Blog
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Posted on Dec 30 2011
Today I'll not talk about code optimization but instead about hardware optimization.
First, allow me to say I hate printers.
They are actually quite useful tools for everyday interactions with the "real world" (or at least, the part of the real world that still use paper instead of digital documents). But the printer vendors are one of the most hateful industry : proprietary drivers, bloated software that you HAVE to install with your printer, and - most of all - toner page counters.
Today I had to print many documents to send them back as snail mail. This is already an annoying thing to do. But when I was about to print the last page (of about 40) my printer stopped working and all was displayed was Please replace the Toner.
WTF ? It was just printing very nicely just seconds ago ! In my old printers memories I was thinking that a toner would die when there is no more ink, or more exactly when you can no longer read what it prints...
Looking at my Brother MFC-7440 printer s...
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Posted on Dec 20 2011
I'm please to announce that the World Wide haXe Conference 2012 (WWX-2012) will take place in Paris on April 13-16 2012.
This conference will be the best place to meet fellow haXers and exchange both ideas and drinks ! Expect some big announcements to be made there as well !
In short : if you are either an experienced haXe developer or someone that want to learn more about it, this is THE place to be !
Check http://wwx.haxe.org for all the details.
This year we have enough room for ~100 persons so we put a ticket system in place, please not do wait for the last minute to get your seat or you might not make it.
We are also looking for Speakers ! If you want to talk about your work or introduce your tools/library or want to show/teach/introduce something to the haXe community, take your chance and please send us a mail with your speaking proposal at
speakers@haxe.org.Selected speakers will be announce little by little but expect the main contributors to haXe and haXe libraries to show u...
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Posted on Nov 23 2011
Today I had some issues trying to recompile one of our SWF game to work with Flash Player 11.2 Beta. I was getting an error #2500 An error occured while decrypting the signed SWF. The SWF will not be loaded
After trying different things to understand what's going on, I thought it was just a beta bug that would be fixed in final release. Until I saw the following quote that was added afterwards to the Adobe Release Notes :
Starting with Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2, content targeting Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 (i.e., content using SWF version 13 and above) will not support the experimental Alchemy prototype.What the F.... ?
But let's explain first what is really Alchemy for those of you that haven't used it. Alchemy is a tool to run C/C++ code in Flash Player. But this is also a set of Flash Virtual Machine opcodes (low level operations) that can be used to get quick memory access.
These opcodes are available by using haXe flash.Memory class or Joa Ebert Apparat optimization tool.
Thes...
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Posted on Nov 13 2011
I didn't wrote that much about recent Adobe announcement that they are dropping Flash Player for mobile and focusing on AIR for apps instead. I wanted first to see what kind of reactions people had.
There is actually many different point of views.
Joy : people that didn't like Flash (some of them actually hate it) are rejoicing, seeing that as the next step toward complete flash demise. I can understand why people don't like proprietary technologies. As a developer, you get more frustrated since you can't contribute or try changing things that are just broken. And companies are often driving you into some kind of vendor-locking strategies in order to make sure that you can't reuse your skills if you buy another product from another company or - worse - use open source software. Which leads to...
Fear : "omgwtf I know only about Flash how am I going to eat in the upcoming years if it's dead ???" that's what a lot of flash developers are thinking now. They spent years building ...
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Posted on Oct 22 2011
A few months ago I spent some time trying to run perlin noise on full GPU with a hardware shader.
Of course, thanks to HxSL I didn't have to write it in assembler.
Before getting into code details, let's have a small demo :
[perlin_shader.swf]Here's the final shader code in HxSL :
var input : { pos : Float3, }; var perlinPos : Float3; function vertex(delta : Float3, scale : Float) { out = pos.xyzw; perlinPos = ([(pos.x + 1) * 0.5, 1 - (pos.y + 1) * 0.5, 0] + delta) * scale; } function gradperm( g : Texture, v : Float, pp : Float3 ) { return (g.get(v,single,nearest,wrap).xyz * 2 - 1).dot(pp); } function lerp( x : Float, y : Float, v : Float ) { return x * (1 - v) + y * v; } function fade( t : Float3 ) : Float3 { return t * t * t * (t * (t * 6 - 15) + 10); } function gradient( permut : Texture, g : Texture, pos : Float3 ) { ...
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Posted on Sep 25 2011
I'm very happy to announce the 2.08 release of haXe, available now on http://haxe.org/download
This release was initially planned for this summer, but it got a bit delayed because of many new features (and community requests) that needed some additional testing/feedback before a proper release.
Because haXe increasing popularity there's still a lot of pending things that needs to be done, but we had to stop a bit adding new things and make a proper release at some time. This is most likely the latest 2.xx release, next one should be haXe 3.0, around spring 2012.
Let's see now what's new in 2.08 :
(more...)- For Javascript, we've been improving the
.jscode output : it looks nicer, more hand-written, less verbose. There's still some improvements that can be done, but don't forget that you can write your own custom JS generator in haXe.
- there's now
js.JQueryas part of the standard library. It uses the new@:overloadmetadata to have a fully typed JQuery access in haXe. By default JQuery-1.5 is au...
- For Javascript, we've been improving the
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Posted on Aug 21 2011
A simple comparison that say it all :
(more...)AS3 Javascript haXe Compile to Flash Y N Y Compile to JavaScript N Y Y Compile to C++ N N Y Compile to PHP/NekoVM N N Y Language Features Native iterators N N Y this Closures Y N Y Conditional Compilation N N Y Macros N N Y Community-Driven N N Y Type system Features Static Type System Y N Y Type Inference N Y Gene... -
Posted on Jul 09 2011
A few months ago I worked on HxSL which is a 3D shader language. I wanted people to be able to see how HxSL works and give it a try without installing haXe and writing code.
So I came up with the idea of HxSL Studio which is an online tool (entirely written in haXe) using both Flash and Javascript.
With HxSL studio, you can modify both vertex and fragment shaders in an HTML page. The shader text get sent to flash component using haXe Remoting on each change. Then I'm using HScript to parse the text before using HxSL compiler to generate on-the-fly AGAL bytecode.
Thanks to haXe being very fast you can get realtime feedback on errors. Works very nice.
If you have an error, it will be sent back from Flash to JS so it can be displayed. If you click on the error you will select the HxSL part that is causing the error.
You can also see the AGAL output that you can paste in your AS3 code in case you're not lucky enough to use haXe for your daily job ;)
This is actually no...
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Posted on May 12 2011
The haXe Meeting 2011 was a real success ! Very nice, talented and passionated people, great talks (thanks to all the wonderful speakers !) and perfect community interaction / networking.
This year we were still able to fit all together into the same restaurant, but I guess with increasing haXe success and awareness, next year will be hard ;)
As for the main announcements :
- FDT4 IDE haXe Plugin public beta
- haXe/C# and haXe/Java are on a good way (thanks to Cauê Waneck !)
- Features preview for haXe 3.0 (check my talk or my slides)
- haXe got a new logo (thanks to PowerFlasher)
See you next year !
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Posted on Mar 10 2011
Motion-Twin is organizing the first haXe Meeting/Conference that will take place May 7-8 in Bordeaux (France). A lot of the many people from the haXe community and haXe-friendly developers will fly there to talk and hear about haXe, what about you ?
You can check the meeting details on the meeting page