Brass Alchemy

Creative Suite 4 Installation Woes

ajpetersen — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:20:04 +0000

EDIT: I fixed it! It turns out it was related to using an NTFS partition on my external hard drive to transfer the image to my laptop. I reformatted my external as HFS+Journaled and all was well. Yay! CS4 is awesome.

Sheesh. I’ve never had issues with installing a Creative Suite before, but this one is really perplexing. I’ve got a desktop and a laptop, both running Leopard 10.5.5. I can install just fine on my desktop. Everything works, no errors. Using the same downloaded image, when I try to install on my laptop, there are no errors, BUT some of the programs are completely missing, even though the installer says it installed them. Among these include Flash, Illustrator, Bridge, Device Central, and Premier. The icons for the .app is there, but it has a cross-out over a greyed version of it, and if you try and open it, it says “You cannot open the application ‘Flash CS4′ because it is not supported on this architecture.”

Now that is bull. I ran CS3 on this machine just fine. Anyone have any suggestions?

Leopard OSX86 Endeavors (Dell D630)

ajpetersen — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 02:43:24 +0000

Well, it all started with Adobe Creative Suite 4. I wanted the new version of flash. So, I tried installing it onto my D630. Wow, did it not like it. The installer would say it had installed everything, but in reality did not. You could go into the Flash folder, for example, and see literally only half the files that were supposed to be there. Photoshop installed, but complained about missing files.

I assumed it had something to do with me uninstalling CS3 before starting (small hard drive), and decided that I had to start with a fresh installation of Leopard. I’ve had Leopard on this laptop for about six months now, with very little issues except for the usual (finicky sleep, shutdown hang, etc).

Apparently, I forgot how precise an installation needs to be to get everything to work properly (it also turns out that it had nothing to do with CS3).

What follows is an attempt to update users on the current state of things with regards to the D630 ONLY, as that’s the laptop I have. This is going to be very condensed compared to the original post, but hopefully should be enough for most users to be able to install OS X successfully. This is also so that if (when) I have to do this again, I can remember properly and not spend a week installing and reformatting.

My Laptop’s Specs:
Dell D630
CPU: Core 2 Duo 2GHz
RAM: 2 GB
Sound Card: Sigmatel 9205
Graphics: Intel GMAX3100
Bluetooth: none internal (but the dlink usb dongle recommended by Apple works really well)

This laptop is fairly barebones hardware-wise, since it’s a work computer.

Let’s get started!

Post #546 @ InsanelyMac

My Journey Through Multiplayer Flash Game Development Land Part 1

ajpetersen — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:17:00 +0000

And it begins.

For a semester-long independent-study project, I’ve decided to create an online, multiplayer, flash-based game. The original proposal is now on google docs; reading it will be helpful in understanding what the following posts are talking about. What I hope to collect here is a record of all the different components I’ve researched and the process I’ve gone through to progress on this relatively new endeavor. I’ve done a bunch of Flash programming before, but none involving network play. Another brand new challenge is the use of Flex. But more on that later…

Given that I’ve got a semester, I naturally went for a huge challenge (apparently, it’s what I do). In addition to the large amount of original content that will need to be produced, this project also involves large technical components. In the original proposal, I broke the game down into the following components: backend database, player creation editing saving, main gameplay (composed of basic chess + additions and “encounter mode”), and online network play.

Knowing this, I began to research how to use Flash to access a database, since from the beginning I wanted player data to be centralized. My findings were that it can be tedious and slow (development-wise) using “vanilla flash”. I thought for sure that I would be using the basic web design concept of throwing data at a URL (a php script) that would query the database, and send things back. The third to last tutorial on Ahmet Gyger’s site was very helpful in demonstrating how this process would work. For basic data this would be fine, but imagine how difficult it would be to grab an array of results from a database, encode them in a URL, then decode them in Flash! Perhaps not difficult, but definitely tedious and probably involving custom classes built just for that.

The next possibility I found was actually two different instances of the same concept, with slightly different names: ASSQL and ASQL. These ActionScript libraries allow the use of SQL directly from ActionScript! This is similar to how asp.net works (and PHP), in that you set up a connection, and then run a query, not having to worry about how the query is sent, or how the connection is made. At last, my savior! Within a night of discovering ASQL (I found that one first), I had my Flash game connected to a remote mysql database, accepting user/password credentials, and loading up basic character data.

But it was not meant to be.

As I soon discovered, this method is not very secure, due to two problems. The first is that all the data is sent as clear text (and not encrypted using SSL). This isn’t a huge issue for me, since I’m making this game as a learning experience, and I’m not that concerned about making it hacker-proof right now due to time constraints. The second is that if someone decompiles your swf file, all your SQL statements and login information are right there in plain text!

Even this wasn’t that big of a deal, but part of me said to myself, “If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it well.” So I began looking into SWF obfuscators. I found SWF Encrypt 5.0 and thought my troubles could be over.

If I were not making an online multiplayer game, I think this is the route I would have taken. However…

Soon after beginning my research into network Flash programming, I discovered that if I wanted to have the game be multiplayer, it would be best to program it from the perspective of a network game from the beginning. Originally, I thought creating a two-player game (on one computer) would be a good start, and then add network play later. I realized that there would be major code rewriting unless my focus was on network play immediately, especially if I was already planning on the data being database-driven.

Let the great socket server hunt begin!

Retro-future/Steampunk Lightsaber

sindyow — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:48:00 +0000

This is none other than a retro-future/electro-mechanical / steampunk / dieselpunk lightsaber (lightsabre for the Brits). I’m thinking about selling it on the bay of e’s, just for the heck of it. Any offers? I’m most happy with this, and I didn’t even set out to make it during my weekend of ray-gunnery. It definitely makes one feel either like a baddass or a pixelated, low-polygonic dark Jedi from Dark Forces II.

Ray Gun

sindyow — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:20:00 +0000

Ready for hand-held battle! This was mainly inspired by Captain Proton from Star Trek and Spacemean Spiff from Calvin & Hobbes. It took forever to clean out the old electric drill, but I got some really cool parts that I used later (WD-40, how great thou are).

(Click the image for a bigger version)