What The Hell, Flash? Ep 2: When frame action gets inherited

Here we go again.

My work flow of doing Flash animation is to tween stuff in a MovieClip and use labels + gotoAndPlay() calls to switch between animations. Nowadays, with the switch to AS3, most of the animation controls are done via external script files, so the MovieClips in my library are now mostly devoid of any frame based actionscript (a very old leftover technique from like the Flash 4 days)... except that I still use frame actions for very simple looping calls (gotoAndPlay("anim1") at the last frame of the anim1 animation frames, for example).

I guess the title of this post is a pretty big spoiler, but I'm surprised I didn't encounter this problem until now. Usually if a series of animations shares the same animation control scripts (say, guy1, guy2, and guy3 all have different animations but are handled the same way), I'd have a common class that the animations would inherit from (Guy1 extends GuyAnim, Guy2 extends GuyAnim, etc). Only this time, I got lazy... I have a few animations inheriting from the first of its archetype, which contains all the control scripts (so Guy2 now extends Guy1, and Guy3 also extends Guy1...)

Imagine my surprise when the animations start glitching like no tomorrow. I guess getting a strange "invalid function override" warning when I place frame scripts on certain frames should have warned me to something, but it's just one of those quirky things where intention don't match behavior. I have two timelines with one set of animations in one clip and another set of animations in another clip. I have two script files (that doesn't contain any of the frame script) where one inherits the other. In appearance, nothing overlaps, but somehow the frame scripts are probably attached to the class objects during compile time, and the result is a total animation glitchy mess.

There are times when actionscript can accommodate the strangest, anachronistic workflows between multiple versions of Flash and still somehow make it all work. Then other times... well, this happens. Oh Flash, how I learned to hate to love you.

Webcomic Wednesday (Well, it was): Future Sight P18

It's aliiiiiiiive! It's aliiiiiiiive!

It's going to be increasingly rough to keep updates going since my work is entering an early crunch... sad too, I was finally loosening up by the time I draw the last panel...

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P17

So tired. I think it's the cake that's making me so sleepy.

Art wise, still recovering from the big hiatus last month. And that instructor... I'm not saying it's aliens... but it's aliens.

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P16

(Wait, this thing is still alive?)

It's aliiiiiive! It's aliiiiive!

The holiday season of game releases can make things extremely disorienting. I think I'm getting my bearings again... somehow. At the very least, I'm committed to finishing the first arc of Future Sight one way or another. No backing out of that!

Super Late Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P15

Got hit by a virus. Reformatted the computer, and getting all the pieces of printing the template, scanning, framing, and other parts back together. Other than that, I'm swarmed with games that I'm obligated to play. They're all grindy RPGs. I like these games, but I really hate it when I'm forced to progress at someone else's pace...

Right. Right. Pages!

Belated Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P14

It looks like with work and play filling up my time, this post a day schedule is impossibly hard to keep up... At the very least, I want to keep Future Sight going. It's the one thing that I actually want to do every week.

Hey, I just met him / and this is crazy / he did a number / but call him maybe

Melodic Thursday: Destiny

On short notice today.



And at the end of the solo, the strings section and the big brass joins in for the reprise... oh right. I haven't written that part in yet...

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P13

Finally, the weather cooled down!

Lynn seemed to have gone through several hair styles here, but all I wanted to do was to draw her head at different angles... bleh.

Rant Tuesday: It's Still Like This Ten Years Later?

Okay, so work is hard.

Modern webdev is also hard. Madness, even. You'd think that coming back after 10 years the whole HTML5 thing would be a bit more civilized... after all, the last time I touched JavaScript was when Flash was in version 4, when you had to cobble together code through drop down menus. It was horrible either way.

Ten years later, Flash is now a somewhat respectable coding environment, even if some of its quirks and slowness never went away, but javascript... it looks like nobody bothered to clean the lawn and everyone kept piling on trash, and there's people pitching tents around themselves like jQuery and they keep pretending the entire coding environment is anything but a steaming pile of manure.

There's no avoiding it though - Flash is going away. Less than five years from now there'd be more people using dedicated content consumption devices than content creation devices, and nobody is hedging their bets that Microsoft is going to pull through with the likes of Windows 8. So HTML5 is as close to the new "build once deploy everywhere" environment as you can get.

Meanwhile, I've found half a dozen ways to write a helper class to load a bunch of images, with none of them looking either right or wrong.

This transition is going to take quite a while.

Rhythmic Thursday: Jungle Bongo

I threw in Adobe Audition to get the final mix because I don't know how to pitch shift entire tracks in Renoise, and the timbre of the drums are off...



I think I'm at the stage where I should spend a month or two going over stuff I've already done and learn to tune the channels and add effects. As it stands, there's a few loops that I'd actually like to finish but couldn't within this 2-3 hour time frame I give myself each weekday.

Belated Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P12

Two words: scanner problems... It is a lame excuse, but it's what actually happened. It looks like the quality of the scan got affected as well...