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.

Tags: 3d engine, actionscript 3, flash, Flex

Tutorial: Creating a Dynamic Starfield with the Flint Particle System

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

The 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

Tags: actionscript 3, Flex, flint particle system, starfield, tutorial

Resources - 8bitrocket.com

Every once in a while I’ll do a quick review of some of the excellent resources out there for actionscript developers.

8bitrocket.com is a resource that comes highly recommended from the authors of this blog. They have a slew of blogs and games and a fairly active community with a lean towards flash gaming. The 8-bit reference is explained in their about page:

in honor of those first animations we made on the Apple II, we have decided to call this site, and our collective selves (myself Steve Fulton and my twin brother Jeff Fulton) “8-Bit Rocket”. The subtitle “Garage Launched Games” signifies where we are coming from. While we do spend much of our time at our actual jobs (to be revealed later) making web-based games and entertainment, this site is not really about those projects. While we might mention them here, the work here is separate. This site is dedicated to midnight coders, garage games, and making your ideas come alive one hour at a time, at night, while the kids are asleep

I know I can definitely relate to that.

Some recent gems from their tutorials section include, Creating an Optimized AS3 Game Timer Loop, a series of ‘Moving From Flash AS2 To Flash AS3 Articles’ like this one, and a nice 4-part series on recreating the Atari 7800 Asteroids game starting here.

Overall, the gist of the site is a bunch of coders having fun making flash games. If you have any interest at all in actionscript gaming I recommend you take a look at 8-bit Rocket.

Tags: 8bitrocket, actionscript 3, flash, resources