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.

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.

Damn I love messing with Flint - it is one seriously cool particle system This is a little test I threw together tonight in about half an hour (includes creating the planet image!). Leave it for a few seconds to see the planet trail burn up, and then just click anywhere you want to re-position the gravity well!

Code wise it’s extremely simple:

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Wow this is turning into a great week for AS3 developers everywhere! First we get treated to TweenMax, and today Richard Lord goes and releases version 1.0 of the Flint Particle system. Flint is definitely one of my favourite libs to play with, and allows you to easily add some great effects to your game with little overhead. I used it extensively in my last game Colour Chain, both in the main menu and to explode the blocks when you get a chain. Easily one of the most important components in my AS3 toolkit.