Archive for the AS3 Category

Shane from Lost In Actionscript has a great writeup on some tips and tricks for working with the Camera class in AS3. One that I never thought about was:

Tip #2

When recording to a Flash Media Server make sure the camera has activity via the Activity Status Event before publishing the stream. Otherwise you may get a static or black frame at the beginning of the recorded stream.

Camera Class Quirks with FMS » Lost In Actionscript - Shane McCartney.

The June 2008 edition of Adobe EDGE has a great article on geocoding. Geocoding is getting popular with the release of Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, and Google Maps APIs. Suddenly any user can apply for one of those keys and start mapping locations on their site or even using those APIs to get geo location data to then use within their own mapping engine. That is where this example comes in. Adobe has written up a great article on getting started with using the Yahoo Maps API to get the longitude and latitude of a location, then converting that to 3D coordinates to place on a globe built in Papervision. The example is simple, but feels good and responsive.

Read the article
View the Demo

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Jeff Winder has taken the WiiFlash library and an WiiMote to rotate a papervision cube using the accelerometers of the Wiimote. To top it off, he has a Phidgets Servomotor that spins also to matech the papervision cube.

seedylifestyle: WiiFlash with Papervision3D and Phidgets Servomotor.

I had started creating AIR apps since the first beta release and I love how easy it is to create a simple customized tool quickly to help with day to day activities. Until now I’ve been using the WimpyFLV Player with limited success. It was ok, but would have issues playing back files on the network. So I developed my own player that is simple and straight to the point. For development purposes I have the dimensions of the video file in the upper right hand corner and the length of the video in seconds. This helps since you can’t just view the properties of an FLV to get this information. Check out the link below to download the .air file.

Adobe - Adobe AIR Marketplace Photo & Video

Justin Everett-Church, Senior Adobe Flash Player Product Manager, just posted a new demo showing off Flash Player 10’s new 3D capabilities. It’s a fabric demo that uses APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) to simulate the physics. This demo may look familiar to a previous papervision demo (which no longer seems to be live, sorry).

Justin’s Flash Blog

Most of these are new to me, great writeup!

Tips on how to write efficient AS3 » Lost In Actionscript - Shane McCartney

Lee Brimlow has added another great video tutorial to gotoAndLearn that leads through some of the great new features in the new Flash CS4.

gotoandlearn.com - Flash CS4 Feature Tour

We recently had one of our interns slave over getting a Displacement Map Filter project off the ground and displaying a flat image in faux 3D. After long hours of slavery, his hard work paid off and we recieved this great tutorial that blows most out of the water. Great work Joel, now get me a damn cup of coffee!

lab.joelGillman.com › False 3D in Flash: Displacement Maps

I had written a post a while back about using the Handy FPS box. Recently I was sorting through some code and remembered I had found a prettier more informative as3 fps stats box. This one is from Mr. Doob, you can download it from his Google Code Repo.

Example Code:

import Stats;
addChild(new Stats());

[ via ricardocabello ]

Tinic Uro (Adobe Flash Player Engineer) has yet another great writeup in relation to performance and flash player. His latest article answers a lot of questions and comments Ajax-heavy developers are making against flash. Understandably Tinic defends his software, I guess I didn’t expect him to agree with those stating flash is a CPU hog.

Decide for yourself. Personally, I’m going to trust an Adobe Software Engineer instead of the typcial company Javascript guy that always tries to shit on flash. There is a time and place for both.

kaourantin.net: On Performance

I was working with the flash deep linking tool swfAddress and came across a ridiculous bug. Apparently the new v2.1 doesn’t support certain special characters. I’m not sure of which exactly, but I know for sure you can’t use a : (colon). Trying to set the deep link URL to a string that contains a colon will cause the javascript to go into an infinite loop and eventually crash the server it is hosted on unless you navigate away from the page quickly.

Reverting back to v2.0 helped the problem. Apparently v2.3 will have a fix for this bug.

Read more about the bug

OneMotion.com has put together a neat experiment using flash and 3D (Papervision?). The demo is basically just a spider crawling around following your mouse in 3D perspective. There is a crontrol panel to alter different characteristics of the spider (Body Scale, Speed, Leg Reach, Height, etc…).

Great Job, creepy, but cool!

Play With Spider - Flash 3D - OneMotion.com.

Adrian Parr has put together the most comprehensive list of AS3 code libraries that I have seen. Just about anything you would need on a daily basis is there with links to the respective websites.

Great job Adrian!

Blog Archive » AS3 Code Libraries.

RTMP is the protocol used by Adobe’s Flash Media Server to stream content into flash. Most of the help documentation doesn’t touch much on this method of connection and is limited to sources not easily available to users.
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Great layout manager, super simple and easy to setup. Give it a go and let me know what you think.

Actionscript 3 Layout Organizers Examples and Source Code | SOME RANDOM DUDE.