Category Archives: Starling

Geophysic, making AIR shine thanks to Feathers

AIR, AS3, Citrus Engine, Feathers, Flash, iOS, Starling, , , , ,

Update: The project has been FWA mobile of the day! Note that this blog post was written 3 months before its publication.

This new project was kind of special for me, I made an iPad application, Geophysic® with one of the best French agency Soleil Noir for the famous luxary watches Jaeger-LeCoultre. No less!
When I was a student, Soleil Noir was the best French agency and we all dreamed to work there! So you could imagine how fun it was to work with them! As a luxury brand, Jaeger-LeCoultre, has a very high expectation of the final product. Combined with Soleil Noir’s graphic designers, it results in a top quality iPad application.

Continue reading Geophysic, making AIR shine thanks to Feathers →

Scaleform, for the love of Flash

AIR, AS3, Flash, iOS, Scaleform, Starling, , ,

RE-Edit : Scaleform mobile SDK 4.4 is out!

Edit, official answer from Autodesk: “Initial Indie friendly efforts have focused on MayaLT, as the most widely used Autodesk game tool. Autodesk is considering a similar option for their Game Middleware tools (such as Scaleform, Navigation and HIK) which will make them more affordable and accessible to Indies. An Indie friendly pricing model, hopefully coming soon, would allow them to offer the latest version of Scaleform to Indies and not bother maintaining a separate (and older) consumer Scaleform Mobile download. That should solve the problem for Indie devs that want the latest Metal, XCode and 64 bit support.”

We’re in 2015 and Flash is still there. It might be a dying technology but it couldn’t die right now because there isn’t any other tool which is able to replace it. The strength of Flash is obviously its vector animations. However since several years many of the flash developers don’t use the Flash Pro software in their daily job. Now we’re mostly using Starling and sometimes we grab animations from a fla and turn them into a SpriteSheets, or using DragonBones or mostly a SWC file to turn it into textures at runtime. Also there is the fact that we’re not able to reload SWF file using AS3 code on iOS.
Those facts highlight that something is broken in our production line: graphic/animation designers are increasingly dependent on developers. We are not able to take their SWF to make it running on our mobile device, so we must recreate everything ourselves via code and optimized framework (Starling). And hell, I hate doing animations jobs.

I think AAA studios were laughing when Flash was announced dead, because they use it daily. Mass Effect, Tomb Raider, The Witcher, Crysis… all of them use SWF file for their UI stuff. Have you thought a moment that even EA was using SpriteSheets with several resolutions for its menu!? Obviously not, with SWF file they are able to target all resolutions needed with just scaling/stretching their SWF without any loss, from a crappy 640 x 480 resolution to a 4k. However they are not doing it via AIR (it even doesn’t exist on console), but via Scaleform. Let’s have a look on this amazing tool!
Continue reading Scaleform, for the love of Flash →

Mission Eau : being Agile with Flash Pro

AIR, AS3, Citrus Engine, Flash, Starling, , , , ,

missioneauintrologo
Stores/Web:
– kezakeau.fr
– google play
– apple store

Intro : This is a serious game designed to teach players a bit about how water treatment and supply works; specifically how its organized in the Île-de-France region – around paris. The game map is loosely based on that region and divided by areas which corresponds to the master water supply facilities that share connections around the region. The map shows you which levels are accessible to play or re-play, you can zoom it or out with many graphical details. The three areas need to be completed and in order to complete one, you need to connect all buildings together by playing the game levels, and also buy the missing buildings using the coins you collect.

This is not a management game however, you do not have to save money or buy things in advance, it is balanced so you can easily get to the end without worrying too much. The action of buying or clicking buildings on the map will tell you more about what these buildings do and how they relate to others… Their in-game worth also gives players a hint on how important they are.

The challenge here was to keep the package size as low as possible yet keep the graphics at maximum quality.

missioneaumap

Continue reading Mission Eau : being Agile with Flash Pro →

GPU render mode hell, and how we barely got out of it alive.

AIR, Away3D, Citrus Engine, Flash, Starling, , ,

Hello everyone, Tam here!

