Ok so my first post in 2010 is about a demo for a 28 year old computer (the ZX Spectrum) but bloody hell, what a demo it is! Here’s a collection of grabs (from Pouet):

  

  … and here’s the demo on YouTube.

  Bear in mind that the humble Speccy is running on a Z80 at a mere 3.5 MHz – that’s probably significantly slower than the processor in your microwave oven.

• By Rich

  Tags

  3D, animation, game, racing, WebbliRacers, WebbliWorld

  Posted in

  Aardman

  3 comments

  New Game: Webbli Racers is live!

  19th Dec 2009

  3

  I’ve talked before about the kids virtual world called WebbliWorld that myself and the Aardman Digital team built. Well it’s been an extremely busy 4th quarter for us as we’ve been releasing hundreds of in-world updates, as well as producing a really excellent racing game called WebbliRacers:

  

  The game has a dual purpose, and two versions exist. One to be released “into the wild” to entice new visitors to the world. And a full version that lives within WebbliWorld which has all 4 tracks and a comprehensive (and fun!) achievement system built into it. Do well and you’ll unlock special items of clothing to wear. Do very well and you can unlock items to decorate your pod (house) with. Do really well and you’ll get awarded special trophies to show-off to your peers 🙂

  The game was developed by Julian Scott (of Drift Runners fame) with art and animation by the Aardman Digital team. It’s a really beautiful game, and takes the unique and wakky style of WebbliWorld and uses it to full effect as these screen shots show:

  

  Track 1 – The cute little traffic cones blink and change colour when hit

  

  Track 2 – Take the hidden routes for extra coins

  

  Track 3 – Oh I do like to be beside the sea side!

  

  Track 4 – Looks so yummy be careful not to lick your monitor!

  I urge you to try it 🙂 You’ll need an account on WebbliWorld, but that’s a 30 second process and is 100% free. Once you are in-world click the map icon on the menu and look for the arcade machine on the left-hand side. There you’ll find the “WebbliWhizzers” zone, which is the in-world leaderboard and place to play WebbliRacers.

  The game has so many nice little touches, from the skid marks, puffs of smoke, jumps, extreme driving bonuses and excellent animation. Lots of what looks like 3D animation (spinning coins, rotating traffic cones) were in fact all hand-animated by the ever talented Robin Davey directly in Flash.

  The 4th track is my personal favourite. Originally it was going to be a volcano level, with lava and tikki statues and the like. But it was rightly decided this was a little too dull for WebbliWorld, so the idea of a “chocolate mountain” was born. So the whole track winds around caramel, marshamllow, chocolate and sticky oozing syrup volcanoes. When you drive through the goo you leave a beautiful messy trail behind:

  

  Click here to visit WebbliWorld – I look forward to seeing you on the leaderboard 🙂 and if you see “WebbliMunro” in world, come over and say hi!