Learning From Others

Today our topic is "Learning From Others," obviously. It's not what I expected at all. I thought it would be a review or critique day; I usually like those days. Alas, it is more a topic on how to copy code from a specific source, which, I'll admit, is infinitely useful in a more cryptic way.

The main tutorial was on the actual wiki. This makes things a good bit easier. The assignment seemed more mental than proving one is able to execute the process, as it is such a simple process, proof is probably not needed. I would think the "moral" of this subject pertains more to being able to view other's works to see exactly how they did a particular action, not being able to copy something verbatim.

I found no tutorials that would really help with what I'm doing in my game at this very moment, as the links given seemed too general. (The word "flash" typed into a browser doesn't seem as helpful as I'd like it to be.)

Programming

Today's topic is programming, so we watched a short video on the subject.

The video seemed helpful, instilling the fundamentals of our action panel. It made sure to stress the importance of our global function books, which I had been overlooking for so long. I'd have to locate very specific tutorials to find, well, almost any sort of code I needed. I now realize that this additional work is nearly always pointless, as the books contain most, if not all, of the code I could ever need.

Also, as a class, we were asked to find one tutorial that will help us exponentially in our game. The biggest issue we have in our game is adding collision detection to one of Heath's scenes, so the collision detection tutorial will probably be the most helpful at this point.

The site with the collision detection tutorial:
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/hittest.htm

Actionscript and Problems

Well, it's been almost two weeks that we've not been in class. I was dreadfully bored the entire time, honestly, but that's not the point of this post. In this post, we've been instructed to discuss our experience in action scripting before the break, and the problems we may have had with the website.

There were a few problems with a link, the video and, for me, the code we were told to download. The third problem being caused by my personal computer, not the actual site. Watching the video out of sync for a second time didn't really both me; I still understood the key points. The problem with the link was annoying, though.

When I began playing with the numbers on the Frogger-esque example, I had fun. Making the speeds irrational, increasing the number of spawning enemies, the things one always wishes he or she could do in a video game. So, I honestly couldn't complain about the experience, the two problems on the site are easy to overlook, as the basic tutorials cover most aspects of the assignment. The only thing we're missing out on, as a class, are the more elaborate details.