Friday, May 31, 2002

Flash Checkers: Now With 100% More MX
As you may or may not know, I've been working on Flash mutliplayer games that use Jabber as the communications protocol. My first attempt at a full game is checkers. (I thought about chess. Really, I did. It crossed my mind for a whole 0.01 seconds.) Most of the game engine is complete, and now begins the work on implementing the Jabber code. Click here to launch the current working game engine.

Note: Turn tracking is not implemented. As of now players can move twice. Don't cheat!

Flash MX Feature o' the Day
It has only required the spare time of about two days to write a nice working version of checkers in Flash. Beta coming soon. The catch with this checkers game is that it will be multiplayer enabled through Jabber integration. Chat with your opponent and send messages to AIM buddies all from the same Flash app!

Writing this little number has really forced me to buckle down and learn all the new MX features. Feature of the Day: Object.registerClass. Object.registerClass allows you to write custom objects and associate them with movie clips in the library. This was very handy when I needed to give a face to my custom CheckerPiece class. Take a look at your Actionscript dictionary for more.

VectorKid
The vector artwork on this site is amazing, and suprisingly realistic. Take a look at the tutorials and make your very own 3D kiwifruit! (Reminds me of my "working days" back on the orchard in New Zealand.) [via JDB]