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Peter Vullings's picture
Jun 13th, 2011
Elegant object pooling in AS3

A large overhead when developing in AS3 (or any language for that matter) is the creation and disposal of objects.  Each time this happens the system needs to allocate memory for that object (or deallocate memory), and this takes time and processor overhead.

 

Peter Vullings's picture
Apr 13th, 2011
ADT helper tool

 We have created a tool to help compile Adobe AIR projects for iOS (Android coming soon) with the ADT.  It reproduces the functionallity (plus more) of the export dialogs within Adobe CS5.
 
Disclaimer:  this software is provided as-is with no gaurantees whatsoever.  It is in pre-alpha mode, and not all features are implemented yet.  Download and/or use this software at your own risk.  We have created this for our own use internally, but are providing it to the community so that other people may benefit also.

Peter Vullings's picture
Feb 22nd, 2011
Latest Facebook Stats (Feb 2011)

Continuing our popular Facebook stats reports, here are the Facebook stats for New Zealand, Australia and USA as of today (22 Feb 2011).
 
Trends

Peter Vullings's picture
Oct 4th, 2010
Flash on iPhone - wildly fluctuating framerate or frame skip?

On a diversion while porting Mr Ice Cream to iPhone, I created a quick benchmarking app to test the performance of AS3 bitmap sprites on iPhone.  The results are very bizarre - I would welcome any feedback on why I might be seeing these results.
 
What we get is a wildly fluctuating framerate (choppy, varying, whatever you want to call it), so that even if the average frame rate is reported as 25fps, the framerate will fluctuate rapidly between 12 and 60.  This is only evident when using the CPU.
 

Peter Vullings's picture
Sep 28th, 2010
How to stop employees emailing

Give them games!
 
Nielsen reports in a recent study on the online habits of Americans that online gaming has overtaken personal email as the second most popular thing to do online (after social networking).

Figure sourced and © Nielsen
 

Peter Vullings's picture
Sep 28th, 2010
Birds eye view of our studio

How cool is our studio/office?

 

We're in a converted 1920's model dairy factory. 'Model' as in it was used to represent how a dairy factory should be built and operated, rather than as a commercial enterprise.  It was attached to Massey University, just across the road - oh, it makes sense now!

 

This is our corner of it.

 

Click for larger image

Peter Vullings's picture
Sep 23rd, 2010
Optimising Flash for iPhone - sprite atlas

Following the first attempt to get our Flash Lite game Mr Ice Cream running on iPhone it was very clear that iPhone specific optimisations were required.

 

Peter Vullings's picture
Sep 16th, 2010
Bringing Mr Ice Cream to iPhone (Adobe Flash AS3)

Mr Ice Cream, our award-nominated mobile game (originally Flash Lite), is coming to an iOS device near you.
 

 
Early experiments using the Flash Professional CS5  packager for iPhone have been disappointing.  We did a quick port of the game as-is to the iPhone and saw frame rates of around 5-6 fps (iPhone 3G). Keep in mind the game is already extremely optimised to run on Flash Lite 2.0 devices that are at least 3 years old.
 

Peter Vullings's picture
Aug 19th, 2010
Latest Facebook Stats (August 2010)

Following on from last month where we reported the latest Facebook stats for July, here are the Facebook stats for New Zealand, Australia and USA as of today (18 August).
 
One thing that is clear is that older age groups are accounting for a large amount of the growth on Facebook over the past month.  The 50+ age group in New Zealand only accounts for 13% of the total NZ Facebook population, however it has grown by 10% since last month!
 

Peter Vullings's picture
Aug 18th, 2010
USA vs NZ

This is not quite 'hot of the press', but still interesting. I just noticed that Sean Kauppinen of IDEA had posted a link some time ago containing a summary of USA gamer statistics from the ESA (Entertainment Software Association).