Its tutorial time again: With further development of my AS3 Tile Based Game Engine, need has arisen for the inclusion of some simple save game functionality. Constraints set by the overarching project brief have led to the decision to make use of Flash’s Shared Object facilities.
The following is a cut down version of a quick personal future reference article, which can be found here.
So whats a Shared Object
Flash “Shared Objects” provide facility to store and retrieve information on a clients machine similar in method to conventional to cookies. Example use’s for Shared Object data could include a user’s name, progress and high score.
Creating a Shared Object
Before we can use a shared object, we have to create a reference to it within our Flash movie. To do so, just put this line of code in the first frame of your movie:
save_data = SharedObject.getLocal("user_data");
Writing Data to the Object
Writing data to the object s an easy task. Take a look at the following example to save a users game progress: Read..
When developing in AS3, there are times when you will need to be able to define the users focus, for things like moving a user onto a desired input TextField, after a page has transitioned or for ensuring that any input code you might have will capture events.
If you search the web, or in the Flash IDE help in reference to setting focus, you might find notes on the FocusManager, IFocusManager, and possibly some details on having to include components for these classes to be triggered. These are all significant in some situations, but for setting focus in everyday AS3, it’s much, much easier.
All you really need to do is use stage.focus property.
As it is a read/write property, by result you are provided with ultimate control. The following details some AS3 code which allows you force focus onto any InteractiveObject – Sprites, MovieClips, TextFields etc:
stage.focus = your_object
So say we have a list of clips stored as an Array like so:
var movieA:MovieClip = new MovieClip();
var movieB:MovieClip = new MovieClip();
addChild(movieA);
addChild(movieB);
var clips:Array = new Array(movieA, movieB);
We could set the focus to movieB by calling the following:
stage.focus = clips[1];
Simple eh. I use a similar system for controlling button tabbing within some of my applications. The above code is fairly psudo so I hope you get the idea.
Paradox is developed by the same guy who did 3d pathfinding in as3. Developed in the flash format Paradox seems to be a high quality 3d engine full of promise.
To Jump straight to the demos click on the images, controls e, s, d and f keys + mouse and click.
For full details check out the following: animasinteractive.com , actionscriptarchitect.com
I must remember to keep an eye on this one.
Of interest to me at the moment especially as Im developing similar in lingo.
actionscriptarchitect.com
drawk.wordpress.com
