Image in action

Bitcoin black friday

admin — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 06:27:47 +0000

What is happening in the market for Bitcoin in my opinion can be explained easily if one considers how the market is still small, but how big are the interests against the development of a peertopeer coin without masters and with no state control. If i was a banker, a federal reserve, a credit card owner, paypal or a gold reserve owner for now I can invest very little money to cause a depression in the bitcoin market. Mtgox has a volume of some hundreds of thousands. I can easily buy bitcoin at 20 and sell at 15, rebuy at 15 and sell at 10. I will lose maybe some million dollars but this it is very very little in comparison to what I might lose in the future if bitcoin establishing themselves as digital money currently used. Some day ago there was Bilderberg Group reunion, i think some of the speech were about bitcoin and their risk for the establishement. Now someone is working on bitcoin… Could this stop the bitcoin economy? Surely a big deflation was a big advertising for bitcoin and now depression can stop enthusiasm of some folks but bitcoin are still a great idea and i hope there will a future for them because we all need their freedom.

Multilanguage flash

admin — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 11:03:43 +0000

I recently created the multi-language version of a flash game that I had developed. Practically I had to change all the texts from static to dynamic so you can change their text. In addition, all messages sent by the program, had to be changed from fixed strings to variables. Most important of all, I had to implement a system that would make it easier to edit a text, add a new language, make sure that the user could click a button and change the language throughout the site. Logically, I decided to put all the text of the site in external files. I could have used XML file for this but I did not like their verbosity. I wanted something more like ini files that are normally used for this function. Searching the net I found an open source library that, among many other things, has a class that does just what I needed. The library is called Spring ActionScript and is the porting from Java to actionscript of an open source project. The class in question, then, is Properties. The documentation says in this respect: “The Properties class Represents a collection of properties in the form of key-value pairs.” Perfect! It was just what I was looking for. The class has only three methods, but just what I needed:

getProperty (key: String): String
Gets the value of property That corresponds to the given key.

load (url: String): void
Loads a collection of properties from an external file.
setProperty (key: String, value: String): void
Sets a property.

To be honest, I not even need the third method for this purpose.

At this point, I created my ini files. They are simple key and value pairs. Like this

! License free.
! Note : All ini files need to be saved as UTF-8
TITLE                    Title
MESSAGE                  Message
MSG_1                    Click "Close" or try to change the language
MSG_2                    You clicked "Close"
SELECT_LANGUAGES         Select the language
CLOSE                    CLose

I also created another ini to tell the program which languages are present and how are named their files, here it is:

it        it-IT.language.ini
gb        en-EN.language.ini
es        es-ES.language.ini

Well, now I had to create a class that would manage everything. I created a singleton class (a design pattern that I hope all of you already know) so that was easily recalled by all classes of the program. Uhm, maybe it’s better than, if you are interested, you downloaded the zip with all the sample files so I can explain what I did without having to put all the code in the article.
Ok, first, have a look at what is inside the zip. There is the fla and swf of the example, the two external library i used in the code, the flashDevelop project, the 4 ini file used by the swf, a folder with all the flag for any type of language you could use in your project and a classes folder with all the source code. Do you think it’s enough?
Let’s see what the main class Languages does.
When Languages is instantiated the first time, it creates a Properties, which will contain the names of the languages that you have set into languages.ini and load it. Once loaded, set the current language to the first language found in languages.ini otherwise, in my case, set as default Italian. Then load the ini files for that language and, once done, does the dispatch of an event to warn that the language is loaded. You can now use the method getSentence to receive the string corresponding to a key for the current language. Another useful method of this class is changeLanguage that allows you to change the current language. Besides this main class I have also provided a class that allows you to automatically display the flags for the languages present so you can easily change the language. The code, although it does not contain comments, it should be clear enough. However, if you have questions, contact me.

I accept Bitcoins

admin — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:04:04 +0000

Have you heard about Bitcoins?

According to Wikipedia “Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. The name also refers both to the open source software he designed to make use of the currency and to the peer-to-peer network formed by running that software.

Unlike other digital currencies, Bitcoin avoids central authorities and issuers. Bitcoin uses a distributed database spread across nodes of a peer-to-peer network to journal transactions, and uses digital signatures and proof-of-work to provide basic security functions, such as ensuring that bitcoins can be spent only once per owner and only by the person who owns them.

Bitcoins can be saved on a personal computer in the form of a wallet file or kept with a third party wallet service, and in either case bitcoins can be sent over the Internet to anyone with a Bitcoin address. The peer-to-peer topology and lack of central administration are features that make it infeasible for any authority (governmental or otherwise) to manipulate the quantity of bitcoins in circulation, thereby mitigating inflation.”

In the past days I read a lot about bitcoins and I decided to accept them as kind of payment for my work. At actual change rate I will charge you 4 bitcoins/hour, less may be for big jobs.

I could also accept bitcoin donation if someone want to contribute…

My bitcoin address is 18kdp6EPHQjXZHWcgC3kdXw8cEQpgt3fKH
so fell fre to send me some bitcoin cents!!!

