package {

import mx.controls.*;
import mx.events.*;

public class ToggleLinkBar extends LinkBar {

public function ToggleLinkBar() {
super();
addEventListener(ItemClickEvent.ITEM_CLICK,changeToggle);
}

private function changeToggle(e:ItemClickEvent):void {
for(var i:int = 0; i < numChildren; i++) {
Button(getChildAt(i)).enabled = (selectedIndex != i);
}
}
}
}

Works like a charm!

Note: I shrunk it down so it would fit in this blog pane (I’ve made a mental note to fix that later).  The actual game dimensions are 600×500,  so don’t tax your eyes too badly playing it here!  You can see a bigger version at one of my ugly temporary pages here.
]]> http://www.simianlogicstudios.com/2008/01/11/filler-a-game/feed/ 26 http://www.simianlogicstudios.com/2007/12/10/piqqem-in-flexapps-on-flickr/ http://www.simianlogicstudios.com/2007/12/10/piqqem-in-flexapps-on-flickr/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:18:40 +0000 SimianLogic http://simianlogic3d.com/blog/2007/12/10/piqqem-in-flexapps-on-flickr/ A little while ago at work, we switched veins from “Totally Super Secret” to “Shhh, don’t tell too many people, but we’ll give out a few accounts.”  The bosses didn’t want any press releases or newspaper articles just yet, but my co-worker and I spent a couple of days seeing if there were any slightly-stealthy ways to get some word out.  I had stumbled across Ted Patrick’s FlexApps component a couple of months ago, so this seemed like a perfect excuse to test it out.  There hadn’t been any new posts since April, so there was a chance that the group (even though it’s only run by one person) was defunct–but that didn’t deter me.  I’d sort of forgotten all about it until this morning my boss sent us a link asking who’d submitted them  (in a “good job” sort of way).

TypeError: Error #1006: getInstance is not a function…

Figuring that there was some sort of reference to something internal, I started pulling code out. A lot of code out. Eventually I stripped out all of the Meta, all of the Script code, and was left with pure MXML… with anything not core (i.e. function calls) also dumped. It still wouldn’t work. Eventually I had it stripped to the following, and that’s when the “DUH” gods struck:

Of course it should throw an error–I hadn’t wrapped my Panel in any sort of application. I reverted back to the stock Adobe code, made another mxml file with an application in it to load the hacked-RTE, and it worked like a charm the first time out. Because I went into the conversion thinking it would take some nudging to work, I missed my own silly error.

I guess it could be worse, though–it’s not like I have to write my own RTE component from scratch.

After doing some debugging to make sure my sound listeners were actually getting the proper events and firing off the sounds, I was pretty perplexed.  A bunch of google searches with queries like “as3 sound won’t play”, “as3 sound broken”, etc… yielded nothing interesting–the code was correct! Then it hit me.  Every so often when  I play a video or sound file in Windows Media Player, close the application, and then try to delete the video–I’ll get an error saying the file is still in use.  There seems to be some sort of bug in WMP–it doesn’t always release assets properly, even when you completely close the application.

The odd thing is that the flex compiler didn’t throw any kind of warning that the assets it was trying to embed weren’t available.  They just never played.  After deleting the files from my assets directory, copying them back in from my sound library, and recompiling (with no code changes), everything worked like a charm.  No matter how much I love my X-Box, Mac and Linux just keep getting more and more tempting…

This isn’t to say that I’m going to ever stop making games… because it’s too much fun. I’m not going to hold my breath on the financial rewards coming in from the MochiAds, but it’s pretty cool that I can track how many people are playing across a bunch of different sites (sadly, MochiBot doesn’t work with Flash 9 yet). And once it’s been out there awhile, I can flip a switch and turn all the low-CPM ads into links back to my own site.

Why does doing interface stuff take so long? Well, for one thing, it’s boring as hell. This is the main reason MXML exists… but unfortunately, neither of the two “services” I’m targeting allow it: Whirled (still in super-secret Alpha) and MochiAds. The other that I wouldn’t mind supporting is Kongregate, but they’re not Flash 9-enabled, yet. Perhaps Flex isn’t quite mainstream enough (and by that I mean stupid-simple). Or maybe rather than building more games I should devote some time to developing an AS3-only interface library.
On to the game! I whipped up an ad-crazy embedded version just to test out a couple of other ad mechanics. Or you could go directly to the SWF. The thing runs at 900×400, so I’m not sure how well it’s going to embed below:

The selection quirks are indeed fixed in the new version, but there were two more bugs in the ToggleButtonBar code. The logic for whether or not to select or deselect a particular button happens in the function “hiliteSelectedNavItem,” which is called after the clickHandler. So what? This means, from an itemClickEvent perspective, that the ToggleButtonBar will NEVER generate an event where the selectedIndex = -1. Why don’t I just check the TBB’s selectedIndex manually instead of trusting the events? Well, the handler for the event is actually getting called before the TBB’s hiliteSelectedNavItem fires, so as far as my event handler is concerned the selectedIndex can never be -1.

As I want the deselects to turn off paragraph styles, this is a bad thing. Luckily, it’s easy to fix. In the clickHandler function, you need to change it so that if you’re turning off a button it dispatches that event rather than letting the parent NavBar fire of its simpler “You clicked on Button #4″ event:

Previous version:

if (_toggleOnClick && index == selectedIndex)
hiliteSelectedNavItem(-1);
else
hiliteSelectedNavItem(index);
super.clickHandler(event);

if (_toggleOnClick && index == selectedIndex)
{
selectedIndex = -1;
hiliteSelectedNavItem(-1);
var newEvent:ItemClickEvent = new ItemClickEvent(ItemClickEvent.ITEM_CLICK);
newEvent.label = "none";
newEvent.index = -1;
newEvent.item = null;
dispatchEvent(newEvent);

event.stopImmediatePropagation();
}else{
hiliteSelectedNavItem(index);
super.clickHandler(event);
}