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Sorry about the hellacious posting recently, but client work has taken me out of the realm of actionscript in recent months. When I’m not touching actionscript on a daily (or even weekly) basis, it’s hard to for me to stay engaged with the news and happenings of the actionscript 3 gaming community.
Think of this as a short programming break, and nothing permanent!
Saw an interesting demo of another 3D flash engine, Electric 3D, over at Electric Oyster. Not open source or available to developers, but still a neat demo. Check it out:
Looking for a fresh new actionscript 3 2D physics engine? Check out FOAM (Update: also check out a much more in-depth description on the generalrelativity blog). From the project page:
FOAM is a two-dimensional rigid body physics engine written in ActionScript 3.0.
It is meant as an architectural and mathematical reference for developers interested in physics simulation in the area of game development or otherwise. It trades efficiency for modularity and extensibility.
If you’re creating any sort of interactive environment in space in actionscript 3, this may be of interest to you: Tutorial: Creating a Dynamic Starfield wit the Flint Particle System
Tags: actionscript 3, Flex, flint particle system, starfield, tutorialThe basic concept:
- Set up 4 particle emitters just outside the 4 edges of the screen
- Feed the Starfield a velocity vector from your ship’s movement engine
- use the velocity vector to give each generated particle a velocity opposite that of the ship
- use the built-in garbage collector of the Flint Particle System to destroy stars that go off screen
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.
Tags: as3, code, flash, Flex, open source, particle systems
Until recently, I’ve been using the Flash Tracer plugin for firefox for all trace-output while coding. It’s worked great so far, but I’m a screen real-estate maniac and don’t want to have any unneccessary space used up if I don’t have to. That’s why I was excited to see this. ThunderBolt is a debugging console that fits right into firebug, which is a must-have for any web developer, so you don’t have to have any screen-space taken up by an extra plugin, like flash tracer. Also, they have a pretty cool Adobe Air console if that’s your thing.
From Venture Beat:
Tags: ads, mochi mediaMochi Media, the San Francisco company that offers ads that run in online casual games, and analytics services that look at game performance, is coming out with a new service. It has packaged its ads and analytics services together with its catalog of white-label games it syndicates, creating a way for web site publishers to both engage users through games and make money from that engagement.
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.
Wow, just wow! Check out this demo, entitled Green Plante, from the Away3D group to show off their 2.0 release.
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:
Tags: firefoxMike 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.
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