Man, I feel stupid. Turns out those security errors from Kongregate were being thrown thanks to my lack of a crossdomain.xml file that allows access to data from off-domain swfs. kurtmargenau.com didn’t have one, so any calls to my hiscore phps were being rejected by flash, because the default is if it doesn’t find this magic xml file on the root of the domain, it doesn’t allow it to access any info from that domain. This xml file btw, is a list of domains that are allowed to access. For example, I would put “www.kongregate.com” on the list so my high scores worked, but to make it simple, I just allowed all domains, like so:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<!– http://www.kurtmargenau.com/crossdomain.xml –>
<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain=”*” />
</cross-domain-policy>

Now all the folks at Kongregate can battle for high scores!

Kongregate is a pretty sick flash games community where a bunch of people play a bunch of flash games. I just submitted DiggKiller to it, now that the digg-craze has died down a bit, I’m reaching a new audience. Plus they share their ad revenue with me. YAY! Doesn’t look too bad, despite being scrunched a little smaller than the original size. Had to finagle some of the code to get it to work, and for some reason, the hi scores throw security errors when they try to load, despite the sounds, and the digg stories loading from offsite. Whatever. It’s cool.

Check it out on Kongregate

or Play it on my site (hi scores work)

If you go to digg.com RIGHT NOW, you’ll see this on the top 10 sidebar:

.. that is all.

So I’m pretty sure my game has officially “blown up” on digg. Right now it’s getting close to 800 diggs and rising quickly. The cool part about this is.. since the game is a popular gaming story, it shows up in the game itself! And people have caught on to cheating and have starting posting “fuck suck colbert environment epic kevin rose ipod” (these are the keywords that trigger powerups) comments all over the place on digg to give themselves a helping hand when they play. I’ve got to say, it’s pretty cool to be blasting away at a story in my game that IS the game.. it’s kind of like, the matrix or something. No, not really. Image below:

..and when I kill it, I get every powerup in the game simultaneously!!.. truly epic.

If you haven’t played yet, click to play!!

This is what I’ve been working on for awhile. It’s a sick 2D space shooter that implements the digg api. You shoot at enemies that increase in difficulty as they increase in diggs, and you collect comments from the stories that are scanned for keywords to give you powerups. It’s pretty cool, you should play it!

Click Here to Play it!

Right now I’m blazin on puttin’ some high score tables in my game, and among the numerous asinine “Duplicate variable definition” warnings, ironically, Flash gave me the craziest most thoughtful compile warning I’ve ever seen. It made me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside:

“Appending text to a TextField using += is many times slower than using the TextField.appendText() method”

Damn Adobe, thanks for the tip. How many languages do you know of that do THAT?

For awhile now, the flash on my site has been broken. I was an idiot, and hardcoded in the url to my blog into the flash (instead of XMLing it like I did for all the projects and stuff), which at the time was hosted on the CoC. When I graduated, they deleted the hell out of it and that link 404ed to nowhere. I’ve had to have an ugly “blog link broken” disclaimer in the news section on my front page. Weak.

Now I know right now you’re thinking.. “Kurt u n00b, just change the .fla file and re-compile!!” You’d be right, that is, if I still had the source. When my laptop got stolen last november, the .fla went with it. Now you’re probably saying.. “pleez.. just haX0r the swf filez with a dec0mpiler!..” That’s actually a good idea and is exactly what I just did, once I found the right decompiler. It looks like Flasm is the perfect thing. It doesn’t try to re-build the entire .fla file so you can edit it in Flash, but decompiles the bytecode into readable text, so you can change variables and whatnot. Since all I needed to change was the text of the link, it took me about 30 seconds. I recommend this pimpass little command line program to anyone who lost their source and needs to made very minor changes that shouldn’t have been hardcoded anyway. Like me. No more broken links!

Awesome. I haven’t actually changed anything from my old school site except added a blog. This is my first post and I’m still tweaking the stylesheets to get it the way I want, so… yeah. Awesome. I get to blog again with no CoC douches telling that I’m cursing too much… fuck them. I’m out for now.  www.kurtmargenau.com