I was trying to load an image into my swf from an off site location and kept getting this:


Error #2044: Unhandled securityError:. text=Error #2048: Security sandbox violation:http://some.site.com/fbpoker/flash/home.swf cannot load data from http://www.some.other.site.com/danny.jpg.
at ClassName/FuctionName()


There are many reason you could get this error, but one of them happens to be that fact that I was using a flash.net.URLLoader instead of a flash.display.Loader

Lesson Learned.
~Danny

I just got this quote at the top of my GMail:

Blaise Pascal - “Two things control men’s nature, instinct and experience.”

Shouldn’t that be two things that start with T and A?

~Danny

DeviantArt has something called pasties that let you display a few random images from your deviantart gallery.  I’m thinking about working them into the site.

Here’s an example:

Wait a minute! I can’t show 3 random images from *my* account? They are just 3 completely random images from all of deviant art?! On further inspection, you have to subscribe for $30/yr to get the functionality of creating pasties that only select images from your account.

For the record, I pay $60/yr for my website (+$8 for ‘dannyburbol.com’ domain name)… so paying deviant art $30 a year seems ridiculous.

Well, I guess I’ll be pulling all my images from devianart and merging them into the site. Now I need to find some good software for displaying images and allowing comments, and rss feeds, etc…

oh wait, wordpress does all that. :) so now I just have to find a quick way to import all my deviant art entries.

~Danny

Well, wordpress has a one button import for all my blogspot blogs… very cool.

I just tried on this librio, but it clips a lot of my images…

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/librio

I’ll have to look around for a nice quick theme since I don’t have a lot of time to make my own…

~Danny

About every 2 years I do a site cleansing.  It usually amounts to me saying:

At the same time, it gives me a moment to address usability and accessibility issues.

A few Goals this time around:

• Consolidate: I have 3 blogs, 4 or 5 rss feeds.  I’d like to join all the blogs together under this new wordpress blog and only update 1 location with 1 rss feed.
• Update more often: with wordpress I can update any time from anywhere with a web connection.  Since it’s so easy to update, I’ll update more often.
• Lessons Learned: I’m going to start putting more tutorials and lessons learned on the site because that stuff is useful to me and others.  Also I’m going to start using more desktop recording software.
• OMG I<3Flash: and I’m going to be using more of it (mostly for games).

Lots to do,
~Danny

PS: here’s the previous version of the site, let me know if you have any suggestions.

http://www.dannyburbol.com/main/index.php

I’ve heard many good things about Grim Fandango, back in the day, but I’ve never actually played it. I also heard it was story driven and the game part felt more like minigames.

But they released the design doc:

http://www.doublefine.com/news.php/site/just_one_more_grim_thing/

I have to admit, it’s a pretty good design doc. It seems *useful*, unlike many, many game design docs I’ve had to work from that were literally a 200 page brainstorm that was waved in front of the publisher to say “look, we’re going to do all this stuff, so give us money”… only to be tossed aside once work on the game actually began.

Then at the very end, the publisher says, “what do you mean you’re done? We’ve got this 200 page doc you gave us, and all that stuff is not in the game.”

*ahem* “doh!” :)
~Danny

PS: note the last page of the Grim Fandango design doc :)

So you want to get serious about making flash movies and games? Great! The way to get good is with fast iteration. What I mean by “iteration” is the time it takes to make a change to your game, build the game, test your game and decided if you need to make another change.

For the most part, it’s easy to iterate with flash, you just test your movie and there you go. What I’m talking about is more advanced flash movies. I’m talking about passing parameters from the page to your swf (mygame.swf?var1=1&var2=2), calling javascript from your swf (ExternalInterface), and swf’s getting loaded in other swf’s (and you can pass params to the child swf).

Basically, there comes a time when just running the movie on your computer isn’t good enough and the only way to really test your swf files is by uploading them to a server and viewing them in a browser connected to the web. After all, isn’t that how your audience is going to see it?

So let’s not waste time. Here are the things you’ll need to know in order to iterate quickly when building flash movies/games.

(more…)