redwyre

Moderor (working title) is the flash game I have been working on.  I’ve started off not knowing anything about Flash or Flex development and have since learned alot. Flex is very easy to use and I’ve been impressed with it’s capabilities.

The version that I have uploaded at the time of writing this is fairly primative, but the main systems are working.  It consists of a tile renderer (which can be scrolled using the arrow keys), a simple building system where placed buildings can do stuff (which is currently just generating resources), and a system to place buildings (currently it doesn’t check for a suitable area, but part of the work is already done). Obviously there’s alot more to do, but it is functional.

I decided that since I was using Flex - Flash’s application based development enviroment - that I should take advantage of the Flex framework, so the tile render is derived from a Flex UIComponent and I’ve used normal Flex UI controls for the interface. This is great because I don’t have to worry about writing my own GUI system, and I can use the Design view to place and arrange it all. Later on all I need to do is make a new skin and use the built in skinning capabilities to get it to look like I want without chaning anything else. It’s allowed me to work on the game itself rather than fiddling around with UI.

Check out the latest version of Moderor here

I’ve decided to start working on a flash game, and since I’ve used Flex Builder before I’m using it as my IDE. There are instruction here on how to get it to work, but for normal Flex projects you just need to follow a few steps.

The first step is to download Adobe Flex Builder 3. Then to use Flash 10 you need to download the latest nightly SDK, I’m using 3.2.0.3958 (Wed Oct 29 2008).

To install the SDK:

• Create a folder called “3.2.0.3958″ (or the version you downloaded), in “%Program Files%\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\sdks”. Extract the contents of the SDK zip file into there.
• Now go to Flex Builder, go to “Windows”->”Preferences…” (I’ve had problems where some controls dissapear within preferences, if this happens a restart of Flex Builder is required to get them back).
• Navigate to “Flex”->”Installed Flex SDKs”.
• Click “Add…”, enter in the path you extracted the files to and for the name use “Flex 3.2.0.3958″ (or the version you downloaded), and click “OK”.
• Make sure the SDK you added is checked and click “Apply”.

Now two modifications are needed to the project to get it to target the version 10 player.

• Open the project properties, go to “ActionScript Build Path”.
• Expand “Flex 3″, select “playerglobal.swc” and click “Remove”.
• Click “Add SWC” and navigate to the new SDK path, and then deeper into “frameworks/libs/player/10″, select playerglobal.swc.
• Expand “playerglobal.swc”, double-click “Link Type” and change it to “External”.
• Now go to “ActionScript Compiler”
• In “Require Flash Player version” type in 10.0.0.