Adobe sets first steps to open up Flash Lite

November 10th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 1 Comment »

Though our credits for this finding go out to the Device54 blog, we also thank Biskero for pointing us toward them. Device54 reports that Adobe has set the first steps in opening up Flash Lite to the consumers. Everyone who owns a Flash Lite enabled device, can get free upgrades at Adobe. Also developers can download Flash Lite for their devices. Developers are not allowed though to spread the Flash Lite binaries. However the question remains, how to detect if the user needs an upgrade or not?

Verizon to sell Flash Lite

October 25th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 3 Comments »

This morning we found a press release from Verizon Wireless about their on deck support for Flash Lite. Verizon will kick of it’s Flash Lite service for the LG VX9800, Motorola RAZR V3C, V3M and Samsung A950. Other phones are expected to be supported soon.

“Verizon Wireless’ commitment to improving the mobile experiences of our customers while providing value to our developer and handset partners is an ongoing priority. By combining Flash Lite with the BREW solution which enables our Get It Now service, developers have a new way to easily design and market rich, interactive content to our customers

Flash Lite Diary: 1.4 Flash but dull?

October 23rd, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 4 Comments »

Ok first the diary is a bit late as I have just had a bout of mild food poisoning!, but all ok now.

Anyway, I continued to look at vector graphics for my newly named crazy balloon clone which is named ‘Balloonacy’ in flash lite. Importing the flashy graphics I had made with vectors into the flash IDE has proved to be just too painful in that many of the drawing functions (i.e. complex strokes and areas fills) I had used in the artwork are basically just not supported it seems when incorporating them into my 1.1 game project, though somehow I managed to get the N80 at least to display them almost correctly?, but this is not an ideal situation to a programmer when you don’t know how or why something works when it really shouldn’t perhaps!

As I did manage above to get them running on the target handset at 1.1 level on several flash 1.1 enabled handsets here, although moderately pleased they still looked a little a bit tatty… at this point I switched to front end graphics being a mix of bitmap and vector graphics as the main game test graphics now – it just looks and feels better and more like a real game. Oh well I tried with the complex vector route but I guess flash 1.1 is just not good enough in my opinion to what I want with just vectors so now I mix and match vector and bitmaps when required.

Onto the code… well I managed to get things working real fast since my last diary entry and now have most of the front end completed as a mix of timeline tweens and actionscript but have since gone from a 32Kb running .swf to a 186Kb one!… this though being due to having not optimised any of the bitmap graphics just yet which with a bit or work and j2me experience of course I will get down much, much lower when this test project nears it’s end.

Regards the main game I have everything running at around 14fps on a real device but it feels kind of bloaty and flaky in terms of running code… my sprite moves ok per frame event, but still feels a little sluggish as compared to my j2me engine – hmmm odd, I press on anyway and look at collision and hit my first real problem to date 😛

I still have (or ‘had’ should I say) the background maze built as both a fairly complex irregular vector based kind of cave wall layer (now non-scrolling) sitting on top of a background sky layer and want to test my player balloon sprite against it for collision… I soon realise that the ‘hittest’ function built into flash lite 2.0 upwards is not included in 1.1 oh s**t and yet another limitation. Without pixel based collision this type of quick and clean level design is now rendered useless… so I go back to box collision (or possibly quicker sphere based) and start to think about more regular square shape tile design for the final game level design – not as nice to actually look at in practice compared to what I had or was going to have. Oh well I guess the ‘lite’ is now getting duller by the day I guess :/

Anyway, I am going to keep this one a bit shorter and it’s not all bad… I have lost some of things I wanted to do in 1.1 (and I still want to do 1.1 at this stage for obvious reasons) but I envisage at least now that the whole thing will be a completed running alpha version with one level in about another 7 man days of bashing away at it, as I have now mastered already the timeline and the way actionscript works with it to produce an interactive experience (i.e. a game and not just an animation heh). When I say mastered I mean I have enough knowledge now of 1.1 to complete the title but I have a feeling that when it is I will still not be happy with it, given that I have had to drop quite a few idea’s just to get the damn thing running well enough via 1.1 on the target devices.

