viralplatipuss’ blog

I can’t keep updating a blog, as you can see from the ages of my posts, and I’m sure no one really cares that much.

So at some point, when I can actually be bothered I may make a cool site that just lists my work in a cool flashy way.

Sounds good huh?

So I got the idea for this post when I was making my Space Bunny animation…

I was testing it at first and watching his stupid little face as he was blasted into space.. when it occured to me… the smoke effects are actionscripted… and not just that.. there are some levels of alpha in there too!

Hmmmm…. this wasn’t really an issue with my own setup as I have a beautiful NP8660 laptop specd out to run pretty much anything! But I wanted to make sure other people would see my work with the same quality I was putting into it!

So I tested it on my friends laptop (not so good) and unfortunately it went out of sync very quickly :( 

I also tested it on another 13″ Sony Vaio and it started lagging before it began!

So as you can imagine I was some what annoyed and thought to myself… If I turn it into an avi.. then it can’t go out of sync.. and it will play on pretty much anything (even rubbish laptops can play AVIs ok)

So several days and hours work later after finishing the animation… I went through the horrific ordeal of having to convert an swf to avi…

Now… there are LOADS of programs that claim to do this.. and they are all crap… there are also lots of forum posts everywhere with people asking how to do it.. and people giving answers that don’t work!

When it comes down to it… nothing can directly convert an swf to an avi… you are going to have to screen capture it. Now I could let you spend the next several hours of your life dying inside as you play around with different codecs and download all sorts of programs, but I thought I would save you the hassle and tell you my step-by-step guide to doing it well.

Ok.. So the swf converters work fine if you’re swf is a simple piece of rubbish (They still only work by capturing btw)… but if you have one that runs slow on other peoples computers… I recommend this:

1. Make sure you have a powerful computer/laptop

This is a no-no:

DO NOT WANT

If you do not own your own powerful computer… buy one! Your doing flash stuff and you deserve it!….. or find a friend who has one and kick them off for a bit!

Slightly biased view of what a good computer is! :D

2. Download Hypercam 2 - It is the best caputre software I found for doing this… camstudio is good.. but nothing compares to hypercam 2… just trust me ok!

HyperCam... it's good ok!

Right… first things first you want to record that bad-boy of an swf you’ve been working on for so long… I recommend exporting it from the latest version of flash, preferably CS4 then you can export it as a flash player 10 file… which is nice and optimised! Also… build a simple button into the first frame of your animation, I had an invisible one which simply contained the code:

on (keyPress “p”) {

gotoAndPlay(2);

}

This will just allow you to play the animation as soon as you start recording….

Now… I was making a music video… so I basically had one continuous track running, so I exported the swf WITHOUT sound… this made it run faster (although it didn’t matter that much) but also I could add the sound later without having hypercam do it and possibly reducing the quality. If you want to try and record sound too then go for it! But I’m telling you how I did it… so listen up if you’re interested…

Get your swf ready to go on your desktop and then close everything else… stop talking on msn.. pause avast (or if you’re not using avast.. whatever poor-excuse for an antivirus that you have)

You want maximum efficiency when you record the swf to ensure a good clean avi version!

So… load up Hypercam 2, and the swf… which should hopefully be paused in the first frame.

These are the settings I used for hypercam:

First I disabled record cursor in ‘other options’ for obvious reasons…

Turned off sound recording…

Then for the avi settings - record at 60fps, playback 60fps  [My animation was 24fps by the way... so it doesn't need to match flash!]

Capture ratio of 1 and keyframe every 100 frames.

The compressor I used was Xvid (Download it if it doesn’t appear on the menu http://www.xvid.org/) .. I found it gave very good results when set up correctly (and yes.. I spent AGES playing with numerous other codecs!)

Set the frame compression quality to 100% then press configure compressor.

I used a profile @ level of: Advanced Simple @ L5

then single pass encoding type, with a target quantizer of 5.95 (you can play around with this using the slider.. you might want to make a few test recording before deciding what works best for you)

And I also used a ‘real-time’ quality preset.

My HyperCam Settings

So use the button on hypercam to select window, and select the swf that should be playing in a standalone flash player (not a browser or from within flash… it’s just wasting extra CPU!)

The default button should be F2 to start/stop recording… so make sure you have your flash player as the active window… then try and simulataneously hit F2 and ‘P’ (assuming you used the same method as myself)

After it finishes hit F2 to stop and you should have a nice high quality AVI of your swf! You might want to play around with some settings but that’s what worked best for me.

The next issue for my particular animation was the lack of audio! This is where 2 FREE programs came in very handy….

