The latest in Blog entries that might interest Flash game developers.

Jobe Makar’s Blog has a very interesting entry on enemy AI and predictive shooting. He is creating a Tower Defense like game and needed to figure out at what angle to fire off a projectile at a moving target. He has created a system that is perfect every time, but randomness can be added to make it some what less intelligent.

Interactive Crap has a great new entry on applying Event Bubbling in AS3, and it is especially applicable to Event Driven code for games.

http://www.sebleedelisle.com/ has a wealth of new posts, but the most recent has to do with seamlessly looping video in Flash. This is something we need to do in games once in a while. It is a similar idea to what I have been doing with many pre-rendered clips in my games – use BitmapData to hold the frames and quickly flip through them. It is an interesting experiment and one that should interest many developers. Jobe has been doing this for a while with video.

flashconnections.com has a very exciting post about a Tyler Larson created SWF Swapper for HTML/CSS based content. Basically, it creates a SWF on the fly out of your HTML/CSS content and it is fully open source. I’m not quite sure yet what this might means for games, but it is very interesting, none the less.

Keith Peter’s Bit-101 Blog has many new entries. The latest is on re-dispatching custom events. Like Jobe, but for math based coding instead of just games, Keith is a master. His code and ideas can be applied to any type of Flash content, especially games.

Grant Skinner has some very useful code on creating a seeded random value in AS3. Grant is also an old-hand master, and his brilliance is always an interesting read.

At The O’Reiily site (but linked to from his blog) Colin Moock (a fellow Atari head) has a great article on whether or not AS3 is difficult to use and or learn. He debunks many of the ms-conceptions on how difficult AS3 actually is. I agree with him 100%. The problem is not with AS3, but those who choose to code in a specific manner in AS3. Sure, you can do a full MVC model in AS3 (you also could have in AS2 and AS1), but you can also write very simple control code if you need to. There are some advantages to doing it in AS3. The document class is something that all developers should embrace. Especially since it can be used like a class version of embedded timeline code if you need it. Anyway, read what Colin has to say on the matter.

Mochiland has new leader boards!!! And s $25K contest to boot. Talk about the best thing to happen for the little guy in a long time…