Month: April 2009

AS3 Date Class, PHP and Unix Timestamps

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This is a real quick post about Unix Timestamps, PHP, and ActionScript 3’s Date class.  When creating a new Date instance, you can pass in a Unix Timestamp into the Date constructor.


var myDate:Date = new Date( unix_timestamp_from_php );
trace( myDate.toString() );  // Invalid Date

When I was working with this, I continually received Invalid date in my output window.  Looking into the matter, if you read php.net’s time() function description and then taking a look at livedocs Date class we’ll quickly see the problem.

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3 Lessons Learned in Noob Collaborative Game Development

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I’m currently working on a 2D RPG Game Engine ( think Zelda or FinalFantasyII/IV ) in AS3. At the start of this project, as typical projects with friends go, it seems like a completely easy task. “Hey you know AS3… can you write us a quick game engine for this idea we have?” Sure… I’ve finished a simple little game before, I can totally do that.

Take 1:

From previous (limited) game dev experience I know I’ll need to set up a heirarchy of classes to handle Player Characters, Enemies, Scenes, Buttons, etc. So, thinking things out logically (read: noobishly (?) ) the first thing the team will want to see is going to be a the big-picture, visual framework. I sit down and start hammering out a SceneManager to handle scene changes easily. I’ve created an IZFScene interface to standardize the methods of all of my Scene objects for the SceneManager to manipulate. I’ve got my placeholder backgrounds that I tossed into the Flash Library from photoshop ( or MSPaint ) and I’m off and running creating smooth fade-in/fade-out transitions between scenes. The engine process looks like:

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