f13.net

While some might consider this a "mole" post, it should be noted that Push Button Labs has no corporate or commercial ties to GarageGames at all.

Push Button Labs (http://pushbuttonlabs.com/) is a very new company formed from several of the original founders and employees of GarageGames (including Jeff Tunnell and Rick Overman, as well as Ben Garney and Tim Aste) that have just pushed their open source Flash game engine Push Button Engine (http://pushbuttonengine.com/) into public beta.

I'm not a Flash developer, and I have no information regarding the engine itself (never looked at it, never seen anything written with it), but figured some might be interested.

I'll be quite interested when networking is fully implemented. I already use Box2d, so obviously I think its smart that they implemented that. Im a little interested in the other stuff, but the networking is the important part. A smartfox alternative would be dope.

Ben did a lot of the low level work to move Torque Networking to our standalone Torque Networking Library (which, for the record, is being used in Godfather II), and has a keen knowledge of how to do networking right. If it can be done in Flash, I'm pretty sure it'll be done pretty well!

So, I havent gotten the chance to mess with it yet, and Im not a programmer, I just do art. But I am programmer literate.

I'm pretty sure I can get it to work, but Im king of curious. They have instructions for getting started using a variety of free IDEs and Adobe Flex (which can be used to build 'flash' swfs), but no information on how to use the engine with Adobe Flash CS3 or CS4.

As someone who talks to a shit ton of flash developers... no one uses flex. Like, companies do, but indies don't. We all use Flash CS4. Some still use CS3 if they haven't found a crack for CS4 or are lazy. I just feel like they should know that no one uses flex if they're assuming for some reason that people do.