Thank god for flash ads!
Everybody seems to share the opinion that flash in the browser makes the web slower, kills your battery, crashes the browser and makes everything insecure. That slow animated flash ads come from the devil himself! Javascript is the way to go and so much cooler and faster and a standard and stuff!
A world without flash…
Don’t get me wrong, I love javascript! But let’s just imagine for a second that there was no flash, only javascript. You think the evil advert-creators would will stick with animated gifs forever and be happy with that? – Well, I don’t.
There’d also be animated adverts – with javascript and videos and whatever one can think of, but you know what? By the time being most badly coded flash animation runs smoother than most badly coded javascript animation (You don’t think advert creators will optimize their code, do you?). You get a bit of performance from upcoming hardware accelerated css transitions, and maybe WebGL in the future, but that’s about it. And I don’t want to hit the day when there are openGL adverts running in my browsers! You think having thousand of different javascripts running on each page is fast and secure? I don’t think so.
Evilness is out there
There is evil stuff around the web: adverts, click counting, measuring stuff, badly developed slow scripts… – all this makes the web experience worse. But those things would also exist if there was no flash. And at the time being it’s easy to block most ads with a simple flash blocker, because most ads are made with flash (hey, it’s easy and it tweens!). Simply unblock the few real flash apps you need and there you go with a “fast” web. Would it be as easy if there was only javascipt? How to separate the good scripts from the bad? Just pick one of your favorite web portal pages and inspect all the scripts that are included from lots of different sources that mess with the dom and the global namespace at this very day. You’ll get a headache (and so does your browser).
We’ll get what we deserve
There’s only one thing I assume for sure: Whatever programming language will be “the winner” in the future, we’ll get our ads and scripts and they’ll make the web slower, kill your battery, crash the browser and make everything insecure.
A little help with event listeners...
Let me show you a simple AS3 structure that helps me to keep track of my event listeners and prevents me from messing up my code. Nothing groundbreaking but it always made my code a little clearer and puts everything regarding the listeners in one place.
ALWAYS do a border clip around you swiffs!
Let’s first make clear what I’m talking about:
- swiff is what the web says ”.swf” files are called – and ”.swf” files are compiled flash files.
- A border clip is a Movieclip (or display object of any kind) at the top most layer of your flash stage that leaves the normal visible area of you game visible, but adds a large border around it that hides everything outside.
- always means always!
So the problem is that if you embed your swiff into a website and the embedding container has a larger size than your game resolution, everything outside is also visible, like you can see here (click it!):
(that’s from xhry.cz)
It’s not that I haven’t been aware of this before… I already knew it. But let’s say I simply forgot about it, or maybe I thought “the flashgame portals will for sure use the correct dimension for embedding…”. Now the game is out there on more than 1000 different servers and there are more than just a few that use a larger dimention (e.g. even AddictingGames does, and that’s really painful). Don’t take this too easy, it really kills the ratings!
So please learn from my stupidity and make a border around your flash content. Period.
Pirate flash game now final beta!
Pirate Golf Adventure – the flash game I’ve been working on for so long is now final beta! The “private” beta phase really made the game soooo much better! Thank you all for your great feedback! Check out the final beta!
<- click at the image to play the game
or maybe view some screenshots first ;)
Flash font embedding tutorial - this is how it really works
There are a lot of tutorials online to tell us how font embedding works. Sadly most of them are incomplete and leave you alone with missing characters, bolds and italics and the question how to use font embedding for all your Textfields without always embed all the characters again.
This tutorial shows you how you get your fonts embedded properly.
