I know! He was already taking a massive risk showing how his game moves the view to center on the character who is speaking (why don't those big companies think of these things?) and how the cars stop for yuu at the lights but not elsewhere (pretty cool, huh?) 

My new game doesn't have a main loop. The initialization function sets up separate actionscript timer functions for everything - player 1 animation, player 2 animation, scrolling, drawing, physics, and keyboard input. This is radical because you can change the duration of an AS3 timer anytime you like, so I can change the frame rate for each player independently while the game is running.

Yeah, my collaborator on Evacuation (who wrote the code) used Flex, and wouldn't even know what a vector drawing or a movieclip was. It was his first game in Flex (usually he works using C and OpenGL). So really, you really don't need to know about the vector/movieclip API at all. For him it seemed to be an almost entirely painless transition, although he found the debugging process counterintuitive and was irritated that a flash program can't just write to a file in its directory.

I'm now working on a new project using Flash where I only use the movieclips for layout - at runtime, it copies all the movieclips into bitmapdata objects and doesn't touch the Flash drawing code ever again. Even if you use Flash, you can confine yourself to bitmaps and pixels (this is true as of CS3. Earlier versions made it harder).

Speed of compile time and speed of resulting code, allegedly. And it has more knobs to twiddle with, if you're into that sort of thing (it can be run by the command line).

I don't know if the Flex compiler is much faster for a complex project or not, but in simple web games they both compile pretty fast, to the point where you're unlikely to care about the difference.

You still have to learn vector FIRST because all the games that use bitmap graphics just have a bitmap fill on a vector graphic.

DO NOT USE BITMAPDATA it is slow.
I only use bitmapdata for special effects and occasionally its useful for collision detection.

I'm sorry I didn't read past page 3, but I have to set you right here because you are getting a lot of dud advice. Bitmapdata is absolutely fast if you use it properly. You do not have to use vector graphics at all in flex/flash, and it's perfectly viable to use Flex in the same way as you would use C++ (By which I mean, copy bitmaps to a buffer and flip it).

Evacuation is completely written using one bitmapdata object. So long as you don't try to mix your bitmapdata objects with sprite or movieclip objects, you can have a nice big 640x480 window running at full speed on a very low-end laptop. It's also very quick at scaling these objects, so it's the ideal system for writing low-res pixel-oriented games.

I have used Flash and Flex and the advantage to using Flash is just that you can compose things visually using a GUI before writing code to control them. For some people (like me) that is a big benefit. For others, it makes no difference whatsoever.

So he wrote it in 'I'?

HA HA HA.

Lucky there isn't a programming language called "I", or Bob would be all over it.

It's worth investing some time in Toribash.

He is right, but I stand by what I said before. He will come to regret the antipathy he has generated. They say that 'there is no such thing as bad publicity', but this is falsified by large social networks like the internet gaming community.

Just ask John Romero and Derek Smart.

It's not entertaining either, and is that not the purpose of games?

Hmm, I think it depends what we mean by entertaining. Is the Mona Lisa entertaining?

No, it's a wellpainted painting. And this game is pretty.

In that case, I disagree. Entertainment (in that sense) is not the sole purpose of games.

this game is 432 KB in size. How is that possible?

Are you serious? Most Amiga games are less than 432KB in size, and have rather a lot more in the way of both logic and bitmaps. (Not criticising this game, mind you, it looks cool.)

It's not entertaining either, and is that not the purpose of games?

Hmm, I think it depends what we mean by entertaining. Is the Mona Lisa entertaining?

Games do have to be excellent.

I don't really find it any fun to play.

Yeah, sorry, it's not too fun for me.

I'm not sure 'fun' is the goal here. Do games have to be fun? Discuss.

Is it me, or is he sleeping longer and longer?

Wow, localization's harder than I thought!  :D

On French keyboards it's AZOP.

I hope this foreshadows a Mac build.

No, it's all an elaborate ARG. Bob wrote himself into Bob's game as the villain/boss, and his website is a kind of 'I love Bees' where he demonstrates his metamorphosis into a crazy evil genius by webcam. It's all very self-referential.

Hey Bob, if you're reading this: I think as a marketing ploy, this is reasonably effective. You've generated a lot of interest. The problem with it is that you've also generated a huge amount of honest antipathy from indie gamers and developers, with your whole 'I am the only person to have ever done this' nonsense. Even if you're just playing a role, it's not a funny joke, it's actually quite offensive. Even if it generates interest, it's going to hurt you in reviews and in business deals.

Ah right.  Taking a well-known game.  I gotcha now.   That works by analogy with the ML much better than with the urinal

Yeah, but I would have to do more than just change "Pixel Studio" to "Theta Games" to make it a Duchampian Readymade; my alterations would have to cause players to contemplate the deeper meaning of such a Readymade.

I've already seen this done with both Pac-man and Tetris. There was that Pac-man project with four reinterpretations, not sure who did it. In one version, Pac-man get's more and more zoned out on power pills until the game ends with a newspaper headline showing that he went on a pill-fueled rampage.

I think the point is that the urinal designer was never going to protest that the urinal was his 'art'. Duchamp called it art, and changed it from hardware into art by doing so. The equivalent would be to take something that is not a game and release it as one.

For example, you could release "Microsoft Excel: the game" (maybe bolt in a scoring mechanism to lend yourself credibility)

Or even better, release "Microsoft Word: The Game", a completely unaltered copy of Word with a readme.txt that tells you the word count is your score.


Interesting question: if Duchamp had made the urinal today, would the urinal-designer have sued him for copyright infringement?

He wasn't raided by the police. Someone at 4chan got worried and called the police to make sure he was ok. I'm enjoying watching him clean up his stupid death scene, though.

To evelynn and moi: Why are you so bent on discouraging this sort of nonsense? The more we reward Bob for it, there more there'll be in the future!