Archive for the ‘Dev’ Category
Thursday, July 27th, 2006 |
… Ok, a bit of exaggeration here but it comes pretty close! In case you missed it, Andre Michelle has written a RealTime Synth with ActionScript 3.0 that immitates an analogue synth not unlike the famous 303. The Userinterface is slick and the knobs are turning linear when dragged with the mouse. The sound is very good for that it is calculated! Try playing around with the Filter, Cutoff and ADSR curves and you will see (hear) that it sounds pretty much like a real synth. Heads up to Andre for being such an Innovator!
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Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 |
I’ve updated Alcon (ActionScript Logging Console) to v1.0.8! The only thing that has been added in this version is a Debug Class for use with ActionScript 3.0, everything else hasn’t been changed. The AS3.0 Debug Class can be found in the com.hexagonstar.util.debug package.
Note that you must use Debug.trace() since I’m not even sure if it’s somehow possible with the MXMLC to redirect to a custom trace method (like it is possible with MTASC). If you got any hints on this, please let me know! The new version can be found as always on it’s page at the Flash Game Programming Wiki! Enjoy!
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Sunday, July 9th, 2006 |
The creator over at e-phonic.com seemingly has created the first realtime synth in Flash with AS3.0. Realtime in the meaning that it creates the produced sound completely by itself and not relying on predefined samples. He used the ByteArray and the Loader class (Loader.loadBytes) based on an idea and first experiment from David at Robots /w Lasers.
The synth consists of a simple, white emptyness in where you have to click with the mouse and it plays generated sounds depending on the coordinates. The sounds might be still a bit awkward but hey, it’s a milestone in Flash history, isn’t it?! 
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Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 |
ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9.0 brought a big leap of speed and all kinds of changes and optimizations with it. But these mainly happen under the hood only. While Flash 8 came up with the bitmap level manipulation stuff, Flash 9 doesn’t come with any groundbreaking new features that are visible to the surface (except for the speed improvement).
Yesterday on a meeting I was asked if I could use a rotatable 3D mesh in Flash for the clients presentation project and I could only tell them that the lack of native 3D support is the big weakness of Flash. Eventually we will end up with a single frame animation to fake the rotation. However this was one example that there must be quite a demand for 3D support in Flash, not only for experimentation but even more for commercial use. In fact native 3D is already overdue since a while but I accept that implementing such a thing is not an easy challange.
So native graphics acceleration for Flash has to come one way or the other, not only because everybody wants it but also for Flash to stay competitive (think about WinFX). There is still Director one could argue. But somehow I get the feeling that Director will either continue it’s shadow existence or it will disappear sooner or later. 3D for Flash has to come, there is no way or excuse around it! Maybe the next version? Too early! Maybe Flash 10? Who knows! We might however see some sweet audio improvements in a near future!
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Monday, July 3rd, 2006 |
Thy Dungeonman 3: Behold Thy Graphics, a text/graphics adventure from Homestarrunner in the style of the very early days of computing. Complete with fake floppy load delay and amber screen display! You find yourself in a dungeon cell with doom lurking all around you. The texts are intentionally exaggerated old ‘english’ and once you got out of the first area you’ll notice that this game plays quite smooth. It’s a short but funny and while you’re there, you find several other oldschool imitations on Homestarrunner and videlectrix.com.
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Saturday, July 1st, 2006 |
mdm is working on a new tool named Rebus that can turn AS3 (and Flex2) files into .NET2 executables. It’s still in beta but registered users can download and test it. I’ve did a quick test and compiled my SWNameGen with Rebus and it went surprisingly smooth and flawless. It will offer some new and interesting extensions, to quote from the mdm support forums …
(more…)
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Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 |
Mike Morearty of Adobe wrote in his blog how to change the syntax colors in Flex Builder 2.0. This is useful stuff since I loathe the default blue and green colors of Flex’s syntax colors. Think about it! If you code the whole day long you have to look at your source all day long and you will look all the time at these colors! Sooner or later you start wearing blue shirts and green pants with pink socks! 
To know this is even more important since Mike states in one of the comments that Flex 2.0 will not have any preferences to change these colors and that such a feature might be part of a later version. Another thing about the default syntax style that confuses me is that strings in quotes are in bold while keywords are not. I usually have it vice versa.
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Saturday, May 13th, 2006 |
Short answer: no! Full answer here. However when I had Flex2 beta2 installed, I deleted the JRE that installed with Flex because I already had the JRE 5.0 installed and it caused no problems at all. I don’t really like the idea that every application installs it’s own JRE on my harddisk (Maya is such another app). Not that the ~50Mb are wasting too much space but its getting confusing if there are many JRE’s installed and Windows doesn’t make this fact easier with it’s obscure environment variables configuration.
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Friday, May 12th, 2006 |
Everybody has probably by now blogged about this but Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall are writing a Commodore C64 emulator in ActionScript 3.0! It is still to early to tell how this will take shape but things are looking good so far and by the current state the basic ROM works already. Try it and type the following listing in …
10 POKE 646,1
20 PRINT "C64 IN FLASH!"
30 POKE 53281,2::::::::::::::::::::POKE 53281,10
40 GOTO 30
Note that you need the latest Flash Player PlugIn (9.0) to see this. Either way this is exciting stuff and shows how powerful AS 3.0 and Flash Player 9 are going to be. Additionally the current beta player is a debug-only version that throttles the speed down several times. The final Player might be quite a bit faster.
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Thursday, May 11th, 2006 |
I finally spend some time to make myself more familiar with the Flex 2 Beta and this is what came out as a result: Star Wars Name Generator! It’s a small and modest tool to generate random names (obviously). If you’re a fan of the Star Wars Pen & Paper Role-playing game (like me) you might find this tool useful!
You can generate names for planets and for characters, there are some parameters that can be choosen from before pressing the Generate button. After that it will spit out a list of more or less useful names (some of them sound very exotic). Interesting names can then be dragged and dropped onto the right side list. All names in this list are stored in local shared object on the users computer until the Clear button is pressed. The Switch button displays the saved names in a text area from where the names can be copied to the clipboard. (Small update: Works now with latest Flash Player v9).
>> Star Wars Name Generator <<
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