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Star Wars in Flash: Developing for the Playstation 2 : Fred Sharples

I came in a little late.

orangedesign created the menus for lucasart’s starfighter games (2) for ps2. All of the menus were created within macromedia flash, and played back within a Flash player included with the game.
Have to conisder localization. They do the German version first since the german words tend to be the longest.

Memory considerations, only 32 megs of ram on ps2. compressed sizes of images doesn’t matter, it is the uncompressed size. reducing the number of colors. the butterflyed the images (symetrical, so they only have to load half of each image (and then flip it)).

design process

fred is showing some of the images they presented to the lucas arts to get an idea of the type of imagery they were looking for in the jedi starfigter menus. (just regular images they found on the web).

originally, they had a more dirty, mechaninal interface, but in the end it became more modern, clean look.

showed series of drawings of early menu prototypes. really cool.
tips and tricks

memory issues

framerate issues

Localization

Sony Requirements

card issues, example:

these all have to be asked and considered within the flash movie.
Middleware layer. the layer of scripting between the hardware / game and flash.

example of setting something in the game’s middleware. this tells the game to play in stereo mode:

getURL("callback://SetStereoStatus", 2);
getURL("callback://GetStereoStatus", "variableName");

this tells the middleware what variable name to use when it passed the data back to flash. you have to wait one frame in flash before you can reference the data.

Why should flash be on Playstation 2?
Currently not avaliable. playstation 2 is very popular platform.

three versions of flash player for ps2

showing pictures on ps2 linux kit. pretty cool. comes with harddrive and ethernet port.
website:

Fred wrote a chapter on Flash for the PS2 in Flash Enabled : Flash Design and Development for Devices.

orangedesign.com
secretlevel.com
lucasarts.com

future they want to be able to use the flash player within the games, overlaying the action and even showing video.

testing. worked on pc. they had firewire connection into test unit that they used to upload the entire game into the ps2, and then test it on the console.

orange did not do the sound.

end of session.

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