I still haven’t come up with a decent working title for my farm-based tornado game. I wasn’t trying to make another Farmville, so I’m not sure I want “farm” in the name, but I guess it couldn’t hurt. At any rate, still calling it Dorothy until something better comes along. I’m pretty sure I can’t (or shouldn’t) use that name for legal reasons.

So I am hoping to spend a solid 8 hours today just tightening things up a bit. I have about 700 things I want to change/try/upgrade, but that kind of scope creep will ensure that I am still talking about the upcoming release a year from now. I think its best to just get version 1.0 out there and see if people play it, then think about new features. After all, this Flash game is really just meant to get my feet wet with the Mochi API and their network. I hope to simply use it as a means to learn what I can accomplish by publishing games this way.

So tonight I will get some live feedback from the folks at the Adobe User Group Chicago, when they kindly allow me to spend 15 minutes showing them a beta release. I’m not sure there is even 15 minutes of entertainment there, but maybe somebody will ask questions

Michael Shaffner was nice enough to invite me back for another presentation. Last Fall I spoke to the group about the GAIA Flash Framework. This time it’s all about physics in Flash. I had the opportunity to use the AS3 port of Box2D on a very recent project that is set to launch on 1/15/10. It was a tricky package to learn, but I was able to find some great tutorials on the Web. Hopefully I can put together some coherent thoughts on how to get a kick-start into coding this stuff, and present that to the group.

The best resources I found were some samples posted by Emmanualle Feronato. He was kind enough to provide demos and code samples for many of the basic concepts in Box2D. From there I was able to produce a few class files that are generic enough to jump start any Box2D project I might want to develop. The original C++ code was written by Erin Catto, and the AS3 port was made possible by Colin Northway.

So I am planning to put something together that I can post here as well. Maybe not another full-blown SLide_rocket presentation, but some samples and a link to the web site we hope to launch soon. The AUG meetup is on January 18th, downtown.

Flash gave me this error today and I was unable to find a suitable explanation of the reason online, though it looks like plenty of people have encountered this. Upon further examination I found a way to reproduce the problem. Basically I was sending the same argument twice in a rather lengthy method signature, combined with the fact that I was trying to set the values of an object using “with” improperly (setting the values to the method args out of scope) in the method itself. In the end, it was just sloppy coding, but it is something to look out for.

I will post the code example when I get my stupid blog to format the text correctly, arggghhh!

Derrick Grigg’s Blog, UML, Stub Code and ASDocs