Category Archives: Mac

Citrus Engine V3 Beta2

AS3, Box2D, Citrus Engine, Data Structures, Entity/Component System, Flash, Games, iOS, Nape, Object Pooling, Physics, Programming, Starling, , , , , , , ,

Hey there! On this hot summer day, I’m happy to share a new major beta for the Citrus Engine! There are lots of new features, improvements, bug fixes and a new demo for mobile devices. It is also updated on the last version of each library.

Download it on Google Code or GitHub.

Continue reading Citrus Engine V3 Beta2 →

Tribus, Graduation Project

Chipmunk, Games, iOS, Objective-C, Physics, Profile, Programming, Sparrow, , , ,

On Wednesday 20 th, I made my last orals for school. Some weeks ago, I’ve finished my training at Swad‘s web agency in Annecy. Since Wednesday my sandwich course at Gobelins school (Annecy) is finished, and now I’m in “holiday”. It means that I’m working on my new Portfolio and looking for a job probably at Lyon, France 😉

Let me introduce Tribus, the first game which use bus public transportation as gamification!
We were 4 people behind this project, Pauline the Graphic Designer, Coraline the Designer, Lory the Project Manager / Developer and me as the lead Developer.
Tribus is based on a simple observation : public transportation are boring time for many people. The idea was to play in real time with the bus public transportation and break the boredom thanks to the Gamification.
The Tribus’ concept is to gamify the bus route using its own elements : location, speed, line, bus stop… and offer a game!

The concept was there, but what type of game offer? A real time massive multi-players space opera? Impossible for a small team in 4 – 6 months, we aren’t Electronic Arts. A survival game with zombies? I loved this idea, it could have been awesome if we have worked on subway : safe point, network lost… all the ingredients were already present. However we wanted a game for everyone : fun, easy to play, stress-free… yep, one more casual game.

Tribus is a Canabalt type of game, it is close to Jetpack Joyride. But how are bus elements injected in the gameplay?
It is very difficult to have information on the bus, bus’ companies don’t disclose these informations. So we used the smartphone’s GPS. Thanks to it we could know our position and so the bus one. We have located bus stop in a database and so we knew if a user follow the bus route and then suppose that he is using the bus! The GPS is also used to know the bus speed and thus change the speed of the game.

We developed for iPhone, using Chipmunk and Sparrow for the game (not the app interface) and made a simple port of the Citrus Engine. Since this is my first project using Objective-C the port is not very “user friendly” and it can be improved a lot. Anyway, that was a very rewarding experience.
All the source code is available on GitHub.

A short video :

Screenshots :

Sparrow Framework, AnimationSequence class

iOS, Objective-C, Programming, Sparrow, , , , ,

Coming from AS3 & Starling framework, it is really easy to handle Sparrow. I was surprised to don’t find a class to manage several animations (like the gotoAndPlay in as3) in Starling and it is the same with Sparrow. So I’ve ported the AnimationSequence class (used in the Citrus Engine V3) from Starling to Sparrow.

Basically, the class extends SPSprite with all SPMovieClip animations added into a Dictionary which are addChild/removeChild (with the Juggler).

An AnimationSequence is defined with a texture atlas, an array with animation states and a simple string with the first animation :

AnimationSequence *mc = [[AnimationSequence alloc] initWithTextureAtlas:[SPTextureAtlas atlasWithContentsOfFile:@"Hero.xml"] andAnimations:[NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"walk", @"jump", @"idle", nil] andFirstAnimation:@"idle"];

To change an animation :

[mc changeAnimation:@"walk" withLoop:YES];
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#import "SPSprite.h"
 
@interface AnimationSequence : SPSprite {
 
    NSMutableDictionary *mcSequences;
 
    SPTextureAtlas *textureAtlas;
    NSArray *animations;
    NSString *previousAnimation;
}
 
@property (nonatomic) NSMutableDictionary *mcSequences;
@property (nonatomic) SPTextureAtlas *textureAtlas;
@property (nonatomic) NSArray *animations;
@property (nonatomic) NSString *previousAnimation;
 
- (id) initWithTextureAtlas:(SPTextureAtlas *) textAtlas andAnimations:(NSArray *) multiAnimations andFirstAnimation:(NSString *) firstAnim;
 
- (void) changeAnimation:(NSString *) animation withLoop:(BOOL)animLoop;
 
@end
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//
//  AnimationSequence.m
//  ChipmunkWrapper
//
//  Created by Aymeric Lamboley on 06/03/12.
//
 
#import "AnimationSequence.h"
 
