The year of 2008 starts with a bang as Lee Brimelow releases version 2 of the gotoAndLearn website. There are plenty of Flash and Actionscript tutorial videos featured on the website, including video, sound, and 3d, and I’m quite pleasured to find one of them being about animating with Tweener. Thanks, Lee! (also, thanks to Jeff Guthrie for the tip).
Arthur Debert – lead developer at Gringo and also one of the contributors to Tweener – has just released his new ActionScript 3 loading class, BulkLoader, publicly. The class allows you to load data from files in an streamlined way, and provides a series of features – like maximum number of retries, cache bypass, and others – that makes the whole process a lot easier than it would normally be in AS3.
For more information, see his post here, or go straight to the BulkLoader project at Google Code.
Adobe is gearing up for the next release of their AIF Toolkit – the editor/preview tool for the shader revolution that’ll arrive with Flash 10 – and they have some small/big changes for the next version.
I’ve been working on the next version of the toolkit and I’m hoping it will make a bunch of you hydra developers happy. I’ve rolled in a lot of feature requests from the forums and the big news is that it should work on ALL supported platforms (OS 10.4.10+, XP, Vista) REGARDLESS OF YOUR VIDEO CARD. (…) We have made a language change to Hydra that will be in this next release. It is small, but it will break any existing filters. (…) Images will now be available by name in kernel scope instead of EvaluatePixel scope and that means that they can be used in per-frame functions like EvaluateDependencies and the region reasoning functions more simply.
Wonderful. I think he means evaluateDependents instead of EvaluateDependencies though. This function is called once per frame and actually demystifies one of the issues I had with the language – the inability to build a lookup table or “constant” values outside of the pixel iterator. Now I know.
Anyhow, read more about it here, on Adobe’s Kevin Goldsmith’s blog.
I’m a sucker for statistics, so it’s with delight that I point out that the Programming Language Popularity page has been updated, and it now includes Actionscript on the list of languages covered by its graphics.
What’s not so delightful though is to see Actionscript isn’t exactly popular when compared to most other popular languages of today. I guess we probably tend to be influenced for the world around us, so since I eat, breath, and drink Actionscript all day, I was a little bit disheartened to see it’s not as popular as I thought it was.
Of course this makes no difference in real work – the demand for Actionscript professionals is already pretty massive, and it continues to increase, at least around me – but it does paint an interesting picture on how the platform does on several different fronts such as publishing, job seeking, and open source project hosting.
Mitchell Hudson has just published a few examples with source where he uses the AS3 version of Tweener to control the animation of a few interface elements.
Arthur Debert, co-author of Tweener, has just posted a few tips on using some specific Tweener features. Sometimes, a few features not strictly related to tweening may not be immediately clear, so this is the kind of stuff that’s pretty useful; I still have to write similar posts too.
The Flashcoders mailing list is back from a long time in slumber. Hail to the king, baby.
You may not have heard of it, but FIVe3D is Mathieu Badimon‘s collection of ActionScript 2 classes to create 3d geometry in Flash movies. You can see FIVe3D at work at Mathieu’s award-winning LAB website.
The big difference when compared to existing packages such as Papervision3D – which is also manages to be its biggest advantage and bigger disadvantage – is that FIVe3D is based on vector drawings; meaning all geometry is produced by the drawing API (well, technically, Papervision3D also uses the drawing API, but in its case, it’s more focused on a surface drawn with bitmap fills).
That is an advantage because since all points and edges used are known, the surface projection and distortion can be as accurate as mathematically possible; drawing things like text using this extension can produce a much better result than having it on a plane and having it mapped using triangles. That is also a disadvantage because you can’t have texture fills, and you need to describe all of your drawing data mathematically (including all text).
Still, the result is pretty good and that’s why this is a great collection of classes to have available. Depending on the result wanted, it makes total sense to pick FIVe3D over any other 3d rendering extension.
While written in Actionscript 2, FIVe3D uses a structure and syntax that is very similar to Actionscript 3. I recently started using FIVe3D on a website I’m developing, and I first gave it a whirl to see how easy it was to tween properties of instances created with it. Below is an early result of that experimenting; click the object to rotate it to random directions. It’s one of the original FIVe3D examples, but with just a few lines added to make the transition go smoothly from one random rotation to the other.
Devon O. Wolfgang has a long tutorial on building an image gallery using Papervision3D and Tweener.
Ricardo Cabello has updated his audio visualization effect demo (also using Papervision3D and Tweener). The new one is here, and he promises the source soon. Looking very cool.
Coincidentally, Donovan Adams also has a demo using PV3D (and its new Line3D) and Tweener for audio visualization, although in a different way. In the same vein, this doesn’t use Tweener, but it’s still cool and also a nice Line3D demo. And this post wouldn’t be complete with a link to a japanese page, so here’s another nice Line3D example, similar to the previous one but using a tree instead. Again, no Tweener used, despite the link at the bottom of the page.
DisplacementMap is one of the coolest BitmapFilters available from Flash 8 onwards. Still, it’s severely underused. Does it need more love, or does love actually need a displacement?