The winner of the Breakpoint 64k PC demo this year is just brilliant. It’s not a PC demo done in the “spectrum style” - it’s actually a Spectrum demo, running in an emulator, all in 64k. Ok so the emulator is “overclocked” but still, bloody hell.. this is some mad Z80 skills.
I was playing around with Flint 1.0.2 and a bit of Asteroids ship code that I had (from the Keith Peters AS3 Animation book.) I had the emitter following the ship, leaving a nice particle trail as it went. And then it occurred to me - why not make the particle renderer a mask for an image? A couple of minutes later and the end result surprised even me! Fly around with the cursor keys, as you do so your ship will push the swirling black smoke away revealing the picture behind, leaving a trail of shiny glitter particles as it does so.
I was pleased to read today that Seb Lee-Delisle has released a new version of his particles demos for AS3. While not really a match for Flint, it is always great to have choice, and sometimes it’s better to sacrifice the large Flint library in exchange for a much more light-weight solution such as this. It’s fast, works well and you can produce some really pretty effects with it.
The downsides are a lack of documentation (basically work it out yourself from the source if you were not lucky enough to attend one of his great talks). But hey, that’s why you’re an AS3 geek, right? 
The zip file contains numerous test files, most offering different style effects and all of the source to learn from.
In short, the superb Box2DAS3 library has been updated to version 2.0.0 today! This is great news indeed, as the new features allow for some seriously cool stuff. Check out the new demos on the site (ragdoll anyone?!)
This week just keeps on getting better! Proving yet again that quite frankly AS3 development is one of the most interesting and fastest advancing areas out there.
Just check this out! Click the shots for the two demos. Definitely the fastest 3D I’ve seen done in Flash yet. Really state of the art, it blows everything else away. Apparently part of the Alternativa3D Engine. I really hope they release it!
Flash on the Beach 2008 is coming September 28th. See you there!
Francis Cheng has a fascinating blog entry about the new way you can use Object Initialisers in ECMA4
Jack over at GreenSock has released two great new classes: TransformMatrixProxy and ColorTransformProxy - being a Shockingly Green Club GreenSock member I already had these but it’s great to see them in the wild.
The uber-particle system Flint has been updated to version 1.0.1. This new build changes the way the renderers work, allowing you to now specify how large the render target is (before it was the full stage size). Release 1.0 also included particle flocking, which is great fun! Definitely check it out.
Over on the Adventures in Actionscript blog a new entry gives away the full source to a feature-rich AS3 pre-loader that includes MochiAd, MochiBot, simple Domain locking and a Vista style glossy progress bar. A nice little package. You can get the progress bar on its own if the rest doesn’t appeal to you.
I was always an Atari boy myself, but I can’t help but smile and adore this charming animated video - created on an Amiga4000 by none other than the mega-mighty Eric Schwartz. Click for YouTube goodness.
Everyone seems to be on the PaperVision hype train at the moment (and for pretty good reason), but it isn’t the only Flash 3D engine out there. Today the Away3D team released a new interactive 3D demo called Green Planet. I tested it on Firefox 3 (Beta 5) and was blown away. Graphically it’s rich, with nicely animated objects and a planet landscape to fly around (it’s under your control). There are interactive objects to pick-up, and the sound fits the whole thing perfectly.
In short, you HAVE to try this out!
More pics after the jump
While working on a custom video player project today I noticed a strange anomoly with the bytesTotal value returned by a NetStream object loading data from a local cache.
The first time you play a remote FLV via NetStream the bytesTotal result is correct, it’s the size of the file as sent by the server. However once the FLV is in the users local cache, and the SWF was reloaded, the bytesTotal value was reporting a size of 4 GB exactly until the stream had “settled down”, and then it returned the correct value. This seemed to take a second or so at most, but it still meant that my code needed changing to cope with it.
After making the connection I was storing the bytesTotal value in a uint. An event based check was comparing this uint with the bytesLoaded value waiting for them to equal each other (i.e. get to 100% downloaded). Of course this would never happen, because it was waiting for 4GB worth of data to download.
So rather than assigning the value to a variable I’m now simply comparing bytesTotal directly with bytesLoaded and then setting a Boolean if they match (downloadComplete = true) to avoid future comparisons.
Even so, it was an interesting oddity I thought worth reminding myself of in the future. Hence this blog entry
I’ve been using the excellent KeyPoll class by Richard Lord / Big Room Ventures. It’s an extremely fast and efficient class for detecting keyboard presses for your games. But I needed the class to do more, so I’ve extended it, added in some new functionality and released it. My new version can detect multiple key presses at once, has the full scancode const list built-in and adds a new function to return the last pressed scancode. Plus it’s still just as fast and flexible as the original.
Grab the download and examples after the jump.
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