So recently I have been playing Fallout 3. I have been hooked on the series since it’s unofficial progenitor, Wasteland (with Michael Stackpole – http://www.stormwolf.com – as one of it’s designers) caught my eye and stole my hours as a youth.

I’ve been a fan, but never actually finished Fallout, or Fallout 2. I dabbled in Fallout Tactics, but didn’t get much into it either. Fallout 3 though, it’s pretty much perfect for me. First person shooter, with the option to slow things down with V.A.T.S. when I feel the need, or just want to watch the cinematic glory of a something being blown apart by my combat shotgun, or stapled to a wall by my railroad gun. Exploration, the go anywhere, do anything, real life sort of feel, but with the option to fast travel if things start to get tedious humping around all over the place. Roleplaying, it’s there, better than most computer games that I have played, though still not anywhere near an actual role playing session, it is still definitely fun. I recommend buying up your Speech skill to get better options.

I usually play on the steam locomotive on my way in to the citadel. So I only have about an hour to play at a time, and with this time constraint, I am not feeling lost or that I can’t play it. You are able to save pretty much anywhere, and at any time. So things that take a while can be broken down into smaller chunks. However, when I have had hours at a time to play, just like in my youth, they dissipate into dust of the wasteland leaving me only memory, beautiful, blood soaked memory. I also like the “random” encounters. If they are random, I can’t tell, and that makes them awesome. The wasteland should be dangerous and fairly unpredictable, but once you get to know what to look for, you can handle it. The game does that well.

There are a few things that aren’t bad, but sometimes detract from the game. The biggest, is the computer cracking. I am not sure if the Science skill does anything with cracking computers, other than let you get into harder terminals. I think I have seen that the number of passwords you have to guess at goes down, but I am not sure. The thing that detracts, is that you have four guesses, but if you can’t get it in that, it locks you out, but if you log off before then, you get another four guesses. So I end up spending three cracking attempts, logging out, making three more. The character matching hints that it gives after each guess are slightly helpful, but sometimes when I do get the password, it seems like the hints that it was giving had nothing to do with the password at all. So before I detract from the game more by making this larger than the actual review, let me say that the cracking is optional for the most part, and it does not occur often enough to annoy. There, that’s that. I won’t talk about any other negatives, because frankly, I don’t have any others worth mentioning here. Sure there are some, but they pale in comparison to what the game does right.

The one thing I would really like to see in this game, and others like it, is what I call Limited MMO play. That’s where one person would host a server and up to, say, 32 to 64 people max, would be able to share the play in the world. I would love to play it multiplayer at the lan parties I hold.

While getting sustenance today, I spotted something, and that something fit so well into my hunger for all things Fallout, I had to get it. I don’t know if some marketing genius knew that Fallout 3 was going to be big, or if it was just a huge coincidence, but I don’t really care. I had to get it anyway. So I did.

It’s faintly orange pop flavored, not orange juice, but orange pop. It’s not bad at all, it’s actually a step up from the Red Bull and Diet Rockstar that I have had. It’s also 0 carb, or at least the version I got is. So if you want a drink that fits the theme while you play Fallout 3 to the wee hours of the morning, afternoon, or night, then check it out. It at least looks cool on your desk.

I originally posted this over on the Dirigible of Pain site: http://dirigibleofpain.com

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Remember that issue I had with getting Flash and Flex to play nice and give me events from Flash swfs loaded into a Flex application? Well, it’s the same project, same files, and with a new wrinkle.

So we have the near final files from the client’s agency, and they look good, and perform all the interactions that are needed for the launch in a few weeks. Great! Only one problem. The animations never stop, flash on and off, and do all sorts of other things that are strange.

All of it though, is explained by there being no stop() actions in the Flash swf. To remind you, our gentle reader, both Flash and Flex are published in AS3 for Flash Player 9. I had the foresight to request the original FLA files, so even though I don’t have the fonts available, I can still look at the code, and tweak it to see if any changes I suggest to the agency will actually work. The stop() actions are there! What the frell?

So I do some searching, and searching, and searching. Nothing. I did find out that the default frame rate for Flex movies is 24 fps. So taking that, I thought that the frame rates might not be syncing, since the Flash swfs are set at 30 fps. So I change the setting in the Flash swfs down to 24 fps. Nothing, same errors with things spinning, and button states flashing.

Then I noticed that when I rolled over the buttons, that they stopped flashing, even when I was no longer interacting with them. It was like they caught the stop() that was on their timeline. So after a bit of tinkering I found out this. In our Flex application, when these swfs were loaded, if the loaded swfs had Tweens that tweened an animated movieClip, the animation would ignore the stop() actions in it’s clip.

To solve this, I found out that stop() actions needed to be added to every keyframe that the animation had, and it needed to target the movie that was animating. So if a sign was twirling around, it was, I had to add sign.stop(); to every keyframe where I wanted the sign to not move. I added this on the timeline that had the fade in tween of the sign movieClip.

I still don’t know why this happens, but adding the stop() actions that directly target the movie clip that needs to not move fixes it. If anyone has more insight into this, please let me know. I’m stumped as to why it is happening, and why this workaround is needed.

NOTE: I created a test Flex application, with nothing but a swfLoader to see if I could give that to the agency for testing purposes. In that, the animation behaved 100% correctly. So it’s not all Flex applications, just the one I am working on.

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