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.

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

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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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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.

PaperWorld3D, a game engine for developing virtual worlds and MMOGs in Flash, went open source last week. Based on existing open-source projects like PaperVision3D and Red5, the engine is available under LGPL. The Electric Sheep Company is using PaperVision for a current project, but working with an Ogoglio backend. For newer developers or those with less resources, though, the open-source engine project could be very attractive. John Grden, founding member of the projects, presents a demo below at Flash in the Can Amsterdam:

(News from http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/04/paperworld3d-go.html)

I was really happy to see the release of TweenMax pop-up in my feed reader today. I have been using TweenLite since I started with AS3, and love the simplicity and power of it. However it does have some shortcomings, not least of which are the limited control over tween sequencing and the inability to pause or get feedback on the status of a running tween.

TweenMax resolves both of these, and throws a few other toys into the mix (such as a very powerful looking bezier system). Definitely a good way to start a Monday! Keep up the great work Jack.