Ginormous

Bluetube Interactive site updates

just updated bluetube interactives website www.bluetubeinteractive.com with a bunch of news, new portfolio items and images.

• We re now in the Adobe Solutions Partner Directory
• Added allure of the Automoble
• Added Leonardo
• New news
• Information on Flash Talk I'll be giving on Feb 23rd at the Atlanta Flash Users Group

Grant Davies will be speaking at the Atlanta Flash Users Group

Grant Davies will be speaking at the upcoming Atlanta Flash Users Group meetup on Feburary 23, The talk we be on the site built by Bluetube Interactive - Defend the Dome.

The talk will cover:

• How the assets for a 38mb website where managed so users still had a "good" experience
• How the site was architected
• How traditional flash timeline animation with action script control
• How video was incorporated and used to simulate a 3d experience
• How high scores/signup was implemented and reduce spoofing / hacking
• How the keyboard sequencers and timers where built and we could control the easy/difficulty of the games
• The lessons we learned

Bluetube Interactive Launches Allure of the Automobile

Bluetube Interactive and Gnoggin Studios launched Allure of the Automobile this week, a flash based micro site for the upcoming automobiles exhibit for the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.  The Exhibition will feature some of the worlds most beautiful pieces of machinery ( cars ) and the micro site will allow patrons to preview the exhibit, learn about the cars and share their car stories online.

Eclipse Import Existing Projects into workspace

I've been using Eclipse for many years, originally with JAVA and for the last few years with Flex.  We have one project that has around 20 projects in it since it uses a lot of modules and different developers work on different modules.  We use eclipse work spaces extensively since we use linked resources to define paths so that the project files can be shared by developers regardless of where they put the source code and regardless of them being on the OSX or Windows.

This has worked well for years but whenever we setup a new machine its a bear since you have to import around 20 projects, one after the other..... until now.

It appears I'm a fool, and have never noticed this wonderful feature in eclipse hidden away on the the import -> other menu.

Lets suppose I have all my projects under

clientname/trunk/project1

clientname/trunk/project2

clientname/trunk/project3

etc..

Instead of importing those projects one at a time, however, instead you can do

File - > Import - > Other -> General - > Import existing projects into workspace

Then I browse to

clientname/trunk

The dialog then populates with all the projects it finds under the trunk folder and child folders.

Check the projects you want and click "ok", and now all those projects are imported into your workspace.

Wish I'd known this feature was available about 2 years ago :)  But its great to learn something new.

Launched Defend The Dome

Bluetube Interactive is pleased to announce we launched defendthedome.com last night, a promotional site for the Atlanta Falcons and Ford, it features the first of two games, drive, where you get to drive an F150 or Flex to the Georgia Dome.  The site was built in flex with flash animation by gnoggin studios.  Design by Artistic Image and the agency who brought it to us was JWT.

It was a challenging project but a lot of fun, using pureMVC, Fabrication and the new pureMVC finite state machine.  We have heavy timelined flash animation that was pulled into flex via a swc and then our timeline managed allowed us to control and jump to labels in the flash timeline without having to re-animate the content in flex.

We'll do a case study on the project soon to explain how it all came together.

Cheers
Grant

PureMVC Finite State Machine ( FSM )

We are building a couple of Defend The Dome games in flash for the  Atlanta Falcons and Ford, one is  driving game where you get to drive an F150 from Flowery Branch to the GA down avoiding ladders, sofas and the things you see on i285, and you can get power ups, avoid cars, and take shortcuts if you get qualifying power ups.  In that game I had a command that managed the "state" and managed the changes in state, but it was quite a bit of work and often felt a bit "hacky" where the command was really deciding things that mediators should decide for views.

For the 2nd game we are doing a sacking game, where you get to be John Abraham. This game is more like "dragons lair" where you watch video and then at strategic points you interact by entering a key sequence, or pounding your keyboard in a power meter.  We have 4 progressively harder downs and lots of video cut scenes.  For this I'm using the pureMVC Finite State Machine.

At first I wasn't sure it was going to help much, but after studying the stopwatch demo, and then using the FSM visualizer ( its very buggy, don't rely on it), I got a good picture of how complex the application was and how many states I'm going to need to manage.  I think the FSM has easily saved me a ton of time and complexity due to it managing the state and dispatching notifications when the states change.

Here is a rough capture of the my state machine for the sacking game from the FSM visualizer, sorry its not "great" but the print function in the visualizer doesn't work and it also doesn't allow scaling or zoom of the image.

Once I'm done I'll also publish the XML so people can see what a not trivial FSM looks like in pureMVC.

flex inconsistent linkage error

I just took a flex application that is going to be used by multiple products (its a flex based portal), and needed to move the core code into a swc, once I created my swc I kept getting this weird error :

Inconsistant linkage in D:\projects\clients\someClient\someProject\trunk\3rdPartyLibs\swc\playerglobal.swc(Object) - 'isNaN' is marked as extern, but '__AS3__.vec:Vector$int' is not.       

I did a google and found a couple of references :

http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders@yahoogroups.com/msg122106.html

so I went back to my application project to see if I had any special compiler settings, and remembered I had :

-target-player=10

I added that to the Additional Compiler Arguments in the Properties | Flex Library Compiler panel and its now works.

Hopefully this will save you some discovery.

Astra Flex and Flash Library from Yahoo - Time input component

I love simple components that just do a job that we all end up having to do and think "there must be someone who's already done this".  Astra is a fairly small Flex an Flash library that has some components that make life a little easier, the time input component I particularly like since it validates the time the user puts in and won't accept an invalid time.

pureMVC console

Bluetube Interactive does 90% of its projects using Flex and pureMVC, The Flex pureMVC console  looks like a great tool for pureMVC developers, I'll most definately be trying this out, I have a fairly large pureMVC app that would benefit from some insights.

Debugging flex modules

I have a large flex application using pureMVC. Its a flex based media portal, sort of like a Flex based "yahoo".  its loads lots of different modules that I did not write, I built the framework.

Some of these modules load flash swf's which sometimes have script timeouts, so when I'm trying to debug, I'm constantly interupted by "script timeout" exceptions that halt the main thread and stop me whever I'm stepping through the code, after dealing with it I have to click "resume" in the debugger and start over, its very frustrating.  If you change your main application script timeout to 60 seconds it has no effect on loaded modules, and the module mxml tag has no provision for extending or ignoring the script timeout exception.

If anyone has figured out some voodo to solve this annoying issue I'd be most interested.