I’m going to recount the story of one of the projects I’ve been working on in the past few months, and how it all went downhill from the very beginning.
Oh don’t worry though. This is not a fancy post-mortem for the biggest game of the year, but its my first so I’ve got at least something to smile about.
In fact in order to be able to write this article let me pull up a happy image just for you and me, and then let’s jump right in.

Friends-With-You_Happy_Rainbow-01

Continue reading GPU render mode hell, and how we barely got out of it alive. →

AS3 Skeletal animation libraries performance test

AIR, AS3, Flash, Starling,

Update: part2.

Right after Silly Family (the Android & multiplayer version will be out at the end of the month!), we are already planning our next game. It will be more for gamer, a bit less family, it will be a tower defense kind of game (I enjoyed so much Bardbarian). We’ve already some fresh ideas, so it’s already time for making test implementation!

On Silly Family we used DragonBones for animations. The graphic designer enjoyed to be able to make them right in Flash, and for me the .dbswf exported file is really optimized (less than 1Mb for 6 * 5 * 16 animations and multi resolutions friendly)! However in our future game, we will have at least 30 animated characters at the same time, and in my quick prototype DragonBones wasn’t able to handle them. So it’s time for a benchmark!

Benchmark
Ok, first thing to consider: since I’m not a graphic designer (nor an animator) I wasn’t able to use the same graphics for each library. So I used their default model. Some may be more complex than others and so impact performances. The goal was to see if I can reach 60 FPS on my iPhone 4S (using iOS 7.1.1) in release mode obviously with AIR 13 using ASC 2.0 compiler and Starling framwork.
If you want to have a quick look on what the benchmark looks like, go there.

DragonBones
DragonBones has the easiest workflow since it is used directly into Flash. This is the library with which I’m the most familiar. For 30 Dragons on screen, I reached 34 Fps using version 3.0 beta and its new cacheFrameRate feature!

Flump
Flump is an other library using Flash for making animations. I found it harder to use (in Flash editor) than DragonBones when making Witchcraft Works (I used Flump with Haxe and Flambe). Making this simple performances test was a bit complicated since they don’t provide external libraries (fzip, react) directly, or I missed something. Anyway, I had 30 of their mascot running at 54 Fps!

Spine
Spine has its own software for making animations. It also has its official runtime for AS3/Starling. I had 30 orcs at 25 Fps.

Spriter
Spriter also has its own software for making animations, it also has its official AS3 implementation but when I tested it performances was really, really bad. I didn’t have 30 objects at 60 FPS on my computer! Lucky me, since Spriter is very popular (it was one of the first Skeletal animation software on KickStarter) there are several implementations. And the one made by TreeFortress is pretty solid concerning performances. Have a look on Shawn’s article. I reached 45 fighters at 52 Fps!

Conclusion
After this benchmark, I already know that I won’t use Spine. It’s the most expensive software and concerning performances point of view, there aren’t very good. Spriter Shawn’s implementation sounds very performant however sadly it doesn’t sound to be updated and supported with latest Spriter update. We enjoyed working with DragonBones for our previous game, however for this new one it may be a bad deal. Performances aren’t enough good, but since the graphic designer and me are very familiar with it, it may worth spending time on the library to optimize it (and damn I love this .dbswf format). And finally Flump sounds like a way to gve a serious try, performances seem to be pretty good and for the graphic designer he should feel at home using Flash!

Download sources & Scout reports.

Using an other technology?:
As you can see in the Scout reports, this is really the AS3 code which is limiting performances. It reminds me Philippe Elsass blog post about the fail of AS3/AIR. For my game I won’t need 100 characters à 60 FPS, but it isn’t a reason to have a look on other tech:
– I enjoyed using Flambe, however it’s using AIR on mobile. Thanks to Haxe optimization, it should be more optimized than AS3 directly, however I doubt having so much different performances.
– OpenFL may be the solution concerning performances. However I’m a bit afraid of its constant evolution.
– And finally, why not Unity? Related to my old article, here I’m facing Unity’s bad side: all Skeleton animation libraries aren’t free even for testing their runtime. It’s really sad… Smooth Moves doesn’t sound bad at all.

And you what do you think?