1. Virtual Dub

and 2. Audacity

I opened up the avi in virtual dub, because although the music track is set to perfectly start at the beginning of the animation (I spliced the solidgamers bit to the beginning after using virtual dub) it still has the bang sound effect for when the satelitte hits the earth. I found the exact frame where I wanted the sound to play and recorded the milliseconds into the avi that I needed (at the bottom on virtualdub)

Then in audacity.. I opened the music track, went to the corresponding millisecond count, and spliced in the bang sound effect (contact me if you need more info on how to do this)

Now, back in virtual dub, I simply went Audio > From other file… and chose the mp3 I created.

Then I could have used video > Direct Stream Copy to not use any re-compression on the animation, and simply export it with the now included audio.

But I found 2 issues with this… 1st off, the file was still around 50 meg… which isn’t too much of a problem really.. but it would be nicer if I could get it a bit smaller without losing quality!

2. When I attempted to upload this avi to youtube (and vimeo, my now favourite and I recommend)

Youtube took the file, but when I tested the video.. it jumped a bit and was a tiny bit laggy… and vimeo didn’t like the video at all and just came up blank!

So I went back to virtualdub and instead compressed the video  again using the ffdshow codecs (which I think come as part of the community codecs: http://www.cccp-project.net/)

I used the FLV1 encoder with FOURCC: FLV and mode as one pass - quality.. with quality set to 100

I left the other settings alone. After compressing like this.. it made a nice 30 meg avi, with pretty much no difference in quality from my 50 meg one!

After re-uploading this to both youtube and vimeo.. I found it was still a bit jumpy on youtube.. but it worked on vimeo.. and played fine!

I personally think youtube reduce the quality of the stuff you upload which is why I favour vimeo… and that avi is the current one you can see when you play the video currently embedded on the homepage!

So that was the long-winded but ultimately successful way I converted my intense swf into a watchable online video (or just avi).

If you have any questions or stuff I might be able to help you with.. or suggesstions on better ways of doing things then leave a comment or contact me!

Hope this has been some use to any of you who might be as stuck as I was!

—-

Dom

Ok.. as I stated in my earlier post I’ve been working on an animation… which is finally done! *sigh*

It’s quite random really… 2 clever squirrels decide to launch a bunny into space… still I hope you enjoy it!

I would love to hear any comments you have on it and just for the record… yes I know he has a parachute the whole time… just shhh ok!

I will be posting an tutorial soon about converting intensive swf animations to avi if you’re having difficulty making it look good! As I did!

So without further ado… here is *drum roll*… Space Bunny:

Oh.. turn up your speakers! Awesome song!

—

Dom

Ok. This is my attempt at a comprehensive list of things I’ve done.

Sites currently owned:

SolidGamers.com - My current pet project, really hoping to get it off the ground!

DigiArcade.com - Another arcade site I own that sort of sits there doing nothing.

viralplatipuss.com - obvious

Arcadeblocks.com - Small joint project with a friend of mine

+ a few domains… 

I used to have more sites, but I sold most of them off, my main priority right now is focusing on SolidGamers.com!

Games I have made:

Causality - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/causality.html

Nanocell - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/nanocell.html

Operation Overdom - http://www.arcadecabin.com/play/operation_overdom.html

Ski Chalet Escape 1 - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/ski-chalet-escape-1.html

FireRocket - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/firerocket.html

Vent Escape - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/vent-escape.html

Stuck Inside - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/stuck-inside.html

Stuck Inside 2 - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/stuck-inside-2.html

Space Miner - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/space-miner.html

X-Bounce - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/x-bounce.html

Puzzled 1 - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/puzzled-1.html

Puzzled 2 - http://www.gamegum.com/game/193/puzzled-2/

Puzzled 3 - http://www.escapegames24.com/2006/04/puzzled-3.html

Puzzled 4 - http://www.escapegames24.com/2006/04/puzzled-4.html

Lab Escape -http://www.bored.com/games/play/223/Lab-Escape.html

Hot and Cold Escape - http://www.bored.com/games/play/182/Hot-and-Cold.html

Bad Reception - http://www.bored.com/games/badreception.html

DIY Escape - http://www.arcadeonline.com/play-diy-escape.html

Murder Escape - http://www.arcadecabin.com/play/murder_escape.html

Storage Escape - http://www.escapegames24.com/2008/07/storage-escape.html

Trapped 1 - http://www.onlinegames.net/games/736/trapped-episode-1.html

Trapped 2 - http://www.onlinegames.net/games/737/trapped-episode-2.html

Escape Logic - http://www.arcadecabin.com/play/escape_logic.html

E-Scape - http://www.solidgamers.com/play/e-scape.html

Sniper Escape- http://www.escapegames24.com/2008/04/sniper-escape.html

White Room - http://www.gamershood.com/flashgames/4733

The Big Game - http://www.onlinegames.net/games/774/the-big-game.html

Locked Office - http://www.escapegames24.com/2006/04/locked-office.html

Locked In - http://shut.in/game/locked-in-exclusive-escape-the-room-game/

Jail Escape - http://www.onlinegames.net/games/801/jail-escape.html (First escape the room game I made)