At the time of writing I have added quite a lot of final graphics but have stripped down the game loop to the bare minimum now to work with bitmaps and titles and good old calculated box collision… I could go on about no array support either in 1.1 but I won’t as there are other ways to do it in practice.

Overall then I am doing ok with 1.1 I guess but 2.0 would be the better choice and I still may do this one in 1.1 and then swap to 2.0 for a future project – just don’t know yet!?

What I have now as a front end is working and a few percent richer than j2me would offer for even more development time but the game loop code and graphics are not as good as I hoped for, but with a little sprinkle of my magic dust and modicum of good old luck! 🙂 I reckon I can make it look good enough to potentially sell later on via a publisher.

Worth a quick mention before I go on this diary entry, was the use of labels to frames in the timeline meaning you just pick a frame in the timeline, give it a label (on say a layer called labels) and then just jump to it/them back and forth to do your program run just like real programming heh, as it was I was just jumping everywhere to frame numbers (like line numbers) but they changed every time I inserted a new set of frames (which reminds me of my early C64 6502 assembler days)… the labels are simple of course but at least add a much needed friendly naming convention to the program run order.
And I guess at the end of the day even with some limitations I can indeed build once and run on all my flash phones with different screen sizes including the PC etc. without changing anything – the later being why I press on with flash lite in reality as this bit is really cool!.

At this point my brother pays me a visit and walks in with a newish Nokia with what looks like to the hardened j2me coder a 240×320 res screen?. I don’t know if it supports flash without looking the spec of the device up, but I whack across my latest swf n seconds to his device via bluetooth and it runs without any changes!… if flash is not the future yet, I think it will be later for this one big reason. J2me just cannot compete with this now at least in that I didn’t even have to make a build for his screen size etc. and bye bye porting to a great degree.

I am now designing the final bitmap graphics at least for N80 352×416 and them import and scale them into the 176×208 flash screen stage – why?…
well after several graphic tests it looks much better (and not too much larger byte wise when
optimised) on full screen PC – marvellous! – the mix of vectors and bitmaps work for me 🙂

I hope to spend some more time this week to come on the level graphics next so that I can incorporate the box collision 100% but I can help thinking that 1.1 is not going to serve me well for too long before I move to 2.0 and gain some of those missing features that make 1.1 a bit shallow to actual write a decent action/sprite game with.

Anything you do not agree with then please comment below, as this is just my personal day to day experience of developing with 1.1 in between other work here of course.

It’s been fun to date, but fun with limitations. If I could lose those I’d be excited rather than now just happy with my progress so far – then again I have always been a hard task master on myself, it’s what makes me tick and do this for a living I guess.

The Flash Lite Diary is a contribution to the blog by Adrian Cummings. Adrian spend many years in the gaming industry with experience in coding projects for Gameboy and mobile phones. Please visit his company at www.softwareamusements.com.

Online presentation Boston M&D User Group

October 15th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | No Comments »

Tuesday at 10 AM (EST), Miikka will give an online presentation in name of the Boston Adobe Mobile And Devices User Group (MaD) about the various projects they are working on within Flash Lite. You may know Miikka already from his blog, the many comments on this one or his position of CEO at Aniway. You can join the meeting by sending an email to flashmobilegroup at gmail dot com.

Flash Lite Diary: 1.3 The journey into the Lite continues

October 13th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 3 Comments »

Captains Log: Wednesday 11th October 2006

I came back to look at the flash decompiler and looked at it in great detail. After several experiments with it exporting swf’s to fla’s etc, I conclude that this thing still has some bugs but overall for a decompiler I give it 8/10 for being pretty good all the same since I’ve purchased the full version.

