Archive for March, 2009

Project Poor Bear Update 3 posted

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on March 31st, 2009

We posted progress on ole Poor Bear over at Dreamsocket. However, we don’t want this to be a one way communication outlet on what we are doing. We want you involved. Go check out the post and share your ideas on elements of the game. Help us make Poor happy!

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Media Framework Solution: Cartoon Network and Jetstream Video Gallery

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on March 30th, 2009

Our site has a solutions section that showcases sites and applications where we have used our media framework in the past. In a way it provides a glimpse into the legacy and evolution of the framework. Unfortunately it doesn’t paint the entire picture, as our largest and most notable solutions haven’t been posted due client PR departments. Sometimes we get a break, mind sets change and we get the privilege to show them out of the blue. Today was one of those days when PR mindset changed. Many thanks to Jim and Paul for making this happen for us.

Long story short, we posted the Cartoon Network and Jetstream video players we developed to our solutions page. Though these applications are about 3 years old, they still tell an interesting story. When first developed, they utilized Windows Media through an abstract bridge in Flash. The conversion to Flash video was actually seamless in that we didn’t change code, we replaced the internal “playback”.

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Project Poor Bear designs posted

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on March 26th, 2009

We made a new post over at Dreamsocket which contains new designs, animations, and creative write up on our IPhone game (Project Poor Bear) that is currently in progress. Trevor has some great insights into his thoughts for the game. Go check it out!

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Speaking at NAB: Game and TV Collaborations

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on March 26th, 2009

I was asked, agreed, and received confirmation that I will be speaking at the NAB conference in Vegas this month. The presentation/panel is titled “Game & TV Collaborations” and is focused on solutions that integrate games with video based entertainment. I will be showing off the Playstation Megasode that we built a few years back and participating in the subject discussion.

The presentation is slated for Thursday April 23 at 10:15.
You can find all the details here.

It should be quite interesting presenting at NAB, since the crowd is so different than a lot of the places I speak. It also marks my first attendance to the event, so I’d love to hear feedback from others that have attended in years past.

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Dreamsocket Media Framework AS2 1.1.66 and AS3 1.1.83 Released

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on March 26th, 2009

While I was on vacation we released a new point release of the Dreamsocket Media Framework. The main focus of the release was documentation, documentation, and documentation. In addition, we made some structural changes in the project that are aimed at some future additions/changes we are working on. We consider this release a small step before we take a big leap ;) . Stay tuned, much more on the way!

Check out the full write up on the release here.
Check out the entire set of release notes here.

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Announcing Project Code Name: Poor Bear

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on March 4th, 2009

Today we announced over at Dreamsocket our first personal IPhone venture codenamed Poor Bear. A tight rope riding bear of a good game!

Go check it out now, follow our progress, and help us make dreams!

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Introducing the Dreamsocket Media Player

Posted by Kenny Bunch in ActionScript, Flash, Uncategorized on March 3rd, 2009

Today we released the first “face/player” to our framework today, which you are free to throw on your site and use yourself. Check out below, go read the article we wrote up about it, and download it for yourself today!

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BUG: Flash Google Analytics trackEvent

Posted by Kenny Bunch in Uncategorized on March 1st, 2009

Today I was integrating with Google Analytic's Flash codebase and ran into a bug that had me running up against a wall for about 45 minutes. It was a simple bug, but no details bubbled up from the code base to let me know what was occurring. I'm noting it here for everyone else's sanity. If you want to skip all the details and just know the cause jump down to the end of the post.

SYMPTOMS
I had set up my analytics package all via code and made a simple track call.

For the sake of this example, it looked equivalent this

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. import com.google.analytics.GATracker;
  2.  
  3. // setup tracker
  4.  var tracker:GATracker = new GATracker(this, "UA-111-222", "AS3", true);
  5. // make simple track event with a numeric value
  6.  tracker.trackEvent("MyCategory", "MyEvent", "Title1", 10.5);

Very simple right? I had followed examples online and on the surface it all appeared to work correctly. I could see the calls in the visual debugger working exactly how I wanted. However, when looked to see if the calls were going to the server with a packet sniffer, no dice! Nothing was going through. I checked my code about 500 times, looked to see if trackEvents were just beta, and tried to find out if I wasn't setting something for production.

DEBUGGING
I couldn't find anything. It wasn't until I switched the call to trackPageview that it started to go through. That worked. I decided to take the numeric value out of the call for the trackEvent call, since that was a variant between trackEvent and trackPageview. Ching, ching, little winner. Everytime I added it back in it failed silently and didn't call the server. I then noticed that the number was a fraction and not a Integer (even though the call's signature has it as Number). Therefore I decided to round the fraction everytime, and triple ching, we had the final winner.

CAUSE
The bug turned out to be that trackEvent can only take Integers as the numeric value in it's call. If you make calls using trackEvent you must round all numbers going in or the calls will not be sent out to the server.

Hope this helps with some folks headaches. Also if you ever have a bug with no details, follow the example above and work backwards. Looking at variants and testing multiple inputs you can find the root.

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