Archive for January, 2007

Behind the blog

Computers Behind Blogs pool on flickr.

Finally, a decent editing font

I’ve been struggling, since my switch to OS X, to find a decent bitmap small font that is very readable and aliased for OS X.

Today I found ProFont, which is perfect in Eclipse if you set OS X to alias fonts <=10pt.

I’ve also found Anonymous, which is great if you don’t want to turn of anti-aliasing at smaller sizes, it looks great at 11pt.

Anyone else know a good font for OS X coders?

Kernel Debugger

debugger
I’ve been using this for a long time now, it’s a debugger that runs in another SWF and is passed trace statements via my Debug class, with different levels or detail, info, warning, event, classinfo, error etc. It also has a runtime monitor graph at the bottom, the yellow line showing the current framerate, and the blue line showing the time it takes to execute all threads currently running in the Kernel class. The Kernel is basically a single onEnterFrame on a MovieClip in the _root, which runs through an array of threads, I simply have a getTimer() at either side of the thread execution and time it, this is a great way to view code-weight, especially when developing games or persistent enviornments such as physical engines.

I will make a public release of the Kernel, Thread and ThreadGroup classes soon, which will also include the debugger.

2D Physics API

I’ve recently been doing some games work that required some pretty full on physics, after battling with vectors and collision reflection on wheels and other objects, I ditched what I had done and am now working with FlaDE (Flash Dynamics Engine) an AS 2.0 GPL Licensed API. It’s written by Alec Cove, and is very easy to use. It never went to final release, and he has now moved on to APE (ActionScript Physics Engine) which is written instead in AS 3.0 and is again GPL Licensed.

Very Clean 3D vector rendering

lab-badimon.jpg

Just found this http://lab.mathieu-badimon.com/

Some serious work has gone into the vector-renderer under the bonnet of this one! Good stuff