What is an entity framework for game development?

Last week I released Ash, an entity framework for Actionscript game development, and a number of people have asked me the question “What is an entity framework?”. This is my rather long answer.

Entity systems are growing in popularity, with well-known examples like Unity, and lesser known frameworks like Actionscript frameworks Ember2, ...

Posted on 19 January 2012 | 16 comments | continue reading

Ash – a new entity framework for Actionscript games

I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with entity systems recently. At try{harder} I gave a presentation about entity systems, which was warmly received and led to many interesting conversations. I also created example projects with the Ember and Xember frameworks and had fruitful conversations...

Posted on 11 January 2012 | 6 comments | continue reading

So what are Adobe up to with Flash?

It has been an interesting week in the Flash world. Various announcements and clarifications about the future of Flash, which seem to add up to

1. Adobe will stop development of the Flash mobile browser plug-in, but mobile operating system and...

Posted on 14 November 2011 | 6 comments | continue reading

Four ways to link a list (a performance test on linked list architectures)

In looking at entity systems for Flash games, and particularly the projects Ember and Xember, I was wondering what is the most efficient architecture for the linked lists used by these systems. So I ran some tests.

The code for these tests is all available on Github.

The lists in these frameworks are used to...

Posted on 25 October 2011 | 4 comments | continue reading

Flint Particles 4.0.0 released

Last week I released version 4.0.0 of Flint Particles. This version adds support for the latest versions of Away3d, Flare3d and Alternativa3d. Specifically, the supported versions of these three libraries themselves support the new Stage3D in Flash 11. This is the first step in Flint supporting Stage3D. We hope to add further support later, through 2d libraries like Starling and ND2D, and possibly using Stage3D within Flint’s own renderers.

The release notes for this version are on the Flint Particles website, along with information where to download the new version…

Posted on 18 October 2011 | no comments | continue reading

Ant scripts for Blackberry Playbook development

The early days of Playbook development have been quite painful – for some more than others. I remember fondly the struggle to get live debugging working, along with many other adventures. But I use FDT as my tool of choice for Actionscript development, and I always create Ant scripts for my build process.

That means, by the...

Posted on 12 May 2011 | 16 comments | continue reading

My first Playbook app

Like many Flash developers, I jumped at the chance to create an app for the Blackberry Playbook. With the Playbook we have a platform where Flash is a first class citizen. Indeed, for some time Flash (more specifically, Air 2.5) was the only development platform available for the Playbook.

On top of that, Research in Motion offered free Playbooks to any developer who had an app accepted into the App World store before the...

Posted on 11 May 2011 | 3 comments | continue reading

Bugs in Vector3D and Matrix3D

This is part 4 of a 4 part series comparing Coral, a derivative of the 3D math classes that used to be in the Flint Particles project, and Flash’s native 3D math classes.

In the first post I introduced Coral, explaining what it is and why I’m releasing it as an open source project. The next post looked at...

Posted on 24 February 2011 | 7 comments | continue reading