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[ithamore]

I saw this tutorial in the Flixel forums and thought I might be useful:

http://flixel.org/forums/index.php?topic=226.0

I can't vouch for how complete or explicit it might be (wasn't sure what was going on when I read step 10), but it seems like the sort of tutorial I've been looking for, and it has received much praise in the Flixel forums. So, I had to share.

[Radix]

Just watch out for typos in the code, there are a bunch. Debugging practice.

[tylerjhutchison]

This is a pretty good tutorial.  I used it, and FLIXEL is awesome!

This little demo was the result of my following this walkthrough...
http://tylersaurus.com/flixel/test.html

[ithamore]

Debugging practice.

 :D That's a positive way of looking at it.

tyler, thanks for sharing the demo. It brought my hopes up for the tut. Now I need to stop reading it and start working with it.

Where there any parts of the tutorial that gave you any trouble?

[Gagege]

This was a really nice tutorial. I got through the whole thing with only a few struggles. Here's my version of the tutorial game: http://arcadiaonline.doesntexist.com:81/flashgames/bradvstheworld_beta_0.02.html

[kavs]

Hm, Mappy is spitting out a weird error for me... Maybe I have to update DirectX? I'll do that tonight just to see. This is using the default tileset provided. :3

"Error importing blocks, see helpfile section on importing

Likely causes:
LIBPNG12.DLL and ZLIB.DLL missing for PNG
BMP file is compressed
BMP file is not the correct colour depth"

Has anyone ever seen this?

I saved the same image out as a .bmp and it seemed to work.. but it isn't playing well with my .png files. What did you guys do for that part of the tutorial, or did it work fine?

[BlueSweatshirt]

I found this tutorial on my own, and I'm still working through it. I'm kind of taking it slow and doing a lot of my own thing.

Ah yeah, lots of typos and declusions. 
But hey, they've helped me learn Flash all the better.

[Sar]

I had a go at starting this tutorial last night with a view to trying Flixel for the second half of Assemblee, and... well, it seems a bit out of date, to say the least. There's commentary on the end of the thread on the Flixel forums to that effect, helping out with some of the problems, but they're still detracting from the utility of the tutorial quite a bit. At the really simple end, it seems the Flixel namespace has changed; more frustratingly, the one that confused me for a while was the existence of a 'Preloader.as' in the project, which apparently used to be bundled with Flixel... I presumed they'd started an "AS3 Project with Preloader" instead of an "AS3 Project" at the beginning despite what they'd said, and spent a while trying to work out what to change in the template preloader to make it run the Flixel one.

So yeah - while reading through the tutorial a couple of weeks ago encouraged me to try and learn AS3 and Flixel, and none of the problems encountered are insurmountable for someone who's willing to dig into various things they haven't been told about to find potential problems, I wouldn't recommend it to someone who was new to programming in general since it hasn't been maintained, and that renders all the general programming tips throughout it frustrating instead of useful.

[kavs]

Interesting take on it. I'm about halfway through and am using this as my base to make something for Assemblee 2.

I only know very low-level programming, but this has helped a lot with getting my project off the ground. I'll follow it all the way through before I work on any other tutorials as it is helping me understand a lot of how AS3/flixel works (like overrides, super(), variable declaration syntax, etc).

If anyone has any other resources like this that may be more up to date, please let me know. :3 I'm taking a very brute force approach in learning AS3, and any resources you have will be super valuable.

[pgil]

I've been waiting for something like this 

[BlueSweatshirt]

I had a go at starting this tutorial last night with a view to trying Flixel for the second half of Assemblee, and... well, it seems a bit out of date, to say the least. There's commentary on the end of the thread on the Flixel forums to that effect, helping out with some of the problems, but they're still detracting from the utility of the tutorial quite a bit. At the really simple end, it seems the Flixel namespace has changed; more frustratingly, the one that confused me for a while was the existence of a 'Preloader.as' in the project, which apparently used to be bundled with Flixel... I presumed they'd started an "AS3 Project with Preloader" instead of an "AS3 Project" at the beginning despite what they'd said, and spent a while trying to work out what to change in the template preloader to make it run the Flixel one.

So yeah - while reading through the tutorial a couple of weeks ago encouraged me to try and learn AS3 and Flixel, and none of the problems encountered are insurmountable for someone who's willing to dig into various things they haven't been told about to find potential problems, I wouldn't recommend it to someone who was new to programming in general since it hasn't been maintained, and that renders all the general programming tips throughout it frustrating instead of useful.

Look at the date it was posted.
I totally misinterpreted what you meant as dated, sorry.

The namespace thing is just file structure, you put in wherever flixel is in your project tree. It would've helped if they mentioned that in the beginning, but I don't think it hurts too much. Same thing basically goes for the non-standard preloader.

[Sar]

The namespace thing is just file structure, you put in wherever flixel is in your project tree. It would've helped if they mentioned that in the beginning, but I don't think it hurts too much. Same thing basically goes for the non-standard preloader.

