The other day I was writing the code for a simple animated movie. I decided to use a host flash to get the user started quickly and then create a separate SWF file for each scene in the movie. The host flash would then preload the next scene while the current one was playing. MovieHost.as would be the document class for the host movie and Scene.as document class for all the scenes. Simple right? Budget: 6-7 hours including the stop frame animations…

Well, not quite so. I created all the animations in all the swiffs, set up the hos flash to load them in, pressed command+enter to verify my effectiveness. The host flash fires up and loads the first scene but the scene’s code does not seem to run at all. And no error messages? After all this is AS3 - WTF??

I won’t bore you with the details of all my testing, but it went to the point where I started to research the use of explicit application domains and such. After some hours I found the reason, and here it it:

From the Flash documentation on the ApplicationDomain class:

“You cannot override a loaded class definition with a newer definition.”

This says it all really. Close to the top of my HostMovie.as class (where I hadn’t been for a while) I found this line:

private var _currentScene:Scene;

Even though this variable was not being used in any way, the host flash still had a compiled version of the class Scene.as when the scene swiffs were being loaded. I f you look at the comment from the documentation again you realize that of course no code from the loaded swf could run, it’s document class had been discarded in favor of the one allready existing in the host flash.

I removed the unused property definition from HostMovie.as and everything from there on went as planned.

ShareThis

ShareThis

I checked the FOTB site about a week ago and it seems I might have misunderstood the message there about ticket sales not being open. Or maybe tickets were in fact not yet for sale at that point. Either way, those tickets must have been ripped away pretty fast and here I am without one. Actually I’m two tickets short because there are two of us who wanted to be there from my agency.

If anyone has a couple of tickets to spare please let me know because I’m buying! (as you can see from the tags to this post…)

ShareThis

ShareThis

Grab a beer, It’s St. Patric’s Day. In the words of House of Pain: Put on your shit kickers and kick some shit!

If anyone’s wondering why I’ve been a slow poster  lately, it’s because my basement home cinema is looking like this:

I’ll be back when that is done with

ShareThis

A really interesting project I’ve been doing at work is finally live after a little over a month in design and development. I am quite pleased with the result as it is a fully dynamic (with content management system on the way) all Flash, language extendable solution.

The language menu has had to be hidden from view for now. That’s because the site hasn’t been translated yet, but after the first one is in I will be enabling the language selection. From there, extending the site to other languages is a matter of translating and publishing through the CMS with no touching of neither FLA-files or XML needed.

A tricky part of this project was getting the site swf, which filles the entire browser, to scale to fit the browser window, but not so that it would crop the site without displaying scrollbars on smaller screens. The solution was a little javascript that I published in an earlier post.

MasterPhoto captures stills and video by using model helicopters to reach heights and angles unmatched withother types of equipment. The results they can achieve is really stunning. Check out the site!

www.masterphoto.no

ShareThis

I just browsed through Microsoft’s download pages to find a .NET Framework install needed for FlashDevelop when I came across this page asking me if I would like to try their shiny new Silverlight-boosted download area. Of course I was curious, so I happily OK’ed the installation link for the Silverlight and waited for my first encounter with MS’ answer to Flash.

Now, why in the world MS would like to be a latecomer in this game in the first place is beyond me, but why even bother to turn up at the table with anything less than at least a decent hand. First, *MS* Internet Explorer crashed upon completion of the installer. When I fired it up again and went back to their much proclaimed download site, the first thing I got was this pucker:

Then, after dismissing that dialog I proceeded to click the link that said “Downloads and Trials”, to which the Silverlight application responded with this blank screen:

After a few clicks here and there I managed to land at the correct place to browse for the .NET Framework 2.0 download, but browsing was sluggish and sometimes irresponsive.Come on MS - this is supposed to be a showcase of your great Flash competitor, nothing here is new, nothing here is better and there’s a long way between this and to improve the Download Center experience and make it easier to discover and download Microsoft software a you put it. This is kind of like going up to Ronnie James Dio on stage and saying “Look, I’ve made this song called Holy Diver, and now I want your fame”.

Needless to say Silverlight ain’t scaring me yet.

ShareThis

See for yourself: Resize Example

Because of this I had to write a small JavaScript to gain back some control over how the move resized. Here you go, you can either download only the JS-file or the entire zipped example above.

flashresizer.js

Entire zipped example

Enjoy!

ShareThis

To be honest I don’t know too much about this stuff either, but this I do know: the term “opening a port” is somewhat misleading. It took me some time to discover that it’s actually the same as “forwarding a port” or “port forwarding” as it is called in the AirPort Admin Utility for Mac. You cannot just open a port, you have to tell the router which computer on your network should receive network traffic directed to that port. That computer is identified by an IP-address, but that means entering that IP address manually, and most home networks are configured handle this automatically (by means of DHCP) and that’s likely to be the most practical solution anyway.

How do we solve this? Enter DHCP Client ID… ok, an introduction should probably end with a far sexier name than “DCHP Client ID”, but here it goes, watch:

These screenshots are in Norwegian, but the layout is the same, and I will attempt to translate.

Step 1: Open AirPort Amin Utility and select “Internet” and “DHCP”

NOTE: This requires that your AriPort is set to share a public IP address. That setting is located in the first tab under “Internet”.

At the bottom you will se something called DHCP reservations, and the list is likely to be empty, unlike mine. Below the list a +-button. Click that and this sheet appears:

Step 2: Enter a name and method for the new reserved IP address.

I chose to name it PS3, bu that’s not important. What is is that you specify DHCP Client ID as the method and click continue.

Step 3: Enter a client ID and the IP address you wish

The Client ID is important because you have to enter the same on your PlayStation. May I suggest “PS3″ for that. Next you enter an IP address. The three first numbers have been entered for you, and you have to select a number between 2 and 256. I chose 94, and if that’s not manually assigned to any other computer on your network it will work for you as well. Click “Done”.

Step 4: opening/forwarding the ports

Select “Advanced” and “Port Forwarding” and you will see something like this. Again, click the +-button below the list and this sheet appears:

Fill out the fields exactly like the screenshot, or if you chose a different IP address to be reserved for your PS3 in step 3, enter that address instead. Click “Continue”.

Here you select a name for the configuration. Again, this has no technical meaning, it’s just a description so I entered “COD4″ as an abbreviation for “Call Of Duty 4″. Pretend like the rest of the sheet isn’t there and click “Done”.

Step 5: Restart the AirPort

Restart your AirPort by clicking the “Apply”/”Update”/”Restart” (don’t know it’s actual name in English) in AirPort Admin Utility.

Step 6: Configure your PlayStation network settings

You can configure the network settings for your PS3 almost like you already have. You need to choose manual setup, but you can still use automatic detection for all settings except you DHCP Client ID, which, obviously, has to be whatever you chose in step 3. Remember my suggestion was “PS3″. After that Bob’s your father’s brother!

ShareThis

Aron turned 6 months on december 27. He’s full of smiles and really interesting language interpretations. He’s just about to begin crawling around. He also wishes to thank you all for the humongous pile of presents he got for Cristmas.

Most of all he’s the cutest, loveliest and happiest little boy alive!

ShareThis