Silly Family, being an indie dev

AIR, AS3, Citrus Engine, Flash, Games, Mobile, Profile, Starling, , , ,

Edit: Apptoonomy is no more. Selling games is even harder than making ones. I only focus on Da Viking Code now as a cross platform developer.

The game.

Hey guys, this blog post is very special for me :
– it’s my hundredth article!
– my first game as an indie dev is out!

100 blog articles
When I started blogging 4 years (already!) ago, I didn’t imagine that someday I’ll reach the hundredth article. I started mostly as an exercice in style, improving my english communication skills and coding different things for sharing (unpretentious). I continued and now when I give a look in the past I’m smiling : I can see my evolution, how I’m better as a programmer, and all the different things I did in 4 years.
Also thanks to this blog I had my first client as a freelancer! I would recommand to any programmer to have a blog and post each month an article (that’s what I’m doing since 3 years) on what he is doing.

Apptoonomy
With some friends we created a new company, Apptoonomy. So does it mean that I’m not anymore a freelancer at Da Viking Code? No way! What does a programmer on his spare time? He is programming. With Apptoonomy we mainly focus on making our own games. Let me introduce the first one!

Silly Family
silly1Silly Family is a familly-fun Puzzle Game! Do you know Suzan? Of course you do! Suzan is my father’s son’s sister’s mother’s mother! Suzan is my grandma!!!

In Silly Family, you train your logic by resolving more and more complicated enigmas about increasingly crazier families! You’ll have to find the family relationship or run through the family tree.

We offer 3 different gameplays, 5 families (maybe more) and crazy designs… not to mention the animations! Also a multiplayer mode to defeat your friend!

Obviously questions are generated dynamically, I wrote the algorithm using (family) trees and recursivity. That was funny especially managing the different languages (the application is currently available in English, French, Spanish and Italian). We’re waiting a little bit for German, it won’t be easy 😉

Being an indie dev
Silly Family is the first (finished and published) game that I made as an indie dev. It’s really a longest process than programming games for clients. A client has to be sure (or at least should) that his game design is strong and developer implementation won’t show design flaws. Otherwise programmer’s bill may be painful. I started to develop Silly Family in October 2013 so six months ago. And obviously we already had a game design document. But so many things changed during its developement. Also you can add the fact that you must be satisfied with your game’s direction, and to still have the will to work on. Anyway, it’s a very interesting experience and it improved my skills as a game designer. We’re already looking forward for the next game!

Technology
Obviously I used my beloved Citrus Engine for making this game and Starling framework. The IPA size (before submitting to Apple) is less than 17Mo! How did we achieve this size? It’s thanks to DragonBones and its awesome .dbswf format. AS3/AIR technology was perfect for making this game!

Working with multi-resolutions assets

AIR, AS3, Flash, Starling, ,

When we’re making mobile apps we have to support lots of resolution from 480 x 320 to 2048 x 1536 if you only target iOS. Adding Android support you have to extend it to 2560 x 1600 (for the Nexus 10)!

If your graphic designer made its design into a vector format, it will be easy to fit exactly to your screen size, and you will only fight with the different ratios format.
However if your design is made with bitmaps, you have to, firstly, be sure they have been made for the highest resolution you would like to support! When this is done, you will use a SpriteSheet to have all of your assets in one (or a little more) place.

In this blog post we will see how to manage multi-resolutions assets based on a Starling app.

Continue reading Working with multi-resolutions assets →

Alef is out!

AIR, AS3, Citrus Engine, Flash, Games, Nape, Physics, Starling, , , ,

Hey there,

It has been a long time since I wrote my first game, Kinessia, with the Citrus Engine (and start contributing), one and a half year. Less than one year ago, I made an other one, Tribus, using a Citrus Engine’s port in Objective-C. That was my first project in Objective-C so the source code of the port shall not be very clean, that’s why I’ve never released it officially.

We all know the problem making a framework / library and never use in real context project. That’s why I started my carreer as a freelancer 4 months ago, to be able to make applications / games for companies and show what can be done with the Citrus Engine. And now I’m proud to add a new reference to the engine: Alef.

Continue reading Alef is out! →