Rogue Codewright

Command-line AIR support

2014-09-29T00:00:00Z

Running an Actionscript project from the command-line is not something that is frequently required (and I would certainly not recommend using Actionscript as a general scripting language), but there are corner cases where it is occasionally useful...

Lessons Learned from Diablo 3

2014-09-19T00:00:00Z

Launching a Bad Game

Diablo 3 has had a rocky history, to say the least. The initial release date was May 15, 2012. The first night, a horde of enthusiasts descended on the game, which was consequently completely unplayable because the servers...

Dealing with Stage3D Error 3702

2014-07-23T00:00:00Z

The Update (2014-07-24)

Today, I updated my Starling to the latest on github, and discovered what I wish I’d known a week ago: this solution has been in place in Starling proper for a couple of months. Still, I went to the trouble of typing it all...

Google Spreadsheets for Game Configuration

2013-09-02T00:00:00Z

Dynamic game configuration is always useful, and doing it cheaply and easily is especially important for small indy studios. Setting up a Google Spreadsheet with your runtime configuration data enables easy collaborative editing, and having a process that can read that data and export JSON makes it easy to use that data at runtime in whatever client language you find suitable. In this article I’m using Gson for JSON serialization, but it wouldn’t be difficult to use Jackson instead, if that’s how you roll.

Authentication in Ember.js

2013-07-12T00:00:00Z

This post is about authentication, but it also covers a more general topic: setting up a framework for ajax calls that accepts errors and reacts to them appropriately. When implementing my own Ember app, I decided against ember-data and ember-auth because they’re both new enough that the rough edges were causing me more headache than good while learning my way around Ember to begin with. I also really struggled with getting basic auth such as this working while learning Ember, so hopefully this will be useful to a few other Ember newbies out there.

This guide was written for Ember 1.0.0-rc4, and originally published in May as a gist.

Alpha hit testing in Starling

2013-07-08T00:00:00Z

In Starling’s display stack, the default behavior for DisplayObject.hitTest is to use the DisplayObject’s defined bounds, and only its defined bounds to determine if a touch hits that sprite. My current game has levels with very tightly packed assets, resulting in severely overlapping bounding boxes. Furthermore, on mobile devices, we have tight memory constraints, making it impractical to keep the source BitmapData for an uploaded texture in memory.