I did a bit more ‘haxing’ to let the authors name come up for each post as we now have more than one author on this here blog.
I’m going through my stuff making it a bit less ‘me’ and a bit more ‘us’…
I’m not looking forward to finishing the flash game that we have been working on for a good part of this semester. Every minute spent in flash makes me more and more angry and crazed, how can an expensive and professional piece of software that is used by so many be so frustrating and hard to use? If flash is the introduction that budding animators and programmers get to the world of computer development I feel sorry for them.
I’m finding it hard to get things done with constant interruptions, uni assignments and other things I’m required to do. Again Voodoo hasn’t been worked on for a while. I’ve decided to restart a bit and use a slightly different paradigm for the parser. It’s more like flex and bison now, but the scanner only returns 4 different types of tokens. Identifier, Number, Symbol and Literal (for string literals). The parser class asks the scanner for the next token, it returns and the scanner can be asked questions about the location and indentation of that token. The scanner can also be told that the last token it returned was bad and it will be able to print out it’s location.
So each individual parse method will be a lot smaller which will be good, and I will still be able to use the cool parser errors that using flex and bison won’t give me.
Edit: I’ve also fixed a problem with the /author pages, the authors name wasn’t coming up. I used a bit of a hack, but it works. I want to submit the bug report but the signup email is taking yonks.
Being new to the world of compter programming I find Macromedia Flash rather difficult. I agree that it isn’t great, and even though I find it challenging to use, I still enjoy writing a game using actionscripts. I would really like to continue learning how to use Macromedia Flash, but with the way things are going, I’m not learning a bloody thing.
If all we get to do is change the pictures and backgrounds for our game, I’m starting to wonder what the point of this entire exercise is. I was enjoying myself more when the tutor was taking us through the construction of the game step by step and explaining what all the different functions do. But now all we do is sit and listen to him drone on about what some obscure function does rather than do it alongside him with guidance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not attacking our tutor or anything. He’s a cool guy. It’s just the exercise in itself I find utterly pointless.
I totally agree.
The actual actionscript isn’t bad, in what we are doing we aren’t really using Macromedia Flash all that much. We’re just using the built in editor to write actionscript. The editor is in a floating window which means that windows and save dialogs are covered by this huge window. That’s bad.
If you try to do something within flash, it’s not apparent how to do it. Most programs can be explored and used without having to constantly refer to the help pages. I’ve never read the photoshop manual or looked at the help and I’ve been able to learn and use it fine. But with Flash I’ve had to constantly refer to the help system when trying to do something, and even the help system isn’t very well designed, and even then for something I wanted to do… there was no way to do it.
The reason the tutor has made it available on the net is people were really having trouble keeping up. What’s crazy is that last time we had the lab we started from scratch again, and when Gareth said that it’s going to be marked this week it’s a good reason to freak.
Flash isn’t impossible to use, and I’m sure if you spent the time to learn it you will be able to do things fast and easily with it. But from the perspective of someone learning it, it’s not very nice. It doesn’t seem to use enough common sense and simplistic design principles to make it comparable to other programs. Even photoshop, which I think could do with some alterations, is IMHO better than Flash for learning.