As you may know in "real" games you need to check if a key is pressed at this time. Right now I'm using events and I remember if last event was a key-up or key-down to know if a button is held down.
BUT I'm experiencing some lags (not network) in the game when several buttons are held down. New key pushes are recognized a little bit too late. From DirectInput in DirectX and from LWJGL I know how nice and smooth input for games can work.
a) So I ask: Is there a way to check keys directly in ActionScript 3 ? I don't think any other extra package would be useful since it would just do what I do right now.
b) If no. Why wouldn't Adobe add direct input feature to Flash since it is used for games to a high percentage ?!?
Related
I'm new to actionscript 3, I have sequences of frames and two buttons to control which sequence to play, it first works properly, but have problem when a sequence is being played for the second time. I have used gotoAndPlay function for my navigation. can anyone help me?
From your description I have a hunch about what may be happening...
Firstly I would ask you if the buttons are present at all frames along the timeline? If they are not (ie, sometimes the timeline shows a frame where the buttons are not present before returning to them ) you should realise that when they come back into view again, they are not the same buttons as the ones from before. That means that the event listeners you attached the first time are not going to respond to clicks on these new buttons.
This happens because flash always totally recreates timeline objects when they come into view again. Flash can sometimes cope with a "jump" over a "gap" when a symbol is the same, but this is extremely unreliable and should be avoided for this reason.
You can avoid this problem by keeping the ui on the stage at all times, and revealing and hiding the buttons when you need them. Even better, create an instance of your ui in code and add it to the stage when you need it. This way you know there is only one instance, and you are in control of it.
So, I'm pretty much a beginner in Flash and Actionscript (using AS3, as I said in the title), and I'm trying to make a basic escape the room game. I haven't gotten far, and right now that's because every time I test my game (or publish preview it) the graphics get this annoying outline. Here it is when tested: http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn228/chokingondrama/flash.png
Every outline corresponds to some object present in the game, most of which have an alpha component of 0 since they're on different sides of the room. This didn't happen before, but once I added the code that allowed the player to change their view with the arrow (each viewpoint/wall is a different frame) these appeared.
It's a little different when published to HTML, basically it just gives each image a white background: http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn228/chokingondrama/html.png
Also, it would be nice if somebody could give me advice on how to make sure importing to flash won't result in lower quality.
Thanks in advance. If needed, I'll post any part of the code.
Some tips:
Don't set alpha to 0, instead use the visible property, setting movieclip.visible = false will make it a lot more efficient.
As for the importing and quality, after you import to stage or library, bring up the library (ctrl + l), and right click on the file you imported, go to properties. If it's an image, set compression to lossless, and allow smoothing.
For audio, go to file-> publish settings, and change audio stream and audio event (whichever you might use) to 128kbps.
As for your main question, I need more info, if you want you can post your source. It might be because of how you are placing your graphics on the stage.
For each of your MovieClips in question:
Try disabling button mode and see if the rectangles go away.
movieClipName.buttonMode = false;
If that doesn't help, or you really want button mode, try setting
movieClipName.tabEnabled = false;
There's a chance that since you added keyboard interaction each of your MovieClips are now expecting to be selected by the user when they press the tab key, much like any normal web form.
tabEnabled in the docs
You could also try
movieClipName.focusRect = false;
focusRect in the docs
I've made a simple game in flex. You control falling blocks and your goal is to eliminate viruses. It's almost a copy of the 90s game dr Mario. I've made it so you control blocks with the arrow keys and you spin the block with space. Everything works fine as it should when playing. However when i switch to another program and the application is out of focus and i get back to the game, whenever i press space the game restarts. It's like it calls a function that reinitializes the game and resets all the variables to the start values.
The game is made with several NavigationContent components that acts like scenes. The game doesn't go back to the start screen when i press space, it just resets the game. Wich is really weird.
Are there any default method that is called that causes this behavior? Anyone have a clue?
EDIT: The issue arises - as it seems - exclusively when i tie a function to the space key (keyCode 32). I solved the issue by rebinding the key to "CTRL". But still it would be great to know what's up with the SPACE key. The game works fine with space if i use Internet Explorer. Other browsers doesn't work with the space key. It's the same issue with all of them.
EDIT: This is how the event listener looks:
this.stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, moveBlocksKeyboardEvent);
Even if i comment out all the code in the moveBlocksKeyboardEvent method the game still restarts. It's exclusively when hitting the SPACE-key. If i hold down the key the blocks spin. It's when i release the space button the game restarts. As if it's some reinitialization method tied to the KEY_UP event or something.
This type of behaviour is often tied to a null or undefined value, causing a nonsense-code jump which then results in a reset.
Make sure that that event handler for key down is attached to a valid object; if you are using "stage" then make sure it exists. When you move out of focus, the event handler may be left associated with a null object; when you reenter, it doesn't exist anymore, and therefore you get the reset behaviour.
This thread may help provide more detail:
Adding a key listener in Action Script 3
Creating an application that requires BOTH gesture(swipe) support as well as simple touch events. I understand that one limiation of the built-in touch support in actionscript is that you must choose either Gesture OR Touch events as input.
So I was wondering if you can easily simulate gesture events using the TouchEvent.TOUCH_BEGIN +TouchEvent.TOUCH_END events? Are they essentially the same thing as using Gesture events?
I believe you'll be able to simulate the gestures appropriately by using the touch events. Each time a finger goes down a temporary id is assigned to it so you can easily tell if this is the first or second finger down. In terms of them being the same, it's not exactly the same since the GestureEvents seem to be all dependent on the mobile OS to report as gestures instead of just as touches so any calculation for deltas (or whatever else) would be handled by the OS already instead of you doing it (with the overhead of the VM). http://help.adobe.com/en_US/as3/dev/WS1ca064e08d7aa93023c59dfc1257b16a3d6-7ffd.html
Try making gestureevents with touchevents. There are lots of properties that can easily be converted / combined.
I am making a Flash puzzle game. When the user loads the game, it needs to ask whether to resume the game from the last state (if it exists). I have a serialization system in place, but I need to ensure that the loaded state is definitely the last state.
One solution is to save the state to a SharedObject every time the state changes (when the player makes a move). However, the game state sometimes includes a countdown, so I'd have to be constantly (or periodically) saving the state in order to retain it. I guess this is acceptable, but it seems kludgey.
Is there any event which is fired when the swf is closed? Or anyone else have another elegant solution to this?
(I'm not using AIR, but solutions requiring AIR are appreciated.)
Edit: Another important point is that I may not have control over the embedding HTML for the game, as it may be syndicated to many sites. So solutions involving javascript aren't ideal.
If your Flash is hosted on a HTML page, you can use the 'Window is closing' event notification to fire a message into your Flash object either using old-skool GetVariable() or new-stylee FlashCall() mechanisms.
Whether you'll actually be able to persist state before your Flash object is destroyed is another question... you could always do the (evil) 'Are you sure you want to close/navigate away from this window?' alert that some sites use.
Handling DOM Events in Flex
HTML 5 events
The on-close event sounds the right solution, but I wonder if you could 'split' your serialisation? i.e. save the full puzzle state on each move, but also have a secondary 'lightweight' state for your countdown (or anything similar) which could be updated each time the countdown changes.
That may be easier than trying to catch the close event and save before the page is destroyed (especially as browsers are not consistent in this area).
this one should help you