Richard Feynman (why isn’t there a movie about him?) gave brilliant lectures, wrote brilliant books, came up with brilliant science, and was reasonable on the bongos so they say. There is a totally amazing series of his lectures online now, for free, thanks to Bill Gates. You have to get past Silverlight, and thus the stuttering video (and no download), and the side by side giant portraits of Feynman and Bill G (what, are we supposed to compare?). That said, it is really really great that this stuff is online and totally worth a watch. Hopefully as retirement sets in, Bill G will not feel obliged to use a Microsoft technology to wrap his gifts in (but rather feel free to use one that, err, works properly, microsoft or otherwise). I understand he had to pay to put this out there for us, so a big thanks in any case — frankly though, the idea that this isn’t world property already is a travesty.
Anyway, WELL worth watching…
My brother and I are working on some XBox mini games, and one of the goals is to be able to really *crank* stuff out (ideally one every week once we are set up). This of course will involve some automation tools — the first will be flash>xna and the second will be box2d. Atm the state of the flash one is vectors and positioning are coming in, but so far no animation or multiple frames. The goal is full animation, but probably no code. I have a similar framework on the go for the XNA side, which is probably enough.
For box2d I’m using the Flash>box2d output from a previous tool (http://debreuil.com/v2d/) to create box2d screens. For this the vectors are coming in, and the basic bodies are working. Need to add joints etc still.
Once these are complete and cleaned up I’m planning on getting a content pipeline thing going. Then we need to get cranking on games : ).
It is a bit counter intuitive to a Flash developer, but in Scaleform (swf for video games) it is more efficient to take all your bitmaps and put them in a single png. You then take specific rectangles in that png and use them for your bitmap image symbols. I had to do this on a recent project, and decided to build a tool using the swf format library I made a while back.
It ended up not being fully automated due to time constraints (I had some trouble recreating the file exactly with the new bitmap info and only needed a few swfs converted that were easy enough by hand). What it does is parse the swf finding all images, consolidate those onto a single png, and then output all the name/rectangle information. To create the rectangles in Flash, you can copy the output to the jsfl below (replace the array contents), and put that in your commands folder — then run it from the ide (be sure ‘no fill’ is set). Place the broken apart bitmap on the same layer, and you can copy and paste into symbols.
var rects =
[
{X:67,Y:614,Width:316,Height:32},
{X:780,Y:274,Width:38,Height:38}
];
var dom = flash.getDocumentDOM();
for(var i = 0; i < rects.length; i++)
{
var r = rects[i];
dom.addNewRectangle({left:r.X,top:r.Y,right:(r.X + r.Width),bottom:(r.Y + r.Height)},0);
}
One day I may finish this, it would be nice to get into the build system, and even put on a dial. Also some images may be best left unmapped for various reasons, it would be nice to mark those.
Download (it is the SwfBitmapPacker project, requires VS2008 Express and windows)
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