Stage3d plus flash player 10 backwards compatibility

Posted by Pete Shand in 3D Flash, Actionscript

So while there are hundreds of cutting edge tech demos, sites and games being produced with flash player 11′s stage3d, it’s not always practical to develop for a player version before it’s reached a mature penetration rate. Given that flash player 11 was only released a few months ago it’ll probably be another few months before we see the 90% mark being hit. http://riastats.com/ puts it at about 63% at the time of writing this post.

That aside, it’s still quite tempting to disregard the above and set the minimum player version to 11, but we all know the client just isn’t going to let this fly. The obvious option is to create an swf for each target player containing the 3d engine code, then have your main application swf load the appropriate 3d engine swf. It’s a bit of a drag, as it’ll increase your work load, but it’ll get the job done.

a basic example of this can be viewed at:
http://labs.peteshand.net/stage3d_fp10fallback/

source can be downloaded from:
http://labs.peteshand.net/stage3d_fp10fallback/stage3d_fp10fallback.zip

Flash 11 Platform Game Prototype

Posted by Pete Shand in 3D Flash, Actionscript, Flash

you can view an early prototype for a platform game I’m building with flash 11, away3d and box2d below.

You can view the game in action here (Warming: there is no pre-loader).

I’ve been surprised at the speed in which I’ve been able to put this together and because everything is xml driven once the initial level, characters and game objects have been implemented content generation is going to be a breeze. You can view the xml here.

As stated above this is an early prototype, so there are plenty of things missing, for example the hero will probably stop walking when he isn’t moving and I’m sure most of what you see will change anyway, but just thought I’d share my progress.

integrate browser scrollbar with flash – part 2

Posted by Pete Shand in Actionscript, Flash, Javascript

After my last post on integrating the browser scrollbar with flash a friend of mine (Tim Keir) instantly pointed out that there is a small library called swffit which he said achieves a similar result. Don’t you just hate it when that happens!

However while swffit is a great library (and I encourage you to check it out), it achieves a somewhat different result than what I was trying to demonstrate. swffit basically sets the height of the swf to 100% as long as the browser height is greater than x, if the browser height is reduced below x then the flash movie’s height is set to x and a browser scrollbar appears. This is great for full-page flash movies when viewed on a small screen because the user will always be able to scroll down if there screen isn’t big enough.

So obviously my explanation and example require a little reworking to clarify why you might want to implement something like this. So that’s what I’ve done. This time round I’ve abandoned the idea of creating an experience similar to an html page and focused on more of a ‘flashy’ example. Its still very basic, but it should give you a better impression of the possibilities. The second example can be viewed here.

This time there is also a scrollbar along the bottom of the window, as well as a 3d cube which replaces the checker panel. The side scrollbar controls the cube’s rotation around its x axis and the bottom scrollbar moves around the cube on its y axis. also in addition to this clicking and dragging anywhere on the flash content (or pressing the arrow keys) will also update the scrollbar locations and in turn feed back into the flash movie. The thing i love about this concept is that the user will see the scrollbar, drag it down and expect the page to scroll, however in this case the cube rotates… wow, amazing they think to themselves for half a second.

The source files can be downloaded here.

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Integrate browser scrollbar with flash – part 1

Posted by Pete Shand in Actionscript, Flash, Javascript

Just a quick post to demonstrate how to integrate the browsers native scrollbar with a full-page flash movie. Why? Why not… People always go on about how flash and html/javascript work well together, so thought I’d try to create something new that’s flash/javacript related.

Click here to view the example in action. Right clicking anywhere on the page will bring up the flash player context menu, so obviously this is a full-page flash movie. However where this differs from your traditional full-page flash movie is that it will add a native browser scrollbar if the checker box exceeds the height of the browser window. Once the scrollbar appears the user is able to drag the scrollbar up and down and it will adjust the flash content just as you would expect html content to scroll.

So why is this a nice feature to have? Well the browser scrollbar is something everyone is familiar with. Everyone knows that when you see the scrollbar on the right hand side of the browser you can scroll the page. That’s not to say you can’t add additional interaction to the flash movie and update the scrollbar appropriately, I think its always nice to have a few different ways of navigating through a site, whether it be via the keyboard, or various mouse interactions.

Obviously this is just a basic example, but you could really go to town with this. If I had the time I would love to create a Stage3D scene and use the scrollbar to move through it.

You can grab the source here.

Continue reading part 2

as3 Text To Speech plus proxy

Posted by Pete Shand in Actionscript, Text To Speech, Translation

A while back I wrote a post on a few as3 classes I wrote that would hook into googles text to speech engine (you can view the original post here). Unfortunately there was a few problems with the way it worked, first and foremost not all browsers handled the cross domain sound request the same, as in IE/Chrome bitched about cross domain policy files. secondly there were some issues around using special characters (non english character sets)

I wasn’t using these classes in any commercial projects, so sadly these issues were never investigated, well that is until a chap by the name of Daniel Kazmer needed this type of functionality in one of his projects, I suggested looking into a proxy for the cross domain issues and that’s just what he did.

Click here to download the as3 text to