For a while now (alot longer than I had hoped for) I have been working on a project that falls outside the realms of my usual kind of games-related projects. Im not ready do describe exactly what it is yet but im excited about it.

For months I have been struggling with the techinal challenges the project has entailed and I have dabbled with many new and highly diverse technologies including JavaFX (Java), Qt (C++) and Mono (C#).  I have been looking for a cross-platform technology that will get the job done that I need and doing it in an elegant manner.

I thought I had found it with a combination of JavaFX and straight Java using the PureMVC framework. I however was plagued with problems throughout with Bonjour, jGroups, JmDNS, JNI and JNA.

So after months of work, hardship and struggles I read a very interesting article on the up-and-coming Adobe AIR 2.0  that was opened for beta in December. With 2.0 Adobe are bringing NativeProcess  to Air. What this means is that you can you can execute native code (.dlls, .so, .jar etc) from Air. To me this was bloody brilliant as I had been playing with Air reccently and my day-job heavily involves Flex and I simply love the power and beauty of Flex.

So what this meant to me was that I could write the bulk of my project including its interface in my much preferred Adobe Flex (Air) and then use Native Process to communicate with a small kernel of Java that would do all the dirty work that Air itself cant do.

So after a little playing with Flerry for Air->Java bridge I started to think about the structure of the code and the framework I would use. For my initial few runs at this project I had been using the Java version of PureMVC. I really like some aspects of PureMVC but I think its can be so overly cumbersome in some circumstances (ill write another post on this in the future I think). So instead I looked at the alternatives.

I have been using Mate alot recently at work and on my own mini-project the Audio Book Organiser. However as this project is partly for my own learning and personal growth I decided to look at what else there was out there. From the videos by Jessie Warden I had heard about Robot Legs. Apparently this framework has been around for a while, but it was the first I had heard of it. Taking at look at it I immediately became very excited as it looks like it offers all the things that make PureMVC great but without the extra coding-baggage that goes with it.

To add to my interest it appears another very interesting, very new action-script technology has been introduced into Robot Legs called Signals by Robert Penner. Signals is an alternative to the standard events dispatching method found throughout flash (more on this in another post).

So why have I called this post “the bleeding edge?”. Well Adobe Air 2.0 is still in beta and has only been for a month or so. Its so new that some parts still havent been documented atall and the only way to find out how they work is to post a msg to the devs on the forums. Signals is also new and its integration into Robot Legs is very new indeed (last coupple of weeks). So at the moment I feel as if im at the forefront of some very new, very exciting technology, a stark contrast to my fiddlings with the ancient Java.

I realise this post is very text and tech-heavy but I needed to post about it before I forgot all the pain I have gone through with this project to get where I am at the moment. Future posts ill be delving a little deeper into some of my experiments with these new technologies

Okay so i have finally decided to upload this. I had intended to do some more work on it and get it into a more presentable state. However as time goes on and I still havent found time to do any more on it I have just decided to upload it now.

ChainReaction was my large (60 credits) project for my final year of university. It is basically a tool for creating 2D particle effects in an easy and fun way. There are two parts to it. Firstly the main tool:

The tool lets an artist or designer visually lay out their effect in an easy to use and understand manner. Once an effect has been created it can be exported out to either the XNA SDK or the Flash SDK for a programmer to use in thier own projects:

I have produced video tutorials explaining how to use these in conjunction with each other. However you must understand this is mainly an academic project and I had realy intended to clean this up before I released it.

There is also a GIF animation export option that I added late in the project and as such is a little slow and buggy

The source code is included within the project. Feel free to use it for anything non-commercial. If you wish to use it for commercial purposes I would like to be contacted for permission first: mike.cann@gmail.com

Download: ChainReaction-Final.zip (161mb)

Tutorial1:
 

Tutorial2:
 

Chain Reaction Tutorial 2 from mike cann on Vimeo.

Well its almost getting to the end of the project and i thought i would release bits and bobs as they are finished.

A full description of what the project is and what it does will follow but for now in this post im going to show off a few of the example particle effects that have been created with the tool then exported out using the inbuilt GIF exporter.

You will have to excuse how slow the GIFs run. For some reason i cant get the frame delay any lower than about 10ms, any suggestions?

Just to follow on from the previous post and to make it make a little more sense, here is a screenshot of the demo XNA space game i made in a day to show off my new particle engine SDK.

Yup space penguins are attacking the earth!

Edit: For some reason wordpress doesnt like it so go to this link to see it.

The game was a great learning experience and didnt do too badly in the rating achieving about a 7/10.

There were two coders, one being myself, and an artist on the project. It was coded in J2ME and ported to multiple handsets. I enjoyed parts of the project, such as the random level generation algorithm and the particle system, however the majority of the time was spent wrestling with bugs that only appeared on one or two handsets
Despite this it was phenominally successfull scoring game of the month as Orange Mobile and getting a perfect 10/10 score from the Total Mobile Magazine

Worms_Total Mobile.pdf