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!
The last two days I’ve been refactoring the Adventure Island Jump n Run Demo code, in order to be able to use parts of it for a Racing Demo. For this, I’ve written a generic Box2D trigger, which can fire any type of event, with any type of arguments (even PBE notation like #Player.Spatial.position)! If a player skips a marker/trigger, he gets respawned to the last legal one. I’ll post more about the trigger class soon, for now, here’s a pic of the scene in the Editor:
Level Master 2000 Racing Demo
The weeks before, I was mostly busy with writing the introductional / theoretical background chapters of my thesis. Turned out to be more work than expected…
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 
In case some readers don’t know, PushButton Engine is a component based game engine for Flash/ActionScript3.
I am using it for my rapid prototyping tool (current working title “LevelMaster2000″). With this post, I’d like to wrap up how I got my development environment setup.
Basically, there are three options when coding ActionScript (I am not counting FlashCS3/4 as an option!)
Since FlashDevelop is free and open source and (seems) mature, I decided to go with it.
Installation was pretty straight forward, and there are good docs how to setup a project with PushButton Engine. I am also working with Flex SDK 3.4, haven’t yet tried version 4, but that might come later on.
As soon as you got your project running, you’ll probably miss the debugger (at least if you have some programming background ). There’s also a solution to this: FlexDbg, a debug plugin for FlashDevelop. You can get it here (if that doesn’t work, try http://gforge.opensource-sw.net/gf/project/flexdbg). Just copy the files to your FlashDevelop/Plugins directory.
After restarting FlashDevelop, the debug-toolbar should be visible. You also get some windows (breakpoints, locals, stack) you might want to dock somewhere. If you navigate to Tools > Programm Settings > FlexDbg, you can set hotkeys for debugging, which is nice as always needing to press a button can be a bit annoying.
So, with this done, you’re setup for action!
A last remark: it seems that alternately using FlashDevelop’s “Test Movie” and FlexDbg’s “Start” confuses FlashDevelop so hard, that it won’t start the movie after all. Examining the TaskManager, a flash.exe starts up, but doesn’t show up. The solution is to kill the process, restart FlashDevelop and don’t use those two functions along. After all, you probably won’t need the standard “Test Movie” anymore anyway!
If somebody has a better solution to this problem, I’m happy to hear it and update my post.
© 2010 The Scrambled Egg · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
