interactive tm

As many people may or may not know HTML5 is on its way and it is going to bring happy dandelions and sunshine for all in the web industry. Now as many also know is the position Apple has on Flash. Now I’m not going to say their wrong, because in a way they are right. By “they” I probably mean Steve Jobs. Steve says that flash is not and will not be on the iDevices simply because Flash doesn’t fit there. And he is absolutely correct, from my point of view. This how ever does not mean that Flash will get removed and HTML5 will take over.

The main reason why Flash is not on any iDevices is simple. It doesn’t work. Why bother tarnishing a product with something that won’t work. Sure there is Flash on Android and many other devices, but as we have all seen it doesn’t work quite right. This simply lowers quality of your user experience. Also the fact that trying to use flash with the fingers and no mouse or keyboard would just be awkward. Flash belongs on non-mobile platforms.

This is where HTML5 comes in for many features that flash provides on the web. Flash provided us with amazing video and audio support for many years. We could put videos on blogs, create social media sites like YouTube and share our music with our friends. Soon HTML5 will replace these simple features Flash provided and it will be natural to the web environment rather than a plugin.

This defiantly won’t get rid of the Flash platform from the web. It just means we will be viewing videos and audio in HTML5. Flash has amazing power and sure its got bugs, but most of the time there is no real worry if you did it right. Flash can do many things that JavaScript and HTML5 won’t be able to do for quite some time. And sure there is the canvas tag and all that, but if you really wanted to make a game you would really do it in either Flash or some other console or pc platform. I am not saying that games won’t be made using JavaScript and in HTML5, because there is some amazing stuff being done with it. Flash can create some pretty cool filters on videos, you can read and display the wave lengths of an audio files and much more.

Flash is powerful software you just choose weither or not to integrate it with the web or not. Depending on what your doing you will find that you will need different software. If you can’t do it in HTML5 but you can in Flash then use Flash. If your going to provide a seamless and enjoyable website with some simple menu animations and stuff it can most likely be done in HTML5. I feel this goes the same with other browser plugins like Unity 3D.

Happy Canada Day!

Time is trolling along. iOS4 is now out making the iPhone even better. With this I must say I need to make a huge update with Icicles. The first iPhone game I have created and put out on the app store. I will guarantee that there will be much better improvements to make this game feel like it fits on iOS4.

Recently while working on my new game featuring a particular dragon and blue bird I got to take advantage of multitasking capabilities. Features like auto pause will make it into this new version. More types of icicles instead of the same one and better collision detection. How about some actual scene transitions, eh? I will also add a build up to the game, so as you play it gets harder. Don’t worry though the game will start easy not hard.

Icicles will be built from the ground up this time in Obj-C with the latest version of Cocos2d. For those of you who do not know, I built Icicles in pure C using a custom wrapper on Cocos2d. I also plan to implement a social gaming service, but I am to choose between Apple’s Game Center and Open Feint. Open Feint does have a lot of features I could see not being implemented into Game Center, so I am leaning more towards that. If the Game Center does have what I need I will be sure to use that instead.

There is no announced date for when Icicles 3.0 will be out, but defiantly before the end of the year.

Stumbled across this problem during work today. Took me a while to understand what was going on when I found out my post data wasn’t getting through. I won’t go into any details with code or anything, but I will explain what happens that causes the POST variables to not work. Now depending on how you set up your application you may have not run into this problem at all. This problem occurs when you are trying to use the POST method in a form on Facebook, and if you have to get access to Facebook users information. When you want to use Facebook’s API with PHP you have to first get access from the user. In your PHP file you will check if there is a “Session” in the Facebook API system if there isn’t then you must redirect them to the app install page (this is also the allow access page).  I found today that the reason why my POST data was not getting submitted is because when I submitted the form, the browser would go the the appropriate URL but it would not carry along the session data or the user id of the Facebook user, thus making the redirect back to my app page. So basically I was skipping over the page I was submitting to with the session check. The way to get around this is to manage the POST data before you do the check, or store the Facebook session and user id into the PHP sever’s session variables and then set the Facebook session and user ID yourself on the page you submit the form to. This may all seem kinda confusing. Let me know if it is.

I would just like to show off 1 of the 2 new games I will be making for iPhone. The project is pending a title, but I do have screen shots of what it will look like.

This game will be pretty simple. Tap the screen at the right time to eat the small blue bird. If you miss you lose the game. How good will your timing be?

Credit goes to Zachary at Pushing The Pixels for making such amazing graphics.

Everything copyrighted by Thomas Mathews @ interactive tm 2010

Welcome to the graphical side of me. A good friend of mine created an emulator on the iPhone and needed some graphics. I whipped this up in about 3 to 4 hours. The system was the Sega Master System, so I found pictures of the controllers for it and tried to make something similar from those pictures. I went for a classic sorta look with rubber buttons. I think it turned out pretty good, though I see margin and padding issues already. The more I look at it the more I feel like I should change some things.

