[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] [support-gang] An Opportunity to bring vital content to the Sugar/XO world - Needs technical help.

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Tomeu,

On 19 Jul 2009, at 10:51, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

> Hi,
>
> not sure why Caroline's email didn't reached IAEP, wrong email  
> address?
>
> On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 02:17, Caryl Bigenho<cbigenho at hotmail.com>  
> wrote:
>> Hi Caroline,
>>
>> I agree that content is something we desperately need for Sugar and  
>> the XO.
>> But, I don't quite understand your proposal.  Is Innovations For  
>> Learning
>> offering us their software for free to adapt?
>
> They have offered at least some of it. More may come but I don't know
> about it yet. See:
>
> http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2009/05/progress-on-sugar-activities-with-swf.html
>
>> If so, what language is it
>> in?
>
> Flash, developed specifically to run on Gnash.
>
>> Is the source code available?
>
> Yes, though in the .fla format that as far as I know can only be
> edited with the proprietary tools from Adobe.
>
>> Or, is this something you think our volunteer programmers should  
>> try to
>> reverse-engineer and create for Sugar and the XO?
>
> Well, what I would like to see (but may not be what Caroline had in
> mind) is someone with access to the Adobe tools and some Flash
> knowledge to debug the EatBoom swf file and see why the game is not
> progressing to the next levels after the first three or so sums have
> been completed.

Just looking...

:-( damn and blast... The .SWF played on my Mac also fails to progress  
levels.

:-( double damn and blast... I have MX2004 (which is really Flash v7  
if you ignore the annoying marketing naming fluff). The eatboom .FLA  
was last saved by someone using Flash v9 on Windows (needed a binary  
hex editor to find that out) and will not open here – so there's no  
way I can fix – pity this level of content could have been compatible  
with Flash v4!

:-( triple damn and blast... I used a (recent) flash de-compiler to  
convert the .SWF into a v7 .FLA. I can access all the project/code/ 
media, but the levels still didn't progress (though I could always get  
through the exit). There should be 3 levels (see attached images), and  
two game over (failure/success):

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Oh well, I did try. Anyone else have the latest Flash IDE want to give  
it a shot? I did notice (though this may be an issue related to  
version incompatibility) that the levels are often impossible to  
complete. Your 'slug' can only pick up a number for a short amount of  
time, so if the correct answer appears away from the door you can  
never get it to the exit in time...

FWIW, the .swf should play directly in a web browser with the Flash  
plug-in to test, does this game actually play through the levels for  
anyone? I've tested without luck in Safari with the latest Adobe Flash  
plug-in and several other older stand alone Flash players. Here's the  
URL:

http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/eatboom/repos/mainline/blobs/raw/5b9c64cb13145b0d90377a354d625afec14f1716/EatBoom.swf

Regards,
--Gary

P.S. If any one's interested :-) this was the main reason I stopped  
developing with Flash (did it for about 5yrs professionally).  
Macromedia, and maybe now Adobe used to mess with developers every ~2  
years by breaking their binary save formats, stopping the new IDE  
release from saving older versions, and usually triggering a re-write  
of a good portion of your source due to API breaks. It was great for  
one off short 'disposable' projects that only had to be maintained for  
~6 months, but a real pain if you had to keep things working over a  
few years.