RAVE AI is an upcoming artificial intelligence framework for Flash/AS3 by Tomas Vymazal from Brno, Czech Republic. The main purpose of this framework are 2D/3D first person shooter games and other sort of games that require agent simulation. It supports JSON finite state machine definition, so you can predefine the behavior of agents. Next to that it supports 2D/3D terrain, bridges, very optimized pathfinding, sight/raycasting/shooting and there is a very impressive yet internal roadmap as well.

You can look forward to it later this year, the performance is amazing and Tomas is also planning to add support for ActionScript Workers for background processing later when available.

See it in action / rendering via Minko engine:

Get in touch with Tomas at twitter @myownclone.

Stay tuned for more.

Botanicula is a new point-and-click adventure puzzle game brought to you by well known Amanita Design from Brno, Czech Republic (the creators of Machinarium and Samorost), so you can expect great visual art, music and many hours of magical gameplay with a tons of fun.

Botanicula is a winner of the Independent Games Festival 2012 – Excellence in Audio award and was a nominee for Excellence in Art.

The game has been around for almost two weeks and it’s still very high in Mac App Store and #1 in many countries.

(screenshot from main page of Mac App Store last week)

(2 out of 3 top paid apps in US Mac App Store are done in Flash, screenshot from the last week)

Download from Mac App Store

The game is available also as a part of special Humble Bundle: The Humble Botanicula Debut, that includes Machinarium, Samorost and Windosill – all done in Flash + Kooky the movie (that has been illustrated by Jakub Dvorsky from Amanita).

The game will debut on Steam very soon, integrated with SteamWorks APIs using an AIR Native Extension written by David ‘Oldes’ Oliva from Amanita / Download the Steam extension from Github.

Trailer:

Bottom line: If you haven’t played this game yet, go ahead and touch the stars!

Coloropus created by Pigsels Media has been launched on Mac App Store / download here.

The game uses AIR 3.2 and you can read an article by Pigsels about the publishing process. Also note that the upcoming AIR 3.3 has better Mac App Store and we highly recommend using AIR 3.3 for publishing apps to Mac App Store.

I’d like to invite you to my Flash gaming talks at the following events in April and May:

April 13: Flash Gaming Tour – Beijing, China
April 24-25: Beyond Tellerrand Play – Cologne, Germany
April 28-29: TIGA Game Hack, Pinewood Studios, UK (just visiting)

May (date TBA): Flash Gaming Tour – Guangzhou, China
May 22: Casual Connect Asia, Singapore
May 24: Flash Camp, Jakarta, Indonesia
May 26: Flash Camp, Manila, Philippines

Map of the events:

View Upcoming events – Tom Krcha – April/May 2012 in a larger map

Flash Player 11.2 with playerglobal.swc and AIR 3.2 SDK final versions are now available for download at the official release pages.

Adobe Flash Player – downloads: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

Download Adobe AIR SDK: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/air-sdk-download.html

There are lot of new significant features like mouseLock, middle click, right click, silent auto-update and Stage3D on mobile.

Go and get it.

Popular 3D framework from Russia Alternativa Platform is now opensource. The source code has been published to github and is available here:
https://github.com/AlternativaPlatform/Alternativa3D

You can read more here on Alternativa’s blog.
http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/2012/03/29/alternativa3d-8-is-out-in-open-source/

See Alternativa’s showcase including MAX Racer, Tanki Online, Ostrova Online and more…

Recently one of my friends came across an issue that happens when you store some app files on Android on the SD card. I have to thank my friends from Inmite for tips and Oldes from Amanita for testing this.

The problem is that your Android app can be maximum 50 MBs if you want put it on Android Market. But there is a solution if you have bigger apps, you just need to download the additional files from your own server, where you have to host them. Once you download these additional files, you save them to SD card on the device and then the app can use them.

But, you have to think where to actually put them. If you make a custom folder on the SD card and uninstall the app, the files will be still there, so they won’t be deleted. That’s the behavior you probably don’t want.

Solution

If you want to delete these additional app files during application uninstall process you have to put them into a folder that has the same name as the app ID according to the official documentation [http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/data-storage.html#AccessingExtFiles].

Extract:
/Android/data/<package_name>/files/
The <package_name> is your Java-style package name, such as “com.example.android.app”. If the user’s device is running API Level 8 or greater and they uninstall your application, this directory and all its contents will be deleted.

If you have an AIR app, don’t forget to include the air.* prefix.

so in this case, it will be air.com.example.android.app folder, where you keep your files that will be deleted during uninstall.

That’s it.

One of the nice and almost hidden features in Adobe AIR 3.2 is the possibility to define supported languages for your apps which will get reflected in Apple App Store.

Instead of this:

You are now able to shrink it to this:

How to set this?

Open your application-descriptor.xml file and add

	<supportedLanguages>en</supportedLanguages>

Your final XML file should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/3.2">
	<id>com.game.id</id>
	<versionNumber>0.0.0</versionNumber>
	<versionLabel></versionLabel>
	<filename>FILENAME</filename>
	<description>
		<text xml:lang="en">DESCRIPTION</text>
	</description>
 
	<name>
		<text xml:lang="en">NAME</text>
	</name>
 
	<copyright>COPYRIGHT</copyright>
 
	<initialWindow>
		<content>CONTENT.swf</content>
		<aspectRatio>portrait</aspectRatio>
		<autoOrients>false</autoOrients>
		<fullScreen>true</fullScreen>
		<renderMode>direct</renderMode>
	</initialWindow>
 
	<supportedLanguages>en</supportedLanguages>
 
	<icon>
		<image512x512>i512x512.png</image512x512>
		<image72x72>i72x72.png</image72x72>
		<image57x57>i57x57.png</image57x57>
		<image48x48>i48x48.png</image48x48>
		<image29x29>i29x29.png</image29x29>
	</icon>
 
	<iPhone>
		<InfoAdditions> 
			<![CDATA[ 
				<key>UIPrerenderedIcon</key> 
				<true/> 
 
				<key>UIDeviceFamily</key> 
				<array> 
					<string>1</string> 
					<string>2</string> 
				</array>
			]]> 
		   <requestedDisplayResolution>high</requestedDisplayResolution>
		</InfoAdditions> 
	</iPhone>
</application>

Geometry Arena is a retro game for iOS, Android, Facebook and desktop built on top of Genome2D Stage3D framework by its author Peter Štefček (sHTiF) from Slovakia.

The game is available for FREE! So go and get it
Download for iPad and iPhone / Universal
Download for Android
+
Play on Facebook
Play on Newgrounds

The game also supports iOS Game Center via AIR Native Extension. Let’s see who is going to lead the board.

I’ve asked Peter several questions:

Peter did also some experiments with overlaying 2D Stage3D framework over 3D Stage3D framework, like here Genome2D running on top Away3D, which is very powerful technique and let’s you build for instance UI in Genome2D and the actual game in Away3D. You can read more details about this technique here.

At this year’s Beyond Tellerrand Play conference in Cologne, Germany I will be doing a 4h half-day Starling workshop. Starling is a 2D based rendering framework for Stage3D with API similar to DisplayList. Angry Birds for Facebook are for instance running on top of Starling.
We will go step by step through most of the Starling features, starting with rendering, animations, adding physics, collisions and particles. I will also demonstrate how to bring the game to iOS and Android using Adobe AIR.

24th April 2012 – mark your calendar. Register here for the workshop.