Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Too Much Dessert Combat

    You know you’ve been playing too much Desert Combat when you start to freak out at the sound of a traffic helicopter. When walking the street to lunch with my co-workers, I was suddenly saddened to know a heli was base camping at the Buckhead Bellsouth building. I knew I was dead, and would have to respawn inside.

    Today when driving home I saw the chopper in front of me, and knew I was screwed, because only tanks are tough enough to withstand a machine gun barrage that those choppers can throw… specially the frikin’ Apache’s. I knew my del Sol couldn’t protect me from even their gunfire because it’s strength is the same as the USA’s Hummer in-game.

  • SWG Resource Viewer v2

    I haven’t touched this in a week, and probably won’t touch it again. As I reach some milestones, I cannot really see how much further I could take this. Granted, there are a few dialogues I could add to better peruse the data as well as add the graphical elements to make it more like the game… but I’d rather tackle bigger side-projects.

    Anyway, uploading in case anyone wants the code. This is a remake of the Central SWG Craft Resource viewer. It reads XML feeds from swgcraft.com and displays the current resources for Star Wars Galaxies. It’s not optimized on a per server basis, and instead just downloads them all, and then saves locally. You have to manually refresh. Feel free to gank what you find useful. It was done in Flash MX 2004 vs. Central like the last one. I was going to port it, but just lost interest.

    SWG Resource Viewer v2 – ZIP

  • Job Market Full Circle

    Summer of 2001, even before 9/11, the job market was pretty bad. I remember seeing my college colleagues drop like flies on a mailing list setup via our professor. Her majesty and I were the only ones out of a group of 10 left with jobs. Industry events were typically somber affairs as meetings got less and less enthusiastic about new work, and more about is there work, who do you know, and frankly can I have a job?

    “Will design and/or code for food” was the mantra of the day.

    Fast-forward 2 years to today. At the Atlanta Macromedia Users’s group watching the Breeze presentation from Macromedia about upcoming products and features.

    7 Flash positions. Seven. Absolutely nuts. Everyone in the room was so apathetic when the job announcements were made, too, because … well, most of them were hiring vs. being talent to hire, me included (looking for 2). The same held true for after meeting networking, and the need for contractors. I don’t carry business cards for a reason.

    This won’t last long kids… Flash is hot; milk it!

  • ScrollPane DOES Support Styles

    Docs say it doesn’t, but it does. Here’s my fav; a borderless one!!!

    – drag a ScrollPane on stage
    – select it and delete it (so it’s in your library)
    – draw something big
    – select it
    – make it a movie clip
    – delete it from the stage
    – give it a linkage name of “test”
    – make a new layer
    – put this code on it

    attachMovie("ScrollPane", "mc", 0);
mc.setSize(100, 100);
mc.contentPath = "test";

function onKeyDown()
{
        switch(Key.getCode()){
                case Key.LEFT:
                mc.setStyle("borderStyle", "none");
                break;
                
                case Key.UP:
                mc.setStyle("borderStyle", "inset");
                break;
                
                case Key.RIGHT:
                mc.setStyle("borderStyle", "outset");
                break;
                
                case Key.DOWN:
                mc.setStyle("borderStyle", "solid");
                
                break;
        }
}

Key.addListener(this);

    – test movie
    – pressing “left” arrow key is my favorite; borderless

    Funny thing, if you scroll your content to the middle, and then keep pressing down and left, down and left, etc., the content will move slightly. A bug, but no one would really care.