Home / Project & Story

Backend: Fancy Flash Frameworks

Two actionscript-frameworks are our weapons of choice for developing Coobico: Fuse and Pixlib.

In last time’s Backend-article we introduced our chat-server “Smartfox”. This time we are going to take a look at Macromedia Flash. Two actionscript-frameworks are our weapons of choice for developing Coobico: Fuse and Pixlib.

Animations are almost exclusively scripted, powered by Moses Gunesch’s ubiquitous Fuse Kit. Fuse is a real powerhouse when it comes to scripted animations and filters, albeit a bit resources-hungry. Coobico therefore mainly relies on Fuse’s underlying ZigoEngine.
Flash has always had as its nucleus animation and motion, and its player’s performance has been greatly improved over the past years; still, Flash is painfully slow when it comes to animating objects over time, especially when developing a game depending on scrolling large areas of the screen at possibly high frame-rates. Thus, our focal point is fast and lesser cpu-hungry code – even though this eventually leads to less elegant solutions. 

All other tasks are being conducted by Pixlib. Pixlib is an Actionscript-framework developed by Francis Bourre, designed to support event handling, managing preloading, data holders, data structures and patterns implementations, dealing with XML and a lot more. As Oddlyonward describes: “What makes Pixlib different from many frameworks is its extensibility.  It has been called the ‘swiss army knife’ of frameworks because it is very open-ended.  While some frameworks are very dialed-in for specific uses (rich internet applications, game development etc.), Pixlib can be put to almost any use.”.
Pixlib’s architecture is quite convincing, especially the model of its front-controller, which virtually pulls the strings of all events and commands on the clients’ side – it’s a great way to keep your myriad of functions in order and under control. The only let-down is Pixlib’s nearly non-existent documentation – a disadvantage it shares with more or less every Flash-framework currently to be found. 
By the way, an Actionscript 3.0-version of Pixlib called LowRA is currently on its’ way. A few informations can be found here.

Here are some recommended links about Fuse and Pixlib:
OSFlash has a collection of links about Pixlib. Everything about Fuse can be found at MosesSupposes.

Nex time we are going to talk about our level-editor…

Back to the main page

Comments & Trackbacks

Please leave us your comments on this topic.

Leave a Comment

Name:

Email:

Website:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments