Flash in Your Face

Well, I’ve never been a fan of long, drawn out Flash intros, and I guess no one else is either. Life Hacker just did a blip on how Google is now offering a feature that allows people to skip intros.

Check out the article here.

Ok, sorry it’s been so long since I posted anything new. Getting the new company off the ground took me out of the loop for a little while, but I digress. Let’s talk about pork or more importantly The National Pork Board.

I recently had a part in bringing a microsite to life that involves getting “life lessons” from a very sensitive butcher. Drag a cut of pork onto the board and then drag an item onto the board as well. Moments later you will gain some sage advise from the butcher himself via a video clip. I promise it’s more fun than I am making it sound.

One thing to note on the programming, I used to always use Robert Penner’s, more than excellent, motion classes in combination with set intervals. However, this time I used the built in Tween Classes which I hardly ever hear people raving about. You know what? They worked great. Not only did they work great, but it eliminated all of the intervals I would have had to keep track of on my own. So you can’t see me, but I’m pouring a 40oz all over my laptop as a sign of respect for the built in tween classes.

Check it out >> http://www.theotherwhitemeat.com/porkand

I was contacted recently by a company releasing a new API that allows Flash developers to create their own multiplayer games without needing hardware or networking of their own. Sounds pretty cool. Check out this excerpt from their press release:

Copenhagen, May 22, 2008 – Nonoba http://www.noboba.com, the popular online gaming and game developer community, today released the industry’s first free and open multiplayer application programming interface (API) designed to make development of highly-scalable flash games easy and hassle-free.

“Until today, creating and running multiplayer flash games has been out of the question for most developers due to the high cost of commercial media servers, open source offerings’ inability to scale beyond a few hundred simultaneous users, and the server and Internet connection resources required to handle high traffic,” said Jonas Kjellberg, chairman of Nonoba’s board of directors. “With the release today of our Multiplayer API those days are now officially over.”

Created for everyone from flash enthusiasts working in their spare time, to advertising agencies and media houses creating professional games for their clients, Nonoba’s Multiplayer API comes with the Nonoba Game Server for running the games before uploading to the Nonoba platform, free hosting services to take care of the traffic, and a Software Development Kit (SDK) that contains four sample games: Fridge Magnets, Drawing Canvas, Pong and Space Shooter.

“The Nonoba Multiplayer API and Game Server handle all the difficult parts such as server connections, server communication and bringing players together in the same game,” said Nonoba Co-founder, Chris Benjaminsen. “When you develop a game for the Nonoba Game Server, your code and your game logic run on the server, which gives great response times, security and flexibility.”

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MORE INFO:
We want to make all the things that are currently hard for flash game developers dead easy. Our hosted Multiplayer API is the first big step in that direction. We’ve got more APIs in mind to fix the rest of the stuff that we think is currently too hard.

Since we’re so confident that we’re on the right path with our Multiplayer API, we’re also announcing our first big game competition with $20.000 USD in prices and a first price of $15.000 USD, for the best game to be built on the Multiplayer API.

Sign up for beta access at: http://nonoba.com/developers/multiplayerapi/signup, and get more info at:
http://nonoba.com/developers/multiplayerapi/overview

I attended last night’s Flex user’s group meeting. I found it very enlightening. They spoke about the latest news in regards to Flex 3 and AIR. I’ll post some specific highlights soon. In the meantime, check out D-Flex.

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