R-C4D3—flash game development middleware

summary

Shell, Front End, ActionScript Library, Tools, and Example ROMs
	R-C4D3 project at google code
Table of Contents
	Overview
	Shell and Front End
	References

Overview

R-C4D3 exists to provide a simple way for game developers to build, play and share their own games. It has several components:

The R-C4D3 shell, a desktop application (currently Windows only)
A visual front end for browsing and selecting games and viewing stats
A supporting library of ActionScript 3 code to provide a common interface for play controls across different deployment environments
Tools to assist in developing, testing, debugging, and loading games
Example game 'ROMs' that illustrate use of the system

The full scope of the system supports the BYOAC-style home arcade developer. It is designed to accomodate installation on a dedicated arcade machine that translates joystick and button signals into keyboard events.

However, by programming to the common control interface, the same game SWF that works within the R-C4D3 shell on a home arcade machine can also be deployed to the desktop or web and work with keyboard and mouse events directly, simply by using a different loader (loaders provided as part of the tools package).

R-C4D3 Shell and Front End

The R-C4D3 shell is basically a full-screen web browser that when launched, loads a menu html page specified in an ini file. Custom menus can be easily installed by editing the ini file to point to a new html page.

The default menu page provided with R-C4D3 displays a flash movie for browsing games and their meta data (e.g. author, genre, rating, times launched), and for selecting a game to launch and play. The menu retrieves a json listing of game ROM config files. Each config file contains meta-data about the game, the location of the main game file, and a thumbnail for the game to be displayed in the menu.

Games are self-contained in their own folder. Each game is hosted by an html container, which means that really any web plug-in technology can be used for game development on the R-C4D3 system. Due to the popularity of Flash, current efforts have focused on the ActionScript toolset, but DHTML & HTML Canvas, Java & JavaFX, VRML & X3d, Processing, and VirTools are examples of other technologies that provide web browser plugins.