@implementation AnimationSequence
 
@synthesize mcSequences, textureAtlas, animations, previousAnimation;
 
- (id) initWithTextureAtlas:(SPTextureAtlas *)textAtlas andAnimations:(NSArray *)multiAnimations andFirstAnimation:(NSString *)firstAnim {
 
    if (self = [super init]) {
 
        textureAtlas = textAtlas;
        animations = multiAnimations;
        mcSequences = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
 
        for (NSString *animation in multiAnimations) {
 
            if ([textureAtlas texturesStartingWith:animation].count == 0) {
                NSLog(@"One object doesn't have the %@ animation in its TextureAtlas", animation);
            }
 
            [mcSequences setObject:[[SPMovieClip alloc] initWithFrames:[textureAtlas texturesStartingWith:animation] fps:25] forKey:animation];
        }
 
        [self addChild:[mcSequences objectForKey:firstAnim]];
        [[SPStage mainStage].juggler addObject:[mcSequences objectForKey:firstAnim]];
 
        previousAnimation = firstAnim;
    }
 
    return self;
}
 
- (void) changeAnimation:(NSString *)animation withLoop:(BOOL)animLoop {
 
    if (!([mcSequences objectForKey:animation])) {
 
        NSLog(@"One object doesn't have the %@ animation set up in its initial array?", animation);
    }
 
    [self removeChild:[mcSequences objectForKey:previousAnimation]];
    [self.stage.juggler removeObject:[mcSequences objectForKey:previousAnimation]];
 
    [self addChild:[mcSequences objectForKey:animation]];
    [self.stage.juggler addObject:[mcSequences objectForKey:animation]];
    ((SPMovieClip *)[mcSequences objectForKey:animation]).loop = animLoop;
    ((SPMovieClip *)[mcSequences objectForKey:animation]).currentFrame = 0;
 
    previousAnimation = animation;
}
 
- (void) dealloc {
 
    [self removeChild:[mcSequences objectForKey:previousAnimation]];
    [self.stage.juggler removeObject:[mcSequences objectForKey:previousAnimation]];
}
 
@end

Be careful, this version uses the ARC mode!

Objective-C basic interface

iOS, Mac, Objective-C, ,

In this tutorial, we will see how to create a basic interface in Objective-C with code only. It will be one TextField and one Button. Yeah, just that and we will need 6 files! And maybe we will use some inheritance.

ActionScript 3 is really a smart language, it is very quick to create what we will do. Something like 10 lines of code… Anyway, in this tutorial I will not make comparisons between ActionScript 3 and Objective-C like the previous one unless it is really useful.

Open Xcode and create a new iOS empty application, disable everything. Many files are created, but we will use only AppDelegate.h and AppDelegate.m In the AppDelegate we will init our applications.

Continue reading Objective-C basic interface →

From AS3 to Objective-C

AS3, Objective-C, Programming, , , , , , , ,

Some days after my article about what is happening to Flash developers, I have started to learn Objective-C and I already like it!
In this post, I will try to compare ActionScript 3 to Objecitive-C. I’m really new to Objective-C so if you find any errors in what I say, please add a comment to correct me.

According to Wikipedia : Objective-C is a reflective, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Today, it is used primarily on Apple’s Mac OS X and iOS. Objective-C is the primary language used for Apple’s Cocoa API.

Continue reading From AS3 to Objective-C →

My thoughts on Flash and its recent events

Flash, Games, Haxe, JavaScript, Mac, Profile, Programming,

Update : Unity3D has set up an exporter to target Flash which works very well! Without doubt they are working on an exporter for HTML5 too. This technology seems to be promising, I’ve added it on my to learn list!

I wouldn’t come back on the Adobe announcements, everyone know what’s happened and it has already been discussed everywhere. I just would like to share my student point of view about the future.

Continue reading My thoughts on Flash and its recent events →

Setting-up MAMP for Php & Ruby on Rails with MySQL

Mac

If you want to develop php on localhost with you Mac, you sould use MAMP. But it doesn’t display error. To change that, just go in bin/php/php5.6.2/conf/php.ini and change display_errors = “Off” by “On”. Easy, but if we don’t know it could take time.

Now if you want to use Ruby on Rails on MAMP with MySQL instead of SQLite you need to download and install MAMP’s libraries.
After that, you should install Mysql for Ruby using Gem, do the command line in your terminal :

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysql_config

And finally, you will have “gem installed”. To create a new Rails’s project with MySQL :  rails -d mysql myProject. Next open the file config/database.yml and add the line : socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock below host.
Don’t forget to put your password !

Now you can start working 😉