kaioa.com

The hashes match

I just finished a tiny web application. And by tiny I do indeed mean tiny. It's a single file and less than 8kb in size (thanks to GZRepack). You can check it over at riddler.kaioa.com.

It allows you to store the hashes of answers to some question in an URL. If someone clicks on that URL he/she is then asked for the solution. If it matches any of the up to 5 hashes the icon and the border turn green and he/she can then start the next round.

The art of shuffling

What it says on the tin, really

Here you'll get Flash (AS3), haXe, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, and Python ports of my continuous shuffled sequence algorithm. As usual the code is available under a Zero-clause BSD-style license, which means you can use it in any way you like.

All implementations utilize an un-seeded default source of randomness. If determinism is required, you'll only need to hand over a PRNG and use that one instead. Or hand the seed over and initialize the PRNG with that one as the original Java version did it.

*squish*

SWF gaiden (side story)

This is some kind of spin-off from my previous mini project. As I said back then Deflate is everywhere. SVGZ files are just gzipped SVGs for example. I thought it would be nice to have some specific tool for SVGZs, but since it's just GZip I decided to generalize it a little bit.

It's basically a logical sub step on the way to the next SWF re-compression utility. It spawns several worker threads which invoke different ZIP utilities with different switches. E.g. with 2 cores there are 2 worker threads by default, which means it can keep up to 12 cores busy with the current default configuration (it contains 12 tasks). At the end the smallest Deflate stream is extracted and put into a GZip file.

The tool is similar to PNGOUT, OptiPNG, or PNGCrush insofar as it clearly puts the priority on size over time — except that it's for GZ/TGZ/SVGZ/etc. files instead of PNG.

Hrrrrrngh!

Intro

With web games you want hits — lot's of hits. A million per month or more if possible. Of course this means lots of traffic. While broadband became faster and cheaper during the last couple of years, traffic is still somewhat expensive. In order to get a nicer cost/income ratio there are apparently two options: reduce the costs and/or increase the income.

As you might have guessed I'm about to tackle the former with brute processing power. If you reduce the file size by 1% every 100th served file is free. With 5% it's every 20th file and with 10% every 10th file. If the price for that are only a few minutes of processing power it looks like a really good deal, doesn't it?

A series of tubes (or not)

I'm using this network stuff for about a decade by now. I always just filled the required values in and never thought about it much. Well, until yesterday that is. It began with something simple; I wanted to read something over at one of Sun's sub domains.

"Address Not Found", Firefox complained. I briefly looked outside the window to confirm that it doesn't rain frogs or something. Alright, it's Just one of those random DNS issues.

It's just a temporary problem, but it didn't really feel like waiting this time. One forehead slap later I grabbed some DNS server IP, added it to my TCP/IP configuration, and everything was sorted.

3 alignments and their origins

What for?

If you're writing a game with ActionScript3 you've basically two options: either use the scene graph or handle it yourself. I.e. extend Sprite, create some Bitmap, attach it to your Sprite, and blit onto its BitmapData via copyPixels.

Skipping the scene graph is certainly more fun. If you wrote some games in other languages, you'll quickly feel at home. Apart from that external main loop it's basically the same deal. Additionally, if your game requires full redraws either way (i.e. dirty rectangles won't help), using copyPixels is the fastest option.

However, if you take a look at BitmapData's documentation you might be in for a big surprise — there is no drawString function. How can you draw some text on top of your entities for quick debugging now?

Interchangeable presentation

You know the drill

If you didn't ignore the web for the past few years, you've probably heard it a million times by now: separate your content and presentation, use CSS for presentation, and say yes to semantic markup. There is no doubt that it's the right thing to do, given the sheer amount of benefits.

In a nutshell: it makes your life easier by lumping those pieces together which belong next to each other. It's somewhat akin to the proximity usability rule. It also keeps the noise down; if you want to change parts of the presentation there are no content bits in the way and vice versa. There is also a lot less overhead since those style sheets can be cached on the client side. In extreme cases it can save as much as 200kb of utterly pointless bloat. Additionally, proper CSS usage also paves the way for the ultimate killer feature: interchangeable presentation.

FPSCounter.as in action

Why did I bother?

The last time I looked for something like this I was only able to find horrible implementations. They somewhat worked for the most part, but boy where they ugly. All of them. Well, to tell the truth I gave up pretty quickly. I decided to use a simple 18 lines long version which utilized trace for the output.

And that was fine. However, as I experimented around with Kostas Michalopoulos's Flash mod player I found out that the Debug Standalone Flash Player can be much slower if the bottleneck is on the code-side. It was over 10 times slower. That was a bit of a surprise, given that this kind of thing is free in Java. Of course I wanted to know now how fast my game can actually run in it's current state.

It's a trap

I just trashed my history again. Same accident as last time. Was it my fault? Well, herein lies the problem. I pressed a specific key sequence which triggered the delete. However, it's very similar to a key sequence I'm using a dozen times a day. The only difference is the order of one down and one release key event.

But let me explain it a bit first. If you hold the Control key you can jump from one word to the next with the left and right cursor keys. If you also hold Shift you can quickly highlight a couple of words. I often highlight parts of the URL like this in the address bar. Then I press Delete and then I either add something new or press Return right away.

The problem is that I can trigger Firefox's Clear Private Data dialog with Control+Shift+Delete (i.e. if I don't release Control or Shift quickly enough). If I now press Return right away, which isn't all that unusual if you've done it a million times before, it will delete my history (among other things) instantaneously.

Something is missing

Now and Then

ActionScript was introduced with the release of Flash 4 back in 1999. In my never-ending naïveté I assumed it should be pretty mature by now. Almost a decade should be enough for that, shouldn't it? Obviously that isn't the case - otherwise there wouldn't anything to rant about. ;)

I started with ActionScript3 (Flash9+) a few weeks ago. It's supposed to be so much better than ActionScript2. There wasn't much of a reason to not use the latest version; given that about 90% of the users use the latest version of Flash. The remaining 10% quickly fade away if you consider things like the lifespan of small web games (a couple of years easily) and the time it takes to get things rolling for real. A quick look at AS2 was actually enough to discard it completely; it's ugly.