Well I recently need to help a friend with some C programming. He was trying to create different screens like you would have in a game for a Title, Menu, and Game Screens. Since C is not Objective Oriented you can’t simply make the screens objects themselves. So I came up with a solution that is pretty simple, but I bet you anything there is a way better way to do this than the way I have done it. Personally I would only recommend using this for small applications and games. Larger projects you would want to do it a different way. He was developing with PALib a DS homebrew library, this is the reason why you will see functions like PA_*.

//INCLUDES
#include <PA9.h>

//DEFINES
#define START_SCREEN 1
#define MENU_SCREEN 2
#define GAME_SCREEN 3

#define u16 unsigned short

//GLOBALS
int currentScreen = 0; //nothing
int screenToLoad = 0; //nothing

//PROTOTYPES
void mainLoop();
void startScreen_Load();
void startScreen_Loop();
void menuScreen_Load();
void menuScreen_Loop();
void gameScreen_Load();
void gameScreen_Loop();

//MAIN
int main(){
	PA_Init();

	startScreen_Load();

	while(1){
		mainLoop();
		PA_WaitForVBL();
	}
	return 0;
}
//FUNCTIONS
void mainLoop() {
	if(screenToLoad != 0) {
		switch(screenToLoad) {
			case 1:
				startScreen_Load();
				break;
			case 2:
				menuScreen_Load();
				break;
			case 3:
				gameScreen_Load();
				break;
		}
	}
	switch(currentScreen){
		case 1:
			startScreen_Loop();
			break;
		case 2:
			menuScreen_Loop();
			break;
		case 3:
			gameScreen_Loop();
			break;
	}
}
void startScreen_Load() {
	u16 color = PA_RGB(255, 255, 255);
	PA_SetBgColor(1, color);
	currentScreen = 1;
	screenToLoad = 0;
}
void startScreen_Loop() {
	if(Stylus.Newpress) screenToLoad = MENU_SCREEN;
}
void menuScreen_Load() {
	u16 color = PA_RGB(244, 100, 255);
	PA_SetBgColor(1, color);
	currentScreen = 2;
	screenToLoad = 0;
}
void menuScreen_Loop() {
	if(Stylus.Newpress) screenToLoad = GAME_SCREEN;
}
void gameScreen_Load() {
	u16 color = PA_RGB(044, 200, 055);
	PA_SetBgColor(1, color);
	currentScreen = 3;
	screenToLoad = 0;
}
void gameScreen_Loop() {
	if(Stylus.Newpress) screenToLoad = START_SCREEN;
}

I have decided to try to make a new game, well its not really new at all. Its going to be a clone of the classic Asteroids video game. The only difference is that it will be much more modern and the graphic style will be totally different that that of the original Asteroids. I have made a new project page here: Asteroids Project Page

I am searching for any body with graphical talent either pixel art or vector art. I cannot pay you but if it makes any money at all you will be sure to see it. It crawls far enough from the original idea of Asteroids that it is not copyright infringement, but it does take the same concepts and is inspired by Asteroids.

Be sure to watch the progress on the project page!

The Presentation is a section of my website where I will be showing off my work that I have done. I created this for the Grad Show I had for my University program. You can check it out over here.

I have been reading a lot lately on which browsers are the best and which one you should choose. After reading biased opinions and statics I can only say there is no one real answer as to which one you should use. I can say though the guide lines you should follow in which will help you make your decision in what browser you will use.

Looking at the current browsers now and the standards of the W3, I can only say you should must use a browser that will render web pages 100% according to the standard. It disappoints me that we bother to make fixes for such software that does not follow this standard. If your browser does not meet up to the expectations of the standards there is no point in using such useless software. Presently at this point in time we have CSS2 and XHTML as the current standard. HTML5 and CSS3 are still in development meaning you do not need a browser that supports these future platforms. If you have a browser that supports them good for you, enjoy some awesome features.

Ultimately it comes down to user preference. Find a browser that will render webpages properly, then find which of those you enjoy using most and you have the browser of choice. A lot of browsers provide great features, some are faster than others and some have better designs. It is up to you to choose what browser you use, just make sure it can perform to the standard.

Adobe provides a easy way to use the keyboard keys for detection on when the keys are up and down. Even though it is pretty simple to use it can be even more simple and this is exactly what I have done with a small AS3 class for flash. I call it EasyKeys. When making games you usually want to know when a key has been just pressed, released or is being held. Not the up and down states. With this class you can get these 3 states. All you have to do is pass the stage when you create your variable for it and it will follow the stage’s captures for key presses. You will have to use the Reset function to reset the keys to get the states. You use this function in your loop for the enter frame of the stage. This was designed to help me with my games in flash so it may not suit you if you are making an application or website. If you know your AS3 this should be easy as pie. Otherwise here are the main functions you will need to know:

Newpress(keyCode); // this will check for a newpress of the specified key!
Held(keyCode); // this will check if a key is being held
Released(keyCode); // this wil check if a key has been released
Reset(); // this will reset the keys for newpress and released so you can check for them again in the next frame

This should be really easy to use and help you make some games without having to worry about the keys! Example and source code can be downloaded here: EasyKeys.