I’ve decided to share a bunch of flash games I build for various clients over the past few years. Most of these aren’t online anymore, and I thought it wold be a shame if they all went to waste : ) Read the rest of this entry »

In keeping with the space theme from my previous post (and not wanted to leave Starfield entirely empty) here’s another papervision parametric 3D object/component : Asteroid.  Similarly to Starfield, asteroid is textured with pragmatically generated texture, so no need to look for images, it has configurable surface deformation as well and it’s default form it can be simply created and placed in your 3D scene with this only line of code : scene.addChild(new Asteroid());

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Some PV3D sessions at Flash on the Beach inspired me to play with Papervision3D again and I sort of went for the “space” theme. And there’s certainly no space without stars! Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working for couple of weeks now on a large Flex 3 based project at the company I work for. It’s a multi-user  publishing system for various flash based creative types, that aids and alleviates the whole creative from concept creation through approval cycles to deployment on various platforms.

In this project I had a page that contained a tab navigator with a custom editors inside of it. It all worked fine, before I needed to make sure the data on the page is saved before going onto another tab. To make this work I had to essentialy force tab navigator to cancel select child action after user click on the other tab and the data on the current weren’t saved.

This proved to be a problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Flash (in AS2) has one unpleasant habit. Interactive handlers (i.e “onRollover”, “onRollOut” , “onRelease” etc..) are being canceled as soon as you place a movie clip on the top of it with at least one interactive mouse handler defined.

Typical situation is a rollover pop up that needs to have some buttons on it. As soon as you rollOver those buttons, onRollOut event is triggered on the pop up, even though you still physically over it with your mouse.

There are of course different workarounds for this, but generally it’s a pain to code around this unfortunate behaviour.

AS3 doesn’t have this problem fortunately, but for the projects that still needs to be made in AS2 for whatever reason I created a MCEvents2Decorator class. Read the rest of this entry »

One one side you have euphoria of what’s POSSIBLE and on the other side what is REALISTICALLY usable. An all important parameter is the width of the gap between these two sides. After some time spent playing with PV3D I reallised just how deep this gap is.

I found out, that unless you cheat ( a lot ) , there’s no way, you can do a 3D that’s even close to a todays CGI  standard. Among other problems, there’s a very low limit to number of fully shaded (goraud/phong) triangles you can have in a 3D scene before you send you CPU usage soaring.

Notice that even quite big names pv3d based sites (Absolut, Canon, Sony) although using very very, simple geometry aren’t quite smooth on even most powerful PCs. Even on a quad core intel machines you can notice a reaction lag, that distorts the smooth interactivity experience. On a below average machines this kind of sites can quickly become unusable. Read the rest of this entry »

With flv videos becoming essentially THE video format for the web, there are many flv players, components to choose from so why bother with this one ?

It’s not your typical feature rich component, all it does is plays the flv file, you can pause/resume, mute on/off , shows you playback and loading progress and you can seek by dragging the seek button. Which I found is 95% of functionality you need anyway.

This player has originally been written for flash banners, I called it VideoPlayerLite, had no buttons and byte size was the most import criteria. This is extended version of the lite version , which has seek functionality and I added buttons. It is still pretty lightweight, code itself has 3.7 kB with buttons and bars has 4.3 kB. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the sessions at Flash on the Beach got me interested into playing with particles. Seb Lee  showed us an example of a using particles to explode a skeleton. You clicked on a skeleton and bones went flying. The only problem was, you had to manually break up the skeleton into a bunch of movie clips first and placed them into the skeleton timeline. That got me thinking… There must be a way for Flash to do this programmaticaly. So I spend some time (and caffeine) and wrote a class capable of doing just that…

Above demo loads the titles of the blog entries from durej.com , breaks them apart and uses them as a particles. You can also roll over with your mouse to trigger particle animation. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a highly subjective list of books I think every developer should read at least once. Some of them are worth reading couple of times, or from time to time coming back to re-read certain passages. The first 3 books do not mention Flash inside them even once. All five, however; do cover spectrum of Flash related topics. As this is a list of books flash developer should read, I do not go into areas of multimedia, there could be another list dedicated to just sound editing, just video editing, just to 3D etc.. Read the rest of this entry »

UltraKillz is a 3D FPS “Quake Arena like” flash game build by my friends and ex-colleagues Mike Barrax and Malcom Bailey. Mike was responsible for the flash end of development (coding of game engine, characters, gameplay etc..)  and Malcom (Malcx) for the it’s back end. The result is killing spree joyride . And all needed is to have a flash 9 plugin.

Well done Mike and Mal!
After the BETA stage, game will be released to the general public, till then you can pre-register for the invites on the game project page www.ultrakillz.com.

The video of the gameplay is available on : YouTube.

Bellow is a little interview with the creators of the game that explains a technical side of the game and some development background details. Read the rest of this entry »