Dynamic language

[Nick Sabalausky]

"James Miller" <james at aatch.net> wrote in message 
news:mailman.733.1331853568.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>
> I hate the fact that Flash games are created the way they are. For
> one, it's impenetrable to try and learn properly, I had so much
> trouble figuring out how to do things properly, you can attach scripts
> to almost any object, but sometimes it might be shared over all of the
> same objects, and other times only on that instance, depending on how
> you've placed them on the canvas.
>
> I probably wrote some terrible code when I started making Flash games,
> and now Actionscript is so foreign to me that i can barely understand
> where to start.
>

Yea, Flash is just plain insane from start to finish. Even the 
vector/scene-editing GUI is awful. Christ, this is the company that's known 
for Illustrator: That's the one part of Flash they *should* have been able 
to get right! (I dunno, maybe the Flash IDE was just drowning in too much 
MacroMedia legacy?)

One thing I learned though, is that if you're going to make something in 
Flash, your best bet is to use as *little* of what Adobe provides as 
possible:

- Cover any APIs that suck with wrappers that paper over the suck (to the 
extent possible).

- Don't use Flash's "frames" system: Just put your whole program in one 
"frame", and handle scenes manually by toggling the "_visible" attribute on 
entire groups of MovieClips. Do animation/tweening by using the timer APIs, 
a simple "lerp" formula[1], etc, stuff like that.

- *Every* piece of ActionScript code embedded into your .fla should be *one* 
line: #include "realCodeHere.hx"; Store the real code in that *REAL* text 
file, under proper version control, and edit in a *real* text/code editor. 
Hell, even if nothing else, at least this make it possible to fucking *diff 
the files*! (*grumble*Adobe doesn't understand software 
developement*grumble*)

- Abandon ActionScript entirely. Use Haxe instead, and use swfmill to embed 
assets. Now you don't need to have the Flash IDE even *installed*. Hooray!

Every single one of those changes made an order of magnitude improvement for 
me. Even with the overhead of actually making the switches, it was well 
worth it: the initial overheads easily paid for themselves in both tangible 
and intangible ways.

[1] A lerp function in Haxe, copied directly from my own production code 
(consider it "Do what the fuck you want" license), formula derived by just 
remembering basic high school algebra:

class Util
{
[...]
    // Convert a value between two scales, using a linear interpolation.
    // To use as a traditional lerp: Util.lerp(normalizedValue, 0, 1, min, 
max)
    // To convert from farenhight to celcius: Util.lerp(degreesF, 32, 212, 
0, 100)
    public static function lerp(fromVal:Float,
           fromA:Float, fromB:Float,
           toA:Float, toB:Float):Float
    {
        return toA + (fromVal - fromA) * ((toB-toA) / (fromB-fromA));
    }

[...]
}