I eventually, after several hours playing with it and the flash IDE; get a good feel for how flash and flash lite actually works and the whole thing is now seriously starting to remind me of Deluxe Paint Animator on the Amiga from yesteryear heh, but with script actions attached. In fact it’s not unlike like a fairly complex sequencer or drum ‘event’ machine in many respects heh – ok so far so good I guess all the same. The way action script interfaces to the timeline is nothing like j2me or any other form of game programming I’ve tried to date come to think of it, and the whole experience has been a bit fiddly to use and somewhat painful as a newbie to flash lite from usual coding practices that are now well burnt in for me personally over the last 20 years.

Taking a break from screens of objects, timelines and scripts, I then start to think about what sort of game project I can do without diving in so deep that I drown and get bored. I first have a few ideas but heavily start to settle on Crazy Balloon 8bit inspired affair where you try to guide a balloon around lots of different increasingly harder mazes – should be a good test case to begin with I think, so I go with that.

After giving some thought of how this game could be implemented in flash lite 1.1 and still battling and debating whether or not I should switch over to 2.0, I finally convince myself that 1.1 is still the way to go at this time from all the input data I have available on the subject so for now it’s still 1.1. So far I’ve not met anything really terrible in 1.1 that would require the switch to 2.0 however, but I remain cautious at all times on my journey.

Graphics: OK which sort? As flash supports loads of stuff j2me developers like myself can only dream of… first up is the decision to design good old bitmap graphics (or) should I go for the vector based graphics? I spend a whole day in my favorite vector graphics package and churn out some basic test backdrops and graphics and then import them into my project library. Oh dear the swf now seems huge when I compile it!?… I guess my vectors are just too complex, so I drop back to the flash IDE to knock up some quick basic ‘tatty’ programmer vector graphics (you know the sort) and things start looking much smaller again – jeez for a minute there I though I would be stuck with bitmaps again (a route I don’t really want to use, as scalable vectors of course look nice on whatever end platform regardless of screen size).

I guess I can mix the two if I want which is great also, but I decide that I want to design graphics that have the clean look and feel and are scaleable to totally get away from the horrors of porting graphics as found in j2me development to speed up development later, although I’m now more than concerned about just how much memory they steal when they are very complex and imported as compared to say .png bitmap gfx.

Oooch! my head is starting to hurt a bit!… I think I will need to do some more size tests soon to check vector against bitmaps on mobile devices in terms of memory overhead for each.

Whilst in the FL IDE again I start to look at the way objects and frames are put to use to construct animation sequences (basically little movies) and look at the way that action script interfaces with these etc. via symbols. It seems ok really, but this part feels like the hardest part to date.

Currently in FL 1.1 I now have (in vector graphics) a new simple balloon sprite on a background made of cloud and foreground cave wall layers (the later being a large vector graphic also) the graphics are dire by any standards but will do for now 🙂 Interfacing the key input to the balloon sprite is messy IMHO and I had to resort to a tutorial some days back just to be able to do it – not easy if you only just about know what your doing
like me 🙂

At this point though I soon realize just how easy it has become to link entire screens into the development fla though and imagine after a bit of fiddling I will have the front and back end of the code done in no time later on – this is where flash lite shines brightest I feel – prototyping!, so for now I concentrate on the main game loop and the game itself.

At the end of the day it appears to me at least from experiments thus far conducted, that flash lite games offer richer content development from a vector graphic and possibly sound point of view as compared to j2me, but overall the game logic (scripting) side of things could prove a little limiting in terms of future games design. Whilst it is good for what it is, 1.1 has some missing components that could be worked around and are to be found in 2.0. This is why I conclude most of the flash lite 1.1 content thus far produced is a little ’empty’ feeling in terms of gameplay. As soon as you switch up to 2.0 based titles and indeed flash games in general, this limitation starts to disappear to a great extent. This is true from what I have seen to date anyway.

I feel like as with midp1 j2me before and because of the currently available FL 2.0 supported devices, that I am now stuck at this moment in time, being forced onto a backwards platform when I really want to go forwards to the next level. Oh well for now I will proceed with 1.1 and see how it goes with the current project test case.

