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03/27/04
I was at the GameHotel presentation at the Game Developers Conference (gamehotel.net). It is this “show” where they interview different “cool” people about new things in fashion and games. They use a hotel metaphor, like when a new interviewee is called to the stage, they say that someone is “checking in”. One of the interviewees came up and said that he wondered if they were inspired by Habbo Hotel, which he then called a “Flash Game.” Flash! Oy. This was in front of hundreds of people, including some of the most influential people in the game development industry.
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03/26/04
Looks like Shockwave is the preferred method for creating Web-based games. I’ve been at various sessions and roundtables here at the Game Developers Conference and many technologies are always mentioned: Shockwave, Flash, Java, Wild Tangent and ActiveX. But Shockwave seems to be the one universally accepted and used by most. Flash has been mentioned several times as something that is too slow for anything but simple puzzle games. The others just aren’t used nearly as often.
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03/25/04
I ran a panel on Monday at the Game Developers Conference on “Web 3D Games”. The morning was a Shockwave 3D tutorial and the afternoon was a panel where other speakers added information on four other technologies: Wild Tangent, VirTools, 3D Groove and Java 3D.
It was very interesting to compare them all. We came to some conclusions. First, that these were the 5 technologies used for 3D games on the Web, and there are no other legitimate technologies. There might be some eventually, but right now any others are too young or just don’t offer the features needed. The other main conclusion was that 3D games on the Web will blossom when they merge with multiplayer game ideas. But these multiplayer ideas won’t look anything like what we already have today — it will be something new.
I came to my own conclusion as well. It was that Shockwave 3D is the only viable 3D platform for Web creation, for the most part. Both Wild Tangent and Groove work well for those companies, but you pretty much have to be a close partner with those companies to use them — both from a business standpoint and a technology support standpoint. VirTools is nice, but expensive, and they only are doing the Web-based thing as a side project, not their main thrust. Java is almost like an academic experiment, although it is from Sun, the only large company in the mix. That aside, Groove has the most potential to innovate, as the developers are very active and interested in getting as much into Groove as quickly as possible. Ironically, with Shockwave 3D as the clear winner in my mind, I also have to say that it is the only tool not being aggressively developed at the moment. All of the other tools are moving forward quickly while Shockwave 3D development really needs to be kick-started.
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03/20/04
I leave tomorrow to go to the Game Developer Conference in San Jose. This is my 7th year in a row attending, my 6th speaking. I’m leading a full-day tutorial on “Web 3D Games” on Monday. I’ll spend half the day talking about Shockwave 3D. Then I have three guests coming in to talk about Wild Tangent, 3D Groove, VirTools and Java 3D.
I’m looking forward to the rest of the conference as well. The second day there is a full-day tutorial on “casual games” that I hope to get to. Then the usual sessions on the other days.
This is, by far, my favorite conference. There is always so much to learn. I think there will be a gathering of Director and Flash users on Friday, but unfortunately I have to leave before then.
I’ll try to report back about how my tutorial went and any other talk about Director or Flash during the week.
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03/02/04
Found a really odd and nasty MX04 bug today. I had a script that attempted to set the property of a behavior of a sprite externally, like sprite(1).pMyProp = 7. What was happening was that it appeared to change externally (put sprite(1).pMyProp), but the code in the behavior saw the old pMyProp value, not the new one. So in the behavior, I had two different values for pMyProp and sprite(me.spriteNum).pMyProp. This was the only behavior of the sprite.
What I discovered, thanks to JHT at Macromedia, was that Flash sprites in MX04 have the ability to have variables that are directly addressable. So sprite(1).pMyProp = 7 was creating a Flash variable in the Flash movie that had a value of 7. So I had a Flash variable and a sprite behavior property of the same name.
There are plenty of fixes for this. One would be to have setMyProp() and getMyProp() fuctions in the behavior and only set them this way. That’s a very object-oriented approach. You could also refer to the property externally via the scriptInstanceList: sprite(1).scriptInstanceList[1].pMyProp = 7.
This bug could very well break old Shockwave movies, so be on the lookout.
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