Ghostees: Meet the Grave Digger

Ghostees: Meet the Grave Digger

March 31, 2008 in Development

The core animations for most of the characters were rendered this week. One of the balancing acts you have to perform is the quality of the animation verses the size of the download. I can tell you now, Ghostees is going to be a demanding game for your processor and bandwidth but the eye candy is certainly worth it. I’ve developed a number of techniques to ease the burden on bandwidth. Luckily a lot of the content will be cached by the browser so subsequent loads will be kinder to your patience. I’m even going to offer an Adobe AIR version for anyone that might be feeling the pinch.

I wired up the foundation for server audited and filtered chat. Essentially when a player sends a chat message, it routes through the server first to be filtered. The server can modify or completely reject the text. If the text passes the server gauntlet, the server drops the text to the auditor service and then broadcasts the message to all applicable players.

Next I needed to take the World View class and create various layers for the visuals to appear on. Actually, two layers were already there (background and content layers) but I needed to add an overlay layer and made the decision to bundle them together in a unifying container. This caused some wierd offset calculation issues that I won’t bother explaining but caused me an hour or two of head scratching to figure it out. The talk bubbles show up on the overlay layer so they won’t be obscured an voila, I have chat.

I’m using the new Flex Builder 3 as my Flash development environment. There are some good bug fixes but actually not a ton of new stuff except the profiling capabilities. This is the sole reason I upgraded. I gave these features a whirl and found some nice optimizations.

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