Using the iPad retina display with Adobe Air

Last Friday, the new iPad was launched by Apple, with its new retina display. I did a few tests to try to use the high-resolution retina screen at its maximum resolution from Adobe Air. Here are the results.

The first thing to note is that Apple deliberately limited the new retina resolution to Apps built with the iOS 5.1 SDK. This is to avoid incompatibility issues with Apps that were released before the new iPad was available. So apps...

Posted on 19 March 2012 | 21 comments | continue reading

20 tips for creating Air Native Extensions for iOS

Over the past three months I’ve created three Air Native Extensions for iOS (available on Github), which were all used in our game Stick Cricket Super Sixes, and have discovered a lot along the way. I’ve forgotten some of it, but here’s a few of the tips I can remember for anyone else approaching this task.

Posted on 1 March 2012 | 8 comments | continue reading

try{harder} level-up

The first try{harder} took place last October and I was lucky enough to be one of the 16 attendee/speakers. The four-day conference was residential – we lived together in four “executive cabins” at Center Parcs in Sherwood Forest. That means everyone had a double bedroom, an en-suite bathroom, and three new developer friends to have breakfast with.

If you ask...

Posted on 27 February 2012 | 1 comment | continue reading

Why use an entity framework for game development?

Following my previous post on entity systems for game development I received a number of good questions from developers. I answered many of them in the comments on that post, but one question stands out. It’s all very well explaining what an entity framework is, and even building one, but why would you want to use one? In particular, why use the...

Posted on 16 February 2012 | 30 comments | continue reading

What is an entity framework for game development?

Last week I released Ash, an entity framework for Actionscript game development, and a number of people have asked me the question “What is an entity framework?”. This is my rather long answer.

Entity systems are growing in popularity, with well-known examples like Unity, and lesser known frameworks like Actionscript frameworks Ember2, ...

Posted on 19 January 2012 | 39 comments | continue reading

Ash – a new entity framework for Actionscript games

I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with entity systems recently. At try{harder} I gave a presentation about entity systems, which was warmly received and led to many interesting conversations. I also created example projects with the Ember and Xember frameworks and had fruitful conversations...

Posted on 11 January 2012 | 15 comments | continue reading

So what are Adobe up to with Flash?

It has been an interesting week in the Flash world. Various announcements and clarifications about the future of Flash, which seem to add up to

1. Adobe will stop development of the Flash mobile browser plug-in, but mobile operating system and...

Posted on 14 November 2011 | 6 comments | continue reading

Four ways to link a list (a performance test on linked list architectures)

In looking at entity systems for Flash games, and particularly the projects Ember and Xember, I was wondering what is the most efficient architecture for the linked lists used by these systems. So I ran some tests.

The code for these tests is all available on Github.

The lists in these frameworks are used to...

Posted on 25 October 2011 | 5 comments | continue reading