Comments on: Walking With Flash

By: insane au

insane au — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 06:05:30 +0000

to Kevin: as a matter of fact one of the biggest complaints i have about flash is that the frame rate is set at authoring time.
You can get data about how much time has passed (in milliseconds) since the swf started running or time (again in milliseconds) since some seemingly arbitrary point in time in 1972.
This is incredibly annoying, and ive yet to see anything close to a comprehensive fix, abode MAY have done something about it in AS3 but somehow i doubt it.

By: fluffy

fluffy — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:48:28 +0000

I believe Java3D is available to J2SE applets.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:42:52 +0000

As far as I can tell, the only thing that flash has going for it (from a software engineer’s perspective) is the ease of deployment (and sandboxing, I guess). I think that a skilled programmer would be just as productive in C++ with a well-designed framework. Hell, you could even use C# or Python or something higher-level like that if you want to be ~~sloppy~~productive.

I guess there’s always java. I haven’t used it in years - do applets have hardware-accelerated graphics yet? I could live without scaling and rotation - you can make a killer game with just a nice, fast, alpha blit.

By: fluffy

fluffy — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:42:28 +0000

“Mr. SCP guy” being Kevin I guess? Okay then.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:35:49 +0000

He’s actually moving forward at a constant rate (governed by actionscript). This is not an ideal solution - the motion of the sprite should be governed by the animation itself - but I haven’t been able to figure out a good way of doing that yet. If I were working in a “real” framework, I’d export offsets for each frame of the animation, and then interpolate between those as the thing plays. I’m not sure how to translate that into flash, however.

They guy is actually a couple of nested movie clips. The main one has one frame per animation, and the sub-movies on each frame hold the specific animations. I have a simple state machine running on a subclass of the main guy clip which calls specific animations by calling gotoandstop on the various frames. If I could track the offsets of the pivot point in the underlying animations, I could accumulate that back up to the main clip and the motion would look much better. Does anyone have any ideas on how to do that?

Also, is it common practice to work in frames for a set clip frame rate? I’m used to working abstractly in seconds and intervals, and then rendering down to a specific framerate at run-time. Tying yourself to a specific frame rate seems. . .yucky

By: fluffy

fluffy — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:33:12 +0000

Mr. SCP guy (I don’t know what your name is even though I’ve been reading your comic for a long time!), I have the exact same problem with Flash (also having an MSCS and being a Real Software Engineer by day, and I also have a few shipping games under my belt although I’m no longer in the games industry).

It’s not ActionScript to blame per se, since you can easily do things the right way in other ECMAScript variants (for example, http://beesbuzz.biz/error/403.html does some stateful animation in JavaScript), but there’s some pervasive ad-hoc principles at work in Flash. The same applies to using it to do animations as well; for music and video editing I’m used to apps like Logic and Final Cut Pro which let you easily arrange things on a timeline and apply simple transformations to them in a structured manner, and then whenever I try doing anything in Flash I just feel totally lost, and like Flash structures things in exactly the opposite way from how they should be. Then I see how so many pretty good-looking animations are always being posted on NewGrounds et al and I’m all WTF but then I see that most of the animators are either 14 years old or have been doing it professionally for years and so I don’t feel so bad (since obviously they have more time to dedicate to it than I do).

But still, yeah, Flash is basically a big pile of mediocre stuff combined in ways that seem to work well for the unorganized masses but sucks for people who actually approach a problem from a principled standpoint.

By: deadlytoque

deadlytoque — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:42:50 +0000

No idea how relevant this is, and I’m probably just being a nitpicky jerk (I’m a lawyer, I’ve been trained for many years to be a nitpicky jerk, so if that’s the case, then I sincerely apologize) but his body moves forward at the wrong part of the animation. The torso and back leg just pop forward as soon as the leading knee is raised, rather than in the mid-part of the step. Very smooth, though. Reminds me of Commander Keen. Maybe Commander Keen’s dad, Capt. Fred Keen, USAF (Ret.), who is now a Social Studies teacher or something.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:13:53 +0000

I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong. Look at him, he’s not a jumping kind of guy.

By: Mike G.

Mike G. — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:33:10 +0000

I tried SHIFT, CTRL, ALT and but I still can’t make him jump. What am I doing wrong?

p.s. awesome.

By: Tyler W. Cox

Tyler W. Cox — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:44:01 +0000

I had much the same experience with Flash. I’ve gotten a degree, several years experience, and even a good handle on how to do the whole vector/fireworks design side. However, Flash is so counter intuitive and backwards that I gave up on it and went back to real compilers in an effort not to waste away my life fighting with a product that was never really designed for real coders to use.