@jpsarda's longer tweets

Making a level on BonusLevel.org, is the rule, but making a game doesn’t happen so often.

Today, a game started more than 1 year ago by 2 young members of BonusLevel.org, has made it to the front page. The game is a mouse avoider, called “Path 4 Mouse”, with endless options in the level editor. If you are not familiar with game development, maybe you don’t know how difficult it is to finish a game! So I want to congratulate geckojsc (15 years old) and MARC2008  (16 years old) for their great achievement. I’ve seen their Flash skills improving along the months while the game was taking shape, and I can’t wait for their next games.

The BitmapData.draw method in Flash, is protected. If you try to write a MovieClip from another domain/website into a BitmapData, you will get a SecurityError. Unless this domain authorizes other domains with a crossdomain.xml policy.

I  learned this when trying to write a Youtube video on a BitmapData.

Youtube is not cool, but fortunately, Vimeo is! Yes, Vimeo authorizes all of us to write their videos on a BitmapData, allowing a bunch of fun experiments (http://asciimeo.com/).

All you have to do is request the right crossdomain.xml, which is not documented on their site (http://vimeo.com/api/docs/moogaloop) .

I knew that asciimeo.com was using BitmapData.draw on Vimeo videos, so all I had to to do is open a video on asciimeo, and use firebug (http://getfirebug.vom/) to capture the crossdomain.xml urls. And it worked!

Here are a bunch of calls you have to add in your AS3 projects to allow Vimeo videos being written on BitmapData :

Security.loadPolicyFile(“http://t.vimeo.com/crossdomain.xml”);
Security.loadPolicyFile(“http://bitcast.vimeo.com/crossdomain.xml”);
Security.loadPolicyFile(“http://av.vimeo.com/crossdomain.xml”);
Security.loadPolicyFile(“http://bitcast-a.v1.ord1.bitgravity.com/crossdomain.xml”);
Security.loadPolicyFile(“http://bitcast-a.v1.iad1.bitgravity.com/crossdomain.xml”);
Security.loadPolicyFile(“http://bitcast-a.v1.sjc1.bitgravity.com/crossdomain.xml”);
Security.loadPolicyFile(“http://b.vimeocdn.com/crossdomain.xml”);
Security.loadPolicyFile(“http://vimeo.com/moogaloop/crossdomain.xml”);

Tanks to http://twitter.com/peter_nitsch and http://twitter.com/UnitZeroOne who pointed me to Vimeo.

As I already told, Vimeo is a cool community, visit their forums where you can reach the staff : http://vimeo.com/forums