Dropkick Chopstick

Objective-C for Actionscript developers

I just found a great series of short tutorials introducing Objective-C concepts to Actionscript developers in the Teknision Blog. Looks mighty useful to me.

The tutorials are:
AS3 to Objective-C : Data Types
AS3 to Objective-C : Syntax 
AS3 to Objective-C : Memory Management
AS3 to Objective-C : Help and Resources

Sweet.

Using AppleScript to wire Flex Builder, Flash CS4 and Debug Flash Player together

Since I’ve been doing quite a lot of AS3 development lately, I got increasingly annoyed by the fact that I can’t compile my entire project inside Flex Builder.

I’m using Flash CS4 as a level designer - where I visually drop movieclips of game elements and have physics and gameplay apply to them in runtime, but I also use Flex Builder for all the code writing. The problem is, that since .fla files need to be built, I have to use Flash to “Test Movie” / Publish each time I want to run the game prototype, and can only wire Flex Builder to the resulting .swf for debug.

In order to smooth this annoyance a bit, I wired Flex Builder, Flash CS4 and Debug Flash Player together into one key stroke: hit F5 in Flex Builder causes Flash CS4 to come forward, publish my .fla and then switches back to flex builder, to run it’s manually setup Debug command. (which runs Debug Flash Player with the resulting SWF)

Here’s how you can make it work:

1. Download the standalone Debug Flash Player from Adobe (direct link here) and Follow the tutorial in this link to wire Flex Builder to debug .swf files published by the Flash CSx.

2. Fire up Apple’s Script Editor, paste the follwing code and replace the names (within the quotes) where needed:

tell application “Debug Flash Player” to quit

tell application “Adobe Flash CS4” to activate

tell application “System Events”
    tell process “Adobe Flash CS4”
        tell menu bar 1
            tell menu “File”
                click menu item “Publish”
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
end tell

delay 5

tell application “Flex Builder” to activate

tell application “System Events”
    tell process “Flex Builder”
        tell menu bar 1
            tell menu bar item “Run”
                tell menu “Run”
                    tell menu item “Debug”
                        tell menu “Debug”
                            click menu item “NAME-OF-YOU-CUSTOM-DEBUG-SETTING”
                        end tell
                    end tell
                end tell
            end tell
        end tell
    end tell
end tell
 

3. Save the AppleScript is an application (.app) - hit File -> Save As and choose Application from the combobox.

4. Define this app as an external tool in Flex Builder (Run Menu -> External Tools -> Open External Tools Dialog…) Give it a name like “PublishAndDebug” and point the Location field in the dialog to the .app file created by the script editor

5. Use the Mac’s Keyboard & Mouse preference pane in System Preferences, to define a new keyboard shortcut for that action in Flex Builder (in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, hit the small [+] button, than fill the information according to the image below)

Viola. If you survived the long list of steps, you can now hit F5 in Flex Builder, and have Flash CSx come up, publish the movie, wait 5 sec, have the Flex Builder come up and launch the .swf for debug.

Sweet.

Resource / Devtool dump

During the last two weeks, I’ve been checking several developer tools and flash libraries in order to go further with my game prototype, among them are:

Torque 2D Game Builder

Vex2D: Flash vectors -> Box2D physics converter / framework
(The command line util itself, v2d.exe requires the .Net 2.0 framework, but works fine for me with Mono for Mac.) 

A Guide on tile-based side scrolling in Flash.

Concept Presentation

Here’s a subset of the concept presentation I gave this week.

(demo prototype not yet online, more updates soon.)