PushButton Engine

Hey all,

We have open sourced one of our internal tools, the PushButton Labs Profiler. It is a hierarchical sampling profiler designed to help you tune the performance of your Flash content. It’s also a useful learning tool - it can give you profiling information on any SWF you open, not just your own content.

If you have struggled to get useful results from the Flash Builder profiler, you should give this tool a try. It’s barer bones, but it often works in situations where Flash Builder doesn’t, and it does not obscure any data, giving you a full performance picture of your application. The profiler is targeted for advanced users.

We’ve opened a section on our forums for discussion about the profiler. In addition, source and binaries can be downloaded from the PBLabs Profiler project on GitHub. The profiler is available under the GPL v3.

We hope it is useful for you!

If you were tracking the @pushbuttonlabs Twitter feed, then you know that we just recently got back from the Flash Gaming Summit and the Game Developers Conference. Busy week! Both were great shows, and it was fantastic to meet up with other Flash game developers.

Of course, we’ve been building games for years, so we said hi to our more traditional game development brethren, too. It’s very interesting looking at the Flash space - in a year, there will be a lot more “old school” game developers doing Flash. The crowd at Flash Gaming Summit was young (and passionate) compared to the game dev scene as a whole. It’s going to be a lot of fun watching Flash grow up.

At the Game Developer’s Conference, it was amazing how seriously people took what we’re doing in the Labs. I was expecting people to kind of blow us off - “who needs a Flash game engine?” But nearly everyone we talked to was very interested in our technology and business model. Jeff Tunnell wrote a great introduction to our vision for the engine. We even got tracked down by James Au of GigaOM - read his coverage of the PushButton Engine.

What about the engine? Well, we found a few bugs since the last release, and we learned an important fact at the Flash Gaming Summit - that a lot of developers still use pure ActionScript and the Flash IDE. Version 36 of PushButton Engine is out - you can read the release announcement on our forums, but the main highlights are: support for pure AS3 development (for instance from the Flash IDE), SWCs are included for easier integration with Flash/FlashDevelop, and a ton of usability bugs from the last update have been fixed.

Go check out the engine!

Image by Blakespot

I lied, another beta! We added an isometric renderer and a state machine component as well as many small bug fixes and a project generator script.

Take a look, post questions in the forums, give feedback.

Features

• Core engine (components, logging, resource manager, serialization, time management, unit tests, etc.)
• 2D rendering (extensible API for 2d renderers to plug into). Includes orthographic and isometric renderers.
• Platformer Demo (StupidSampleGame).
• Box2D integration.
• PushButton Networking. (Realtime networking library; will be pay in final release. NetworkDemo demonstrates how it works.)
• Supports Flex SDK and Flex Builder IDE out of the box. Easy to use with FlashDevelop and other tools (see forums).

What’s new in this release?

• Isometric renderer and demo.
• Major refactors to the implementation for the RenderingTwoD library.
• Added AnimationController.
• Added project file generator.
• Added empty game/library template projects.
• Improved serializer and resource manager error messages.
• Added StateMachine component.