Year: 2012

Adobe AIR for Blackberry Playbook

So, I have finally started to port Solitaire and Mahjong games to Blackberry Playbook and have some notes.
I would like to mention them here, mainly for myself, just as a reminder.

0. Latest Adobe AIR SDK supported by Playbook to date is 3.1.

1. blackberry-airpackager sometimes doesn’t pack all the files to .bar file, if they are not in the same directory as blackberry-airpackager. In my case, it didn’t pack .swf file. App will crash on start in that case.

2. In order to get your Author ID, you need to rename debug token .bar file to .zip, find it in manifest.mf file or execute the following command:

blackberry-airpackager -listManifest [your_debug_file.bar]

3. Description of bar-descriptor.xml file can be found here.

4. According to the link above, permission for the app can be set with <action> tag, while sample HelloWorld project from BB AIR SDK use <permission> tag. Which one is correct – have no idea.

5. Mochi doesn’t work with Adobe AIR Mobile, and I’m not talking about ads, nothing works and it’s been for a long time.

6. Some good guide to AIR apps for playbook.

7. Blacberry SDK for Adobe AIR API Reference.

8. App version for Playbook should be X.Y.Z, not just X.Y as it’s by default in AIR settings.

9. It is always good to verify your .bar file before submitting it to Blackberry with the following command:

blackberry-signer -verify [your_bar_file.bar]

10. Testing Playbook App, especially payments.

11. QNXStageWebView for showing ads inside your app. I’m going to try Leadbolt and Millennial Media for now.

12. Payment System for AIR on Playbook, quit easy to implement.

13. Regular payments (in games or in App World) might stop working after running you own application in development mode. So, you need to restart Playbook to get it working again.

14. Using native extensions for Adobe AIR.

15. If you need to get info (like expiration date) from your certificate file, you can do the following:

blackberry-keytool -exportcert -storepass [your password] -keystore [your_certificate_file.p12] -file output.crt
blackberry-keytool -printcert -file output.crt

Did you know that…

…if you want to delete your game from Kong:

Hello,

We can delete the game for you if you’d like, but you’ll lose any revenue that it has generated. If you’d prefer to keep the revenue so far, we can just unpublish the game so that no one will be able to play it anymore. Let me know which option would be better for you!

What?

You’ll only lose the revenue if you want the game DELETED, but if you’d just like me to UNPUBLISH it, then you won’t lose the associated revenue from it. People still will not be able to play it, so it’ll be as if it was deleted to them. If we delete the game, we don’t have the record of the game that the revenue was generated by. Just the way our system works 🙂

Game License Uploading Agreement? Never heard about that.

Бесплатный Playbook от Blackberry и Marmalade

Пока работал над овечкой, выкроил время зарегистрироваться на спешл от Marmalade и Blakcberry: Marmalade for BlackBerry.
Этот офер уже закончился, было много желающих: “Thanks to everyone who has signed up to this fabulous offer so far. Due to unprecedented demand, we are closing the Marmalade for BlackBerry® offer”.
Но я таки успел получить свои бесплатный PlayBook и сделать маленькую игру на Marmalade: Balloon Shooter.
Пожалуй пора начинать разработку игр для мобильных платформ и этих ваших таблеток.

Dolly The Sheep Released

Woo-hoo!
So, bidding has ended, MyPlayYard(5hippos) won the game!
It was released yesterday to public and got Daily 2nd Place on Newgrounds. And that makes me happy. 🙂
Today it was published on Kongregate as well, but they have more hard-core audience, so I’m not waiting anything big.
Now I have to wait 6 weeks to start selling site-locks, but hope to put version with my brandings to Pozirk Games website much sooner.
As for now, you can play sponsor-branded version of Dolly The Sheep.

RiU is featured

Unexpectedly for me, RiU has got Daily 4th Place on Newgrounds and became featured on main page on Kongregate.
While most of the comments on NG were positive, on Kong there was total madness. Hundreds of comments and some of them were absolutely ridiculous. I was trying to reply to these comments and even made some changes to the game, but… 🙂
Anyway, I’ve learned my lesson.

Resistance is Useless released

It took us quite a lot of time to release this game and here it is: Resistance is Useless, a action/adventure/shooting flash game.
In this game you play as Bruno, a delivery boy, who was forced to “take” a gun and start fighting against hords of perfidious aliens.
We have invented 12 different types of enemies, 4 bosses and 15 levels with very tangled storyline for this game.
Hope, you will like it.

AS3 events

While working with Bloom Lite framework, I have discovered Native Signals – “a new approach for AS3 events, inspired by C# events and signals/slots in Qt.” I have read before, that Events in Flash was slow, but I have also read, that the fastest way to do events is just call required listener (function) directly.
And I’ve decided to make my own fast and ugly approach for AS3 events.
It has only one class and, I believe, works super fast.
It is available for download from GitHub: https://github.com/pozirk/misc, and it’s very easy to use, here is an example:

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...
public class MyClass extends Eventer
{
  public static const MYEVENT:uint = 1;
  ...
  public function myFunc():void
  {
    if(...) //something happened
      fireEvent(MYEVENT, anyObjectHere);
  }
}
 
...
 
var my:MyClass = new MyClass();
my.addEvent(MyClass.MYEVENT, funcToCall);
 
...
 
public function funcToCall(obj:Object):void
{
  ...
}

So, any class can extends Eventer class, or just has it as a variable, and each class defines its own events (static IDs), which can be fired.

My approach doesn’t have anything like bubbling or capture phases, also there is only one listener possible for every event, but I was aiming for speed and I have thrown away everything and made it as fast as possible.
Hope, it will be useful for someone else, although there is nothing special here.

Alternative GUI for Flash

As I have decide to develop Cats’n’Rats game using FlashDevelop, I was required to find some kind of GUI framework for my buttons, listboxes, etc.
First, I have found Bloom & Bloom Lite – a lightweight and easy to use framework, but it was too basic for me and unintuitive.
Later, I have found AsWing, a great framework similar to Java Swing. But it was buggy, at least for me. 🙂 I could not make it work with absolute positions of controls.
Finally, I have found SPAS – Swing Package for ActionScript.
Another Swing-like framework, but, luckily, it works fine with absolute position by simply using AbsoluteLyout class. It has such features like GridControl and DropButton (still under development, but work great). The default design and colors don’t look very nice, but it’s ok for now.

И опять

На UBServers я провёл 5 дней, а потом их сервак упал. Тут я уже ждать не стал и сразу вернулся на DirectSpace, к этому вермени у них уже всё работало. И правильно сделал. Хотя саппорт c UBServers мне клялся, что такие поломки у них бывают оооочень редко, два дня спустя их сервак лёг и лежит до сих пор: We are facing a serious power outage…
А пока я сижу на DirectSpace, и пока их VPS’ы на удивление стабильно работают, думаю куда мне переехать.
Насколько я понял UBServers, покупает сервак(и) у DataShake и уже продаёт VPS’ы своим клиентам, это что касается US-based VPS’ов.

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