as3gaming

WOW-Engine - Physics in 3d

If you’re working on a 3d project, be sure to check out WOW-Engine.  From the site:

WOW-Engine is a free AS3 open source physics engine written by Seraf ( Jérôme Birembaut ) capable to handle positions in a 3D environment.

WOW-Engine use Sandy library for all the 3D mathematical computations (matrix, 3D vector, plane). The inner architecture of the engine is also inspired by Sandy’s one.

Collisions and physical reactions are possible thanks to the AS3 physic engine made by Alec Cove, named APE(version 0.2.).. Even if APE is a 2D physic engine, it is possible to extend the contraints on volumes, and that’s the purpose of WOW-engine. WOW-engine extends APE, and allows to simulate physics on 3D volumes.

WOW-Engine is capable to handle positions and rotations of abstract objects, which need to be linked to some visual objects (2D or 3D). The visual objects can be drawn thanks to another library (Sandy3D , Papervision3D, Away3D for 3D).

WOW-Engine use and depend of the Data Structures classes written by polygonal labs.

Flint Particle System v 1.0.3 released

Richard Lord over at Big Room just announced the v1.0.3 release of his Flint Particle System.  If you’re not familiar with it:

Flint is an open-source project to create a versatile particle system in Actionscript 3. The aim is to create a system that handles the common functionality for all particle systems, has methods for common particle behaviour, and lets developers extend it easily with their own custom behaviours without needing to touch the core code.

Check out the newest features in v1.0.3.

Alternativa Platform has officially Launched

Just read on [draw.logic] that the Alternativa platform has officially launched - check out their site: alternativaplatform.com.

Very interesting stuff.  Not only was their 3d engine demo a remakable display of 3d performance in flash, but now they’ve released the techonology to the public in the form of .swc libraries.  Grab it here.

Tech specs from the site:

* signals system — only nesessary calculations;
* BSP — quality polygon sorting, “sharp” crossings;
* n-gons support;
* reusing layers (only changed regions redrawing, polygons are independent);
* objects hierarchy;
* only necessary matrix, coords and UVs recalculating;
* perspective correction — dynamic triangulation;
* collision detection.

Firefox 3 Breaks Some Flash Applications

Unfortunately, it appears that the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3 breaks some flash applications - specifically it seems on Macs that some KEY_UP events aren’t being received by the flash player.  Here’s the bug on Mozilla’s bugzilla.

Update: as of writing this, it looks like they may back out the changes that introduced this issue:

Mike Beltzner   2008-05-30 09:53:21 PDT

New RC2 OSX build with the backout:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.0rc2-candidates/build2/firefox-3.0.en-US.mac.dmg

Also, nightlies were clobbered to include this change, so if you’re on
nightlies, check for updates.

gamepoetry.com - Scale9 That Actually Works

Another excellent article from gamepoetry.com.  This time Panayoti discusses Adobe’s oft-maligned Scale9 function/property for display objects.  From the article:

Flash 8 marked the introduction of the scale9grid. UI writing was about to become substantially easier, because you could create components that resized dynamically and maintained their artistic integrity at all sizes. This was to usher in a new era of sexy UIs that were built in less time. In theory. In practice, the implementation was, and still is, buggy. Oh, and it only works for MovieClips. You can kinda get it working in Flex using yet another embed tag you’ll forget about as soon as you’re done copy pasting it from some reference site. Here’s a scale9 implementation that actually works.

Gskinner’s New Article Series

Grant Skinner, gskinner.com, is a well known flash/actionscript guru whose notables include gProject (acquired by Adobe), and gallery incomplet. His blog is a great resource for anyone interesting in flash development.

Fortunately for all of us, he’s releasing a series of articles exploring small but useful code blocks in AS3. From his post:

I’ve decided to start a little series of articles on the blog called Core AS3 that will deal with small, simple snippets of code (<5 lines) that are very useful but not particularly self-evident. I often encounter questions at workshops and conferences about small coding constructs that I take for granted, and it occurred to me it might be helpful to document and share them with the community.

I recommend everyone stay tuned to this series. His first article, Core AS3: Modulus, shows some great examples of how to use the modulus - a very useful tool in game development.

