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[LemonScented]

Heya,

I'm interested in dabbling in a bit of Flash. I've not done any for the best part of a decade, so I'm basically sufficiently rusty that I can be considered a beginner all over again. Can anyone recommend the best tutorials for getting me quickly up to speed again? Also, any other libraries or reference guides I might find useful?

Cheers 

[nikki]

i'd start by ditching the flash IDE and instead use the free and great flashdevelop

getting me quickly up to speed...libraries or reference guides

flashpunk or flixel

try them both see wichone you like better.

Have fun!

[Blindsight]

i'd start by ditching the flash IDE and instead use the free and great flashdevelop

Is there a benefit to doing that? I'm getting rather used t working in CS3, but if there are better options, I'm all ears as to why that is.

[Hima]

Script editor in CS is pretty suck, and FlashDevelop is much better in that regards. However, it all depends on your project. You can use a combination of them. That is, use the Flash IDE to deal with animation, and assets, while do the coding in FlashDevelop.

[nikki]

Is there a benefit..

The two libraries I linked to aren't even able to work with Flash IDE.
It's flexbuilder or flashdevelop to work with them.

The biggest benefit i see is writing a program in a programming language in a programming environment. Flash had never been that nice to me.

Another benefit is the cost: it's totally free !
you can just grab the flex sdk, flashdevelop and both those libraries all for 0.00$

[levelbylevel]

If you do go the flixel route, I've put a flixel game template up on my blog which you could start with if you like.

http://www.levelbylevel.com

The tutorials on the official wiki are also fantastic resources:

http://www.flixel.org

I love working in a proper code environment, using Flex Builder myself (flashdevelop is good too but windows only ), and flixel is amazing.

[bateleur]

Good to see the usual blizzard of misinformation getting in there early!

Flash IDE is not only fine, it's generally preferable if you have reliable access to a copy. The drawback is that it's expensive. In particular:

* You can of course use any editor you like for classes (and you shouldn't have more than a few lines of code in your actual .fla). Only crazy people use the built-in editor!

* You can use libraries written entirely in Actionscript exactly as you would from within FlashDevelop. The vast majority of my projects ignore the timeline for purposes of everything except the preloader.

I don't have any specific tutorial recommendations since I prefer to learn by doing, but actionscript.org, kirupa.com and gskinner.com are the three sites I most often find useful Flash info on.

[st33d]

I demonstrated the power of FlashDevelop in the office by mashing my face into the keyboard and hitting return. Legible code suddenly replaced the gibberish.

Having a decent auto-complete I've found increases your workflow ten fold. Instead of mashing the exact keys you mash several that make up the word and you get your prompt. This doesn't just make it easier to write code, it means you take the time to make your variables descriptive - because it's not a pain to type them out over and over again. A 15 character variable name you just written can be fetched in a couple of keystrokes.

[Overkill]

I guess it's fine that many people hurl Flixel and Flashpunk suggestions at him, but it is still very possible and in fact pretty easy to work without this sort of middleware. I made a simple but usable game engine in Actionscript 3 within a couple days of picking it up. Unfortunately got distracted with other things (and Flash Builder beta expired), but I'm just putting it out there.

I have no comment on the Flash IDE, since the last version I used was like... Flash MX? But I tried the Flash Builder 4 Beta, and it seemed pretty neat, since it was basically Eclipse for Actionscript projects. FlashDevelop sounds like it might be okay too. If I were to pick up a Flash project again, I'd probably use mxmlc and a plain code editor like pnotepad, but that's just me.

[Glaiel-Gamer]

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AS3LCR/Flash_10.0/

bookmark that, and refer to it any time you have a question about the language, before asking the question.


Also, flash is easy enough and does enough for you that unless you're switching over from making games in a different environment, it's probably easier to forget flixel and flashpunk and worry about learning how actionscript works first.

Flixel and such are fine if you want to do pixel games or retro games, but there's not too much need for middleware if you want to do flash graphics (vector) games.

[Blindsight]

Script editor in CS is pretty suck, and FlashDevelop is much better in that regards. However, it all depends on your project. You can use a combination of them. That is, use the Flash IDE to deal with animation, and assets, while do the coding in FlashDevelop.

While I haven't had a problem with the CS editor, I'm curious about FlashDevelop. I'll have to check it out. Is there any significant learning curve to it?

[ChevyRay]

EDIT: bah, don't feel like it.

[Glaiel-Gamer]

unless you're switching over from making games in a different environment"

the reason being, it's super easy to drag a ball graphic into the flash IDE, name it, and make pong from it. It's like 100 lines of code to do that, and IMO far easier than setting up some middleware first if you are new to coding games.

I see way too many people complain about things in flash that are part of the language, because they didn't know the language and delved right into flixel because it keeps the style you need to code in similar to other languages they might be used to. The language and it's library was written with its vector stuff in mind (originally it was onl a simple mechanism for controlling animations, and it evolved from that) so a lot of stuff that "doesn't make any sense" in relation to flixel or whatever makes perfect sense when you look at what the language was designed for, and makes it easier to avoid / exploit those pitfalls when using middleware.