Steering Behavior Library From C++ To As3

admin — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 11:11:51 +0000

Hi all,
i converted a c++ library of steering behaviors to as3. See the page on the blog.
It’s still in beta because I’m testing it to be sure there are no errors. The library is taken from the source code of the book “Programming game ai by example” you can find c++ sources and binaries at http://www.jblearning.com/Catalog/9781556220784/student/ and some excerpt and related talk at http://www.ai-junkie.com/books/index.html my first two little example in as3 are at http://www.imageinaction.net/works/steeringBehavior/flocking.html and http://www.imageinaction.net/works/steeringBehavior/followPath.html (refresh the page to get a new random path)
The library is based on simple behaviors like seek, avoid, interpose, obstacles avoidance, cohesion, alignement etc. that can be combined togheter to get a more complex behavior. by the way as part of it there are some usefull class to perform some geometry, collision detection, vector operation. there is anybody out there that would like to help me testing, improving, optimizing the code? I would like to release it as open source as soon as I ended the tests. By now you can download it on the Steering Behaviors page but remember it’s still beta…
I think that such a library can be a great resource to anyone developing as3 games.
Let me know..

Actionscript chess PGN file viewer

admin — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 10:14:27 +0000

I started to make a .PGN file viewer in actionscript. For the uninitiated the PGN format (not to be confused with the PNG) is a format for encoding of chess match. I am not here to explain how the format works, to know this you can view this page. I just wanted to let you see what I have done so far. The program loads a pgn from your computer and re-create the game on the board allowing you to scroll through the moves with a keyboard or clicking on the move who want to go. This is only a part of what I want to do, I want to reproduce all the features of the tool you can find at www.gameknot.com. Try it and let me know what you think. Of course you should have at least one pgn on your computer to prove it. The Internet is full of free pgn database, however if you do not even give you a link here to prove a pgn viewer. is the first match between Kasparov and Deep Blue …

Beasts of South Africa – February 2011

admin — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:52:25 +0000

The King is dead. Long live the King.

admin — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:18:10 +0000

My notebook is dead. Gone. Buried… Sigh! The motherboard is gone, the graphic card burned. I don’t know what happened. I just know that they asked me 670 euro to repair it… No way! Tomorrow I will receive a brand new notebook I ordered from internet. It costs me 699 euro but it’s more more powerfull… It’s a Core i7 from Asus. Specifically an ASUS X52JT-SX013V Core i7-740QM 4x 1.66GHz • 4096MB (2x 2048MB) • 500GB • DVD+/-RW DL • ATI Radeon 6370M 1024MB. The graphic card it’s not the maximum but I think I will use this notebook just to work so it won’t be a problem. May be that I will install Battlefield Bad Company 2… but just to try, I swear!!!

Ghost’n'Goblin 2.0 – Unity3D Experiment

admin — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 11:29:52 +0000

Well, the course is over. It was hard but is gone… Now, waiting a new work for Samsung that would start on january, I want to restart my new technology studies.
After some experiment with Alternativa3D platform I think that the flash Molehill technology is still in a too opening stage to understand the road to take. So I decide to wait some other month before study it in deep. Among other things we need to understand what kind of physics engine to associate Alternativa3D since for now the library contains only one species of Raycasting to handle collisions, but not a real physics engine, assuming that it will ever have one. The prospects in this field come from Jiblib or the WOW physics engine based on the APE libraries (2D physics engine Cove). So I decide for now to continue studying the Unity3D engine that at least has a good IDE to work with. With my friend Roberto Liberati for the 3d Studio part and some other friends for the music and graphics, we have started trying to do a remake of the famous old 2d game “Ghost and Goblin” in a 3d version. For now, we are just familiarizing with the Unity3D engine and make some experiment with the IDE and the language but you can have a preliminary look at our work here. It’s still a first alpha version but you can understand what we are aiming to do.
Stay tuned because we will update the demo as the work will proceed!!!

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre course…

admin — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 21:04:34 +0000

From tomorrow I start to hold a crash course in Actionscript 3 for beginners. Will be nine days to eight hours a day, practically the Texas Chainsaw Massacre … I hope to keep high the concentration of the students, even though I realize that the days are few and the concepts to be learned from the ground are many. My goal is to give them the foundation to be able to independently write simple programs and above all being able to go it alone in the study of Actionscript knowing how to look in the manual, in some book and on the web. In my dreams I would be able to program with them a little breakout-style game but I do not know if it will be possible in such a short time. In fact, even if the 72 hours could be enough, they are too concentrated to give them time to assimilate the many concepts needed and to have some time to do exercises on their own. The ideal would be to dilute the 72 hour course over a minimum of 6 weeks. In order not to give them too much notions all together and have time to make them do some exercises on their own.

Purpose of study for the near future!

admin — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 13:39:35 +0000

The workflow that starts from Photoshop and Illustrator through Catalyst until you get to Flash Builder 4.

The new version of the server socket SmartfoxServer 2 and consequently the Java language required by this version for implement server-side extensions.

The graphics engine for Flash of Alternativa for being ready when at the end of next year will be released the new Flash player with built-in support for true 3D.

A better understanding of the Facebook API and Google.

Learn how to develop applications iPhone / iPad starting from Flash and / or Flex Air with the conversion tools that Adobe is setting up.

As you can see there’s a lot of stuff to study among other jobs, but basically this is the beauty of this job or not?