Mochi Media Snatches MySpace Exec

From TechCrunch.  Mochi Media just announced they have hired the former head of West Coast sales for MySpace, Carol Werner.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mochi Media - they have a set of flash-centric services including flash ads for games, analytics, and javascript developer tools.

From the CrunchBase:

Mochi Media is a San Francisco, CA based company that helps game developers around the world to monetize and distribute their games. The core product, MochiAds, is a platform focused around providing independent game developers with game analytics,…

Flash Player 10 Beta Out

Ryan Stewart, RIA evangelist for Adobe, announced on his blog that Flash Player 10 Beta is now available.  Below are some of the latest features and APIs for the player.  Most exciting to me?  Better Support for Hardware Acceleration!

We’ve also added hardware support for bitmaps, filters, video, and blend modes. You can push all of the rendering duties for those off to the video card in the users machine which should give an automatic performance boost for a lot of very graphic-heavy applications

Sounds like game developers heaven to me.  Anyways, here’s Ryan’s full list:

Rich Text Layout
With Flash Player 10 we’ve exposed new text APIs that will let you create your own text rendering controls. We’re going to be releasing a bunch but if there are things you want to do, you’ll be able to create your own as well. We’ve now got support for bi-directional text, vertical text, and complex scripts along with new layout and flow options. This should meet and exceed what you can do in HTML today and with this release text in Flash Player will no longer be behind.

3D Effects
We’ve also added new APIs to let you create 3D effects inside of the player. You’ll be able easily create very interactive experiences inside and do animation of 2D planes in the 3D world.

Custom Filters and Effects
With the new Adobe Pixel Bender you’ll be able to create your own filters and effects to use and share with other Flashers. You can do all kinds of visual transformations and bring those into your Flash and Flex apps. It’s going to make for some very impressive interfaces.

Dynamic Streaming
We’ve now got the ability in the Flash Player to dynamically change the video quality depending on the bandwidth that you’ve got when you’re watching it. That means we can make sure that you’re getting the best quality possible on the fly. This is probably one of my favorite features in the new Flash Player.

More Hardware Acceleration
We’ve also added hardware support for bitmaps, filters, video, and blend modes. You can push all of the rendering duties for those off to the video card in the users machine which should give an automatic performance boost for a lot of very graphic-heavy applications. We also have an option that will let you specify an HTML attribute when you embed SWFs in the browser to “paint” that SWF using the video card on the machine. This means you’ll get a similar boost to the one you get when you go full screen for video.

File Access
Justin reminded me of the new File APIs which let you prompt the user with a File Dialog box and instead of uploading it to a server you can take that file and load it directly into the Flash Player. You’ll also be able to save content from Flash Player directly to the File system which opens up some cool possibilities.

There’s a ton of stuff in the Flash Player 10 and I’m excited to see what you think. The player team keeps packing a ton of stuff in. If you’ve got suggestions for Flash Player 11, let us know. And thanks for giving Flash Player 10 an early spin.

Portal: The Flash Version: The PC Version

Just read on the joystiq that the group, We Create Stuff, that made the insanely fun flash version of Portal is releasing its levels on the PC. Check it out here.

As a huge fan of the real Portal and a huge fan of the flash Portal, this definitely means Good Things™®©

Kongregate’s New Funding

Kongregate has been getting a lot of press lately, see Crunchbase for in-depth info. In case you’re unfamiliar with Kongregate, it’s a casual flash gaming hub and social network with a pretty neat achievement/ranking system. But, probably the best thing about it is they allow developers to submit their games to the site and share revenue.

More recently in the news they’ve announced a new round of financing from Bezos Expeditions - Jeff Bezos’ (of Amazon fame) venture arm. Kongregate says they didn’t need the money because they’re still sitting on a pile of cash, but hey, if Jeff Bezos wants to throw money at you, you better damn well take it!

What does this mean for actionscript 3 game developers? Good Things™ for sure. Amazon has focused it’s considerable resources on catering to developers of all sorts - just look at their growing list of Web Services for research and web application developers. Now that Bezos has turned his eye (how ever small a portion of it) to gaming it’s not inconceivable to start seeing some services from amazon catered directly to us.

Regardless if you love or hate Kongregate, or if you just don’t care, their making some strides that’ll help the entire developer community down the line