Flash Examples?

[EwanG]

Just finished my first flash game (side scrolling shooter - nothing fancy except for Santa Claus), and am thinking about revisiting Senior Year as a Flash game. I'd remove the voices, add a few extra scenes, and change the name. Partly because I gather the last version I released has issues with Windows Vista, and partly because you can actually make money (not much, but...) from the various Flash Game sites.

Searching seems to imply that there are no tools for building VNs in Flash, but I'm wondering if anyone knows of a halfway decent flash-based VN that has it's source code available? Just trying to find something to show me how best to do those things RenPy takes care of for you - changing out the text, positioning the characters on the screen without having to measure X/Y coordinates, etc.

TIA!

[dreamer]

The Sight of Autumn by m12. It's in the archives. I think he included the fla files in the zip, though I'm not too sure. It's been some time since I played it.

[EwanG]

No FLA file in the Zip unfortunately. There are a couple SWF files and a Flash movie file (FLV which is probably what you were thinking of). Any other ones? They don't have to be in the archive as long as the source is accessible...

Thanks anyway!

[Alphonse]

I was half-worried that it was something wrong with my PC, instead of it being just Vista-incompatible.

Well, that settled that.

I don't know anything about that source code stuff...^-^; Sorry that I can't help you there, I know next to nothing more than what I need to get by on the net...

[esrix]

I don't know of any off hand, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to make a Flash based VN application. If you use a combination of the the Flash loader classes for images, URLLoader for text, and Tweens for movement and effects, it'd be quite possible to make a competent VN application. It'd also be very easily distributed, seeing as Flash has spread to over 90% of all internet-capable computers. And you'd have a some hardware acceleration

The main issue I see is that some very helpful classes classes are exclusively included with the actual Flash IDE... particularly Tweens, which make moving objects very easy. To develop a Flash application exclusively through code costs nothing (except time), but to legally get your hands on some of the more useful ready-to-roll snippets costs a good chunk of cash.

[monele]

I know people have made the tween functionalities as a Class you could use through code, so even this should be possible (though maybe not as intuitive as doing it through the interface).

[esrix]

Oh, yeah, it's totally possible. It's just that most people don't like to reinvent the wheel

[esrix]

I've decided to do a bit of research on the subject of a Flash-based VN using Flex. I'll hopefully be able to dig up some information this weekend.

[EwanG]

Well, my biggest problem so far is turning out to be navigation. I'm trying to use AS3 since I figure that will be used longer than AS2, and if this goes well I'd like to do a couple other stories in this manner as well. So far the issue seems to be that the way I'm turning on the listener works fine if I specify "Stage", but not so fine if I specify the actual movie clip. Obviously I'm doing "something" wrong, it's just not so obvious as to what.

Any particular reason for choosing Flex over CS3?

[esrix]

I noticed that Flex might have some tweening functions available in the SDK. If they are there, I might be able to make use of them, but there's no guarantee. I'm also working out some math to help with tweening as well in my head.

What kind of event listeners are you using? Mouse? Keyboard? Enter frame? Flash can be quite finicky with what gets to use what event.

[monele]

Ewan : Can you post a short example of your listener assign code ? Might know what's wrong if I see it ^^;

[EwanG]

I got it figured out, and it turned out to be a scope problem. My first game was based off a scroller tutorial, and so I didn't pick up that everything is in scope with the first frame. So I was trying to setup a global class to run everything, but then it wouldn't know how to access my movieClips on each frame.

Now that I'm putting the code on each frame, and using this.MC (where MC is the movieClip), everything is working just fine. The plus side is that this means I just take each scene from the original, and put it on it's own frame, and I'm ready to go. Done that way I can even position characters directly rather than refer to a left, right, or center. Down side is that I will end up with hundreds of frames.

Alternative would be to come up with some blank "holders" where I switch out the displayed objects for each scene. But then I'd end up with a monster script again, and so I expect the advantages would be outweighed by the disadvantages. Plus this way if I add something in, I just change my "linked list" pointers rather than having to add code and functions.

Still need to see how I work with global variables if I have a script per frame, and how I play music so it doesn't skip when moving from frame to frame (also how to make it fade in and out). Am encouraged that at least I'm starting to see some progress!

FWIW...

[esrix]

AS3 doesn't have global variables, but you can make a class with static variables and reference the variables that way. As long as the variable is static, you don't have to have an instance of the class to call it and only one instance of that variable can ever exist.

For example, if you have a class called global.as and a public static variable in that file called numTimes, you can call global.numTimes to get that variable. Just make sure you import the class before hand.

[EwanG]

Well, I have a couple variables I setup in the script for the first frame, and I modify one of them in the second frame script and the third frame script, and the other I leave alone. I then added a trace to the third frame script, and it appears that the values are "as expected". So while there may not be global variables, it would appear that variables set in the first frame have global scope. Which for me is "good enough".

Music looks like it is going to be a bit more interesting, although I probably WILL use classes there so I can add the loop option - and I can make sure they get loaded at the beginning.

What I'm really hoping for is that this will work well enough I can get Camp Handiba back off the shelf. I was kind of disappointed how things went there (Nickelodeon liked the idea, but wanted to make a number of changes I couldn't live with - Cartoon Network liked the idea, but didn't think it would fit with where they are going. It was suggested I pitch to the BBC, but...) and being able to FINALLY get that done would make me a happy camper. Still, I have to get THIS one done first