I’ve been working in my spare time on FL for about 3 days and I’ve gone from 100% nothing to a input controlled x,y moving balloon sprite (that rotates if I want or not) on a multilayer backdrop – wow that’s not bad considering I only just got the SDK last Friday I think. Well my journey continues next week now as I am off for a few days break with my wife and quite honestly I think I need one after all this FL stuff which is still early days yet. I imagine it will be another several weeks or so yet before I can say I wrote an entire game but after the hurdle of the first one at least I will know what I’m doing next time… I hope 🙂

The Flash Lite Diary is a contribution to the blog by Adrian Cummings. Adrian spend many years in the gaming industry with experience in coding projects for Gameboy and mobile phones. Please visit his company at www.softwareamusements.com.

Main differences in Flash Lite Versions

October 12th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | No Comments »

As you all know, we’re posting a lot of news around Flash and have Adrian’s Flash Lite diaries in which we will release the second part tomorrow. Yesterday, Alessandro Pace posted an article on his Forum Nokia Blog about the main differences between the current Flash Lite versions available for mobile. A must read for everyone entering Flash Lite development.

Where are those Flash Lite guys

October 8th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 4 Comments »

Getting yourself noted is important these days, specially when you are working on a rather new technology. Yesterday, a new PR tool has been brought to live (thanks Biskero) by Scott. His new service is there to let visitors know where in the world they can find the nearest Flash Lite developer.

Flash Lite Diaries

October 7th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | No Comments »

The past months, the blog has grown pretty fast and so have the number of visitors that hit our url on a nearly daily basis. As of today we are proud to announce, the Mobile Games Blog will host Adrian’s Flash Lite diary. Adrian Cummings is probably known for his past contributions to the discussions and editorials on the blog like the Company Spotlight. He’s currently switching from J2me into Flash development and with his posts he will try to keep us updated about his Flash Lite adventures.

Flash Lite Diary: 1.0 Let there be lite and there was lite

October 7th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 10 Comments »

Captains Log: Friday 6th October 2006

Today I have seen the light – it’s called Flash Lite!.

J2ME is fast coming to a close for personally after developing around 10 games over the last year and while there is money in it still, I am looking to newer platforms now given my late entry as a developer into J2ME in 2005 – and basically I don’t want to make the same mistake!

Both Flash Lite (FL) and XNA are on the development cards for me now but this day by day diary is intended to relate to FL only from here on inwards and how the transition will be made to incorporate FL into my day to day life as developer.

1.1 Step into the Lite:
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OK I have had a cigar, mulled it all over several times and looked at a load of FL games and demos to get a feel for the level of quality currently on offer and have decided to jump into the pool of lite.

I want to make money from this down the line as an ongoing business so it’s not just for fun. As I have written games for most of my life this has to be an exercise in quick learning and fast production of titles if I am to make anything useful happen. This time next year the market (like j2me) will already be flooded with FL content so it’s now or never!

1.2 The first day:
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OK some of what I might say from here onwards you may not like to hear, but it is the ramblings of a developer starting from 100% nothing with FL from day 1 and how I went about it.

First I do my homework and spend about 4hrs looking at other peoples FL stuff and related blogs on the net. I’m like a giant sponge sucking in all the info I can get into my brain and at one point have about 15 windows of ‘cack’ open on my dual screen setup – that is a lot of information! Eventually I get most of it into my head and feel like the Neo in the Matrix when he states ‘I know Jujitsu!’

After looking at various FL games and titles I quickly come to the conclusion that this is not a lot like j2me, in fact all the content I have seen so far is homebrew generated FL – some of it not bad and some of it graphically really bad.

The first thing I need to get is the FL SDK so I sign up with Adobe and get the required files and bit and bobs. I also open up a few torrents on the net to get what I want but it comes down the wire as German SDK so that’s no good to me.

Eventually I get the entire SDK (Trial) for FL 1.1 and 2.0 and am left looking at a hefty price to pay for the Flash 8 Pro IDE when the 30 days expire