Sure, the problems are mostly easy to work around for someone who's competent at OO programming concepts already... as I said, the only one that gave me a little trouble was the Preloader.as, which I get the impression used to be included in the Flixel package, but as far as I could tell it was telling me to change a value in a file that didn't exist unless I chose a different project option in the first place.

But while the tutorial goes out of its way to explain some basic concepts, leading me to believe it's intended for novice programmers, it only hints at - for example - why they choose to "import com.adamatomic.flixel.*;" (IIRC), which means that someone who doesn't understand what packages and import statements are likely to do doesn't have much of a clue why it doesn't work and why they have to write "import org.flixel.*;" instead. They can't see the similarity to the directory structure so easily because the directories mentioned in the import statement don't exist in Flixel any more.

The tutorial omits or glosses over these concepts because at the time it was written, following the instructions explicitly (presumably) meant that the reader wouldn't have to worry about such things at all... but since it hasn't been maintained to keep up with changes in Flixel it's no longer so useful to the novice.

[ithamore]

AdamAtomic's post about the Flixel Wiki in the tutorials (link to the Wiki) has pointed me to his well commented source for Flx-Invaders and FlxTeroids, which look they're much simpler to learn the basics from and are what I'm going to be sticking with for now.

Also, there are plenty of other resources on the Wiki or linking away from it: for those who don't mind using Flex instead of FlashDevelop there's Creating a Flash platform game with Flixel and Flex.

[Poor Lazlo]

Hm, Mappy is spitting out a weird error for me... Maybe I have to update DirectX? I'll do that tonight just to see. This is using the default tileset provided. :3

"Error importing blocks, see helpfile section on importing

Likely causes:
LIBPNG12.DLL and ZLIB.DLL missing for PNG
BMP file is compressed
BMP file is not the correct colour depth"

Has anyone ever seen this?

You need to install a script for mappy to allow it to work with png files. If I remember correctly, it's on the same page you downloaded mappy from.

Hope that helps.

[kavs]

http://flixel.org/forums/index.php?topic=628.0

1.4(5) is now out, and apparently reworks a ton of flixel stuffs. To quote the mighty adam:

This update will break EVERYTHING!!  It will break all your codes.  None of your codes are safe.  All of the old tutorials are broken now, everything is wrecked Smiley  Except Mode, FlxTeroids, and FlxInvaders anyways.  It shouldn't take too long to repair things, but I would plan on spending at least a half hour getting existing projects working with the 1.40 codebase.

So, if the tutorial was old, it's even more obsolete now. I still find it valuable for learning the logic of how to make a game, but just be warned that the tutorial is going to become more and more out of date as time goes on. :3

[Richard Kain]

Has anyone tried to set up Flixel to run with Adobe AIR yet? I've been looking a little more deeply into AIR, and I think there could be some real potential for adapting a game engine to work with it. The most obvious benefit would be allowing for save-game files. Installed AIR applications allow you to write to and read from the hard drive. I believe there are also some performance benefits.

AIR could be an effective way to upgrade some Flixel games to be larger and more robust.

[Hima]

Has anyone tried to set up Flixel to run with Adobe AIR yet?

I have tried that using Flash Develop. But what I tried was just to test whether it works or not. Haven't really finished a game to see if there's any performance benefits or not :S.

Even though the old tutorials are obsolete, Adam just released a series of mini tutorials called a 'cheat sheet' which should you help you get start with a new version of flixel.

http://wiki.github.com/AdamAtomic/flixel/flixel-cheat-sheet-1-the-basics

[kavs]

http://wiki.github.com/AdamAtomic/flixel/seifer-tims-tutorial

Apparently, this one has been updated for 1.4! I'm going to be working through it tomorrow, so I'll report back if anything is terribly broken. Looks good to me, though, and is formatted much nicer than the flixel forum post. :3

[mirosurabu]

Has anyone tried to set up Flixel to run with Adobe AIR yet? I've been looking a little more deeply into AIR, and I think there could be some real potential for adapting a game engine to work with it. The most obvious benefit would be allowing for save-game files. Installed AIR applications allow you to write to and read from the hard drive. I believe there are also some performance benefits.

AIR could be an effective way to upgrade some Flixel games to be larger and more robust.

Disclaimer: I'm not an AIR expert, but as far as I know...

AIR is like an alternative Flash player that runs AIR files and provides desktop application facilities (local file system and OS windows manipulation to name a few). You create your flash game the same old way and use additional AIR native code through existing frameworks like Flex (Flixel is built on top of Flex).

So, in  essence creating AIR application is basically wrapping your existing flash game's code. (someone correct me if I'm wrong)

So, if you're using Flash Develop all you do is create a new AIR project. Then when you compile your project you'll get two BAT files you have to execute to create your final AIR file.

I tried wrapping "Tanaka's Friendly Adventure" into AIR and it worked.

Too bad someone with limited knowledge on this topic is giving you advice, but I thought I should let you know anyways.

[Iamthejuggler]

Seifer tim's is a pretty good one. It's easy to understand. I think when i went through it there were a few discrepancies (like the help function not existing any more) but apart from that it was pretty much up to date. I guess things going out of date is the price we pay for using such a new and constantly evolving engine. It does sound like adam is adding some awesome stuff in these updates.