Post your success stories using OSFlash tools here :)

http://www.boltfashion.com I used MTASC and Eclipse to write and test all the code for this site. I used the Flash 8 IDE for the graphic elements, but there is no code in the FLA. There is nothing groundbreaking here, but using the OS tools sped up production immensely. -Tim Beynart

The American School of Rio de Janeiro recently launched a new preschool. http://www.earj.com.br/barra/ was built with SWFMILL, MTASC and TextMate, with the ability to build the entire project from scratch with Rake. Flash MX 2004 was only used for compiling shared font libraries. The time to build the entire project from scratch, including running markdown on all of the content files, packing library assets into the swf and compiling the class files, was under 15 seconds.

I’m glad to announce a Flash game I programmed with open source tools: http://hybrid.fi/xmas

Game’s AS2 classes are built with HAMTASC - a modified MTASC. ASSERT macro was the most important reason for me to use HAMTASC. Thus checking various important program states including the class invariants became feasible.

The project has two separate SWF files. Most of the graphic assets are listed in an SWFML XML file that is compiled with swfmill into an SWF. The other SWF is compiled with HAMTASC from the AS2 classes. During compilation, swfmill dynamically links the SWF created from the SWFML file with the SWF created with HAMTASC.

The whole build process is handled with Makefiles. I didn’t use Eclipse and the related FAME tools, because I favor Emacs over Eclipse.

I also had to write some Perl scripts to ease the development. One important Perl script was my png2cmask script that stripped the alpha channel off a PNG and traced it into an SWF file. The two main reason to do this were:

1. PNGs have alpha channels, so visually they are great for creating game sprites and terrains. But in Flash image’s alpha channel doesn’t qualify as an empty area when doing hitTests.

2. In most cases PNG isn’t as efficient compressor as the lossy JPG is. But JPG doesn’t have an alpha channel.

So the SWF created with png2cmask was used as a clip mask and thus to define a collision map for the corresponding JPG. The JPG was the same picture as the original PNG without the alpha channel. All the terrain and the player sprite graphics are created using this technique.

I’ve been thinking of writing a more detailed article about the whole development process, when I get some free time. The game has also several nice AS2 classes I might also be interested to discuss about. Including a safer event class and an XML parser that makes parsing XMLs a lot easier than by using the Flash’s DOM API.

Only non-standard AS2 class I didn’t write by my self was the MD5 class (http://www.meychi.com/archive/000031.php) used to do some identification stuff.

Special thanks go to the MTASC author Nicolas Cannasse and swfmill author Daniel Fischer for providing such great FLOSS tools. The project had a zero policy for Flash IDE.

If the game is too easy for you. Try some hidden keys to make it more challenging. But I’ll let you find the keys.

I used MTASC to make a SWF sushi talk and sing at Spark Europe conference. It is the best compiler for this kind of task.

Ralf Bokelberg invested the time MTASC spared him into this. It just became two years old, that’s what we call a huge success. :)