There are a few Open Source Actionscript projects that Urbansquall relies on for most of its games. Here’s an overview of the three open source tools that we’ve found essential to Flash game development.

BulkLoader

For any project where we need to load external files, we’ve come to rely on BulkLoader. If you’ve ever tried to load a few hundred files at once with AS3, you know that at some point Flash will fail fairly silently and just refuse to load the data you require. That’s where BulkLoader fits in. When you try to load something with BulkLoader, if its there it will arrive. No exceptions.

Box2D

Box2D is quickly becoming our de facto solution for anything related to 2D collision detection and resolution. There’s not much to say about Box2D except that it was the first Flash physics engine that did it right, and it quickly destroyed all the competition. We <3 Box2D.

Tweener

I feel dirty every time I use Tweener, but its ease of use and raw power makes it the most common open source actionscript we rely on here at Urbansquall. Even the most stale UI can be made to pop after a few hours in bed with Tweener.

Others?

There are plenty of open source Actionscript projects out there, here are some we hope we get to play with sometime in the future:

• Papervision3d – 3D Engine
• SPAS – UI framework
• AsWing – Another UI framework
• FAR – zip support

Of course we rely on the gamepoetry open source resources more than anything else.