Archive for the ‘PushButton Engine’ category

Level Master 2000 is live@google code!

August 23rd, 2010

Level Master 2000: Logo

Level Master 2000: screenshot0001

Level Master 2000: screenshot0001

Today I prepared the initial launch of Level Master 2000 at google code: http://code.google.com/p/levelmaster2000/. There are still a lot of features missing, as the project page states:

August 24th, 2010. Commited as is. Consider this more a preview/announcement rather than a real release. A major restructuring will occur within the next months, but anyway – here it is!

Nevertheless, it’s a good feeling finally having it on air and getting some feedback!

Level Master 2000: OSX test succeeded!

August 15th, 2010

Since I use Qt and Qt Creator, I thought: “why not try a OS X build?”. I didn’t plan to invest much time in it, as time is rare, but I was simply too curious to resist. So I installed Qt SDK and Qt Creator on a Mac, opened up the Level Master 2000-project and…. CRASH =)
Qt Creator reported, that some files couldn’t be found, but when clicking on the include statement in code, the path seemed to be correct, as I could open the header file with F2.
So here’s what fixed it:

  1. Clean all targets
  2. Regenerate the qMake file via Qt Creator
  3. Rebuild the project
  4. Install the latest Flashplayer and add the app/AS3/bin directory to Flash Player’s local trusted

That was it! See for yourself:

Level Master 2000: running on OS X

Level Master 2000: running on OS X

The GUI needs a bit work though (e.g. the “delete entity” button), but all in all I’m really impressed how easy this was.

Using PushButton Engine with Flex4

May 15th, 2010

I recently upgraded to Flex4 SDK. Before that everything worked fine. After that, I had some compiler errors, and a quick research brought to me that I had to add

-static-link-runtime-shared-libraries=true

to the additional compiler options. Doing some more in depth research, I discovered that this isn’t neccessary with a newer version of FlashDevelop – and I can confirm: it’s true =)
After the update procedure, everything compiled fine in debug mode. In release mode, it compiled too, but I got a runtime error: “VerifyError: Error #1024: Stack underflow occurred”. Again, investigating this error on the web, I stumbled over http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/ASC-2266. The piece of code causing this, looked like so:

conn = new LocalConnection();
conn.client = this;
conn.allowDomain('*');
try {
	conn.connect("_SchemaConnection");
} catch (error:ArgumentError) {
	trace("Can't connect to _SchemaConnection");
}

So as you can see, it’s not the same as in the link above. I started commenting out line by line, and then I discovered, that it was the trace call. Replacing it with a Logger call finally fixed the error:

Logger.print(this, "Can't connect to _SchemaConnection");

I guess we’ll just put that on the unsolved mysteries stack ;)

Configuring Notepad++ for pbelevel format

March 23rd, 2010

I use Notepad++ for viewing my *.pbelevel files, and always had to do the extra clicking “Language >> XML” to configure it, to display the file with XML highlighting. I now found out, how one can configure Notepad++ to do this automatically: locate the langs.xml in your Notepad++ install directory and add the following line:

<Language name="xml"  ext="pbelevel"></Language>

And tada – you’re off to go!

How to Use SWFSpriteSheetComponent (PBE)

March 12th, 2010

JD Conley from Hive7 has posted a tutorial how to use his SWFSpriteSheetComponent for the PushButton Engine. Check it out at his blog, it’s definately worth a look!

In short, using this component, you can combine, what normally is hard to achieve with Flash: animation with “thousands of buildings on the screen at once“.