Bomb Defusal - http://www.escapegames24.com/2006/04/bomb-defusal.html

OG Racer - http://www.onlinegames.net/games/995/og-racer.html (Only ever 3D game I made in shockwave)

Sneak - http://www.dailyfreegames.com/games/puzzle-games/sneak-game.html (This is the single player version, but watch out for the awesome sequel coming to OnlineGames.net soon! Make your own levels and share!)

Hacker 1 - http://www.onlinegames.net/games/1334/hacker-1.html

Hacker 2 - http://www.onlinegames.net/games/780/hacker-2.html

Hacker 3 - http://www.onlinegames.net/games/1333/hacker-3.html

Minefield - http://www.funnygames.co.nz/play/minefield (Funny game… completely….pointless)

Security - http://www.funny-games.biz/security.html

Security 2 - http://www.mofunzone.com/online_games/security_2.shtml#

And I think… that’s it!

Not sure though… If I remember any more I’ll post them up!

Ok, I haven’t updated in a while! I keep forgetting that I actually bothered to make a blog.

Still… I imagine no one really reads this anyway so here goes…

Basically I am a freelance Flash/Web Developer based in the UK, and I always publish under the name ‘viralplatipuss’… just an alias really that allows me to find all my own stuff. If I published under my real name (Dom Chapman if you’re interested to know) then when you search google there would be a lot of unrelated results. But if you do search viralplatipuss, you’ll realise everything that comes up is in someway related to me (or at least should be)

And for the record, yes I realise platypus is spelt wrong, or what I like to call… differently!

—————————————-

UPDATE on BOT WARS:

Everyone including myself seems a little too busy to work on it at all right now, so that’s sort of dead. Might come back to it at some point and add stuff but don’t know when.

—————————————-

That’s all I have to post right now, but I will put in a seperate post with what is basically my current portfolio.

I’m very very close to finishing a new animation, which is really cool! So I’ll post that up when it’s finished as well!

So I decided yesterday to start a project with 2 of my friends.

We’ve been using a cool program called dropbox (https://www.getdropbox.com/home)

We have a shared folder that we can drag stuff into and out of, and it updates on all 3 of our computers.

With this in mind.. and looking at the classic ASwars on newgrounds. I had an awesome idea to have a joint flash file that we can all edit with bots. So all 3 of us have a bot, which we program to attack the other 2.

Obviously we need to set some ground rules on maximum speed, bullets and other stuff. But we can introduce that as it goes.

It’s pretty pointless really as it will just be someone putting a gun on their bot, so the others program shields, then someone codes a rocket launcher, so the others code a nuke.. and before you know what the hell’s going on there will just be stupid amounts of random stuff happening.

But we thought if we keep adding to the file, after a while we’re going to end up with an awesome movie of bots batteling it out and all sorts of crazy attacks and defense mechanisms. So the plan is to add to it when we’re bored and just watch it slowly progress.

Anyway, to kick-start it off I made a basic engine with collision .etc and put 3 simple random-walking wall-hit-and-turn-arounding bots in the arena. I then coded mine so it was a bit more awesome.

I’ll post regular updates as we add more cool stuff to it, it’s not amazing right now as I tend to win pretty much straight away (seeing as I’m the only one with a gun :D) however, it will get better as it goes.

So… enough talking, here is Bot Wars release 1:

I’ve decided to create a blog to keep track of all my developments with flash games .etc

I know I know.. another blog! But actually this is more for me to keep track of my own stuff

and just publish any rubbish I want to, when I get bored. I mean.. you don’t HAVE to read it. You can leave any time you want.

If for some odd reason you enjoy hearing about my latest flash developments, then feel free to stay and read through the arrays of pointless stuff I will publish on this site over time.

I probably should have made a blog ages ago as I’ve been doing flash games for a few years now, but to make up for it I’ll do a post soon with links to all my published work so far.

Enjoy!