I’ve just been having a play with Papervision3D 2.0 (Great White) and here are the results of my first test. I create 240 cubes inside a loop, positioning them in rows across the stage. Each cube uses six movieclips from the library as their materials. Each cube then rotates depending on the cursor position on the stage.
He covers, downloading and installing a subversion client such as TortoiseSVN, getting the Great White Papervision3D files from GoogleCode, downloading and installing the Flash Extension (mxp file), adding the Papervision3D class-path, adding the SWC file in Flex Builder.
This is all pretty useful information if you haven’t done it before.
Today I created a little game that can be played in the Flash CS3 IDE. It is an extension for Flash CS3 (mxp file) that adds a new panel to the interface. You can access the panel by going to Window > Other Panels > BugZap.
The game pretty simple but quite addictive. You move the gun at the bottom left and right, the object being to shoot down the alien before he lands. The alien moves around (slowly at first and then getting quicker) and you have to keep track of him. The more you shoot and miss, the lower he gets.
If you shoot him, you move on to the next level, where he starts from the top again but he moves quicker. There is a maximum of 30 levels. The game is over either when he lands or you get to the end of level 30 (which ever comes first).
The lower he is when you kill him, the more points you get. The level number act as a score multiplyer, so more points are awarded the further you get through the levels (and the faster he becomes in both directions).
Your highest score is recorded and maintained between sessions, giving you a personal best to beat. My current high score is 25,628.
It allows you to embed Flash videos from sites like YouTube and Google Video in to your WordPress blog easily, and the resulting HTML code will be XHTML compliant.The syntax is as follows …
I’ve just come across a little online quiz where you can test your ActionScript 3.0 knowledge. It’s a site that accompanies the Learning ActionScript 3.0 book from O’Reilly. It’s not a particulary comprehensive quiz, more of a bit of fun.
I managed to get full marks on most sections, but it looks like I need to gem up a bit on Sound and Design Patterns …
Yipee! Ordered my Flash on the Beach 08 ticket this morning. The tickets went on sale this weekend (just gone) and already 150 tickets have been sold. The first 250 tickets can be purchased at the reduced Super Early Bird price of £199 for the 3-day conference pass. They are also holding two pre-conference workshops on the Sunday (28th Sept), I have booked for the Papervision3D session.
Currently, there are 94 Super Early Bird tickets left. So get in there quick if you want to save some money.
At the time of writing, the confirmed speaker list (with links to their personal websites) includes …
I’m really looking forward to it. I went to both the 2006 and the 2007 conference and it is a fantastic event. We’re so lucky to have an event like this held in the UK. I always come away from it inspired, fired up and wanting to learn more. Many thanks to John Davey for organising this awesome event every year.
If you haven’t been before, get your tickets and see for yourself. I’ll see you there …
I just had to blog about this freeware game I have come across. It is called Gymnast, and it is built my a guy called Walaber who does this in his spare time. He has a blog here. I haven’t played it yet, just watching the trailer was enough to make me want to tell people about it. He’s actually got some pretty awesome stuff on his site.
Initially it looks very nice, but after a short play with the sliders my Firefox browser crashed and displayed a weird error message. It was not an error message I have ever seen before.
Windows XP, Firefox 2.0.0.13 Error Message: Illegal Operation in Plugin
I restarted Firefox and tried it again, but the same thing happened. It is 100% repeatable.
So then I thought I’d give it give it a whirl in Internet Explorer (IE 7.0.5730.11) and, bingo, another new error message.
Windows XP, IE Error Message
The version of the Flash Player I have installed is WIN 9,0,115,0 (Debug player).
I’ve just built a handy stopwatch Adobe AIR app. Basically, it is a simple timer with Hrs:Mins:Secs.Ms, Start, Pause, Continue and Reset. The number of times I have needed a simple timer like this and havn’t had one, so I decided to build one myself. I’ve used Adobe AIR so that it installs on your system like any other application and is also cross-platform.
I recently discovered a Firefox Add-on called PicLens (created by a company called Cooliris) that nicely displays image search results in a seamless scrolling 3D space, and then allows you to view them as a slidshow. See screengrabs below …
It runs very smoothly and I am impressed with it’s ease of use. You can search Google Images, Flickr, Picasa, Yahoo, Facebook and many more.
They also have a WordPress plugin that I haven’t tried yet, but will check out soon.
I have just come across a really handy and well executed application and website that allows you to easily capture (image or video) and share what you are doing on screen.
The application is called the Jing Project, and is freely available for both Mac and Windows. It has been created by TechSmith who have many years of experience in this field (they produce Camtasia Studio as a commercial product).
Once you have captured your screen as either an image or video it is automatically encoded to Flash video and you then have the option of uploading it to your own area on screencast.com, embedding it on your own page or blog, uploading it to Flickr (images only), saving it as a SWF file locally, or uploading it to your FTP area.
It is very easy to use and it is FREE! I highly recommend you check it out.
Recently I have been having a play around with using different data types such as int and uint (rather than using Number all the time). To help me see which data types accept which values, I have put together a little chart that displays some example vaules and shows if they are valid or not (and if not, the Compiler Errors). Some of the results are pretty obvious, others not so.
Green = All fine.
Amber = A rounded value is stored and NO error is thrown.
Red = Compiler warning/error is thrown.
The Adobe LiveDocs have some more information on the subject.
There has also been some discussion in the past regarding the performance of of int and uint from Grant Skinner and Sho Kuwamoto, but I think Tink takes a balanced view of the subject and I will be following him (as much as I can).
Following on from yesterday’s post, I’ve had chance to update the Colour Line Drawing demo to include gradual colour changing (instead of random) and fixed the saving of the image to a jpeg file.
function createJPG(m:MovieClip, q:Number, fileName:String) { var jpgSource:BitmapData = new BitmapData (m.width, m.height);
jpgSource.draw(m); var jpgEncoder:JPGEncoder = new JPGEncoder(q); var jpgStream:ByteArray = jpgEncoder.encode(jpgSource);
var header:URLRequestHeader = new URLRequestHeader ("Content-type", "application/octet-stream");
var jpgURLRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest ( serverPath+"jpg_encoder_download.php?name=" + fileName + ".jpg");
jpgURLRequest.requestHeaders.push(header);
jpgURLRequest.method = URLRequestMethod.POST;
jpgURLRequest.data = jpgStream;
var jpgURLLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
navigateToURL(jpgURLRequest, "_blank"); }
Here is a little example to show you how to dynamically set the framerate of your Flash movie using AS3. In this example I have also included a slider component to allow you to change the framerate, to prove that it is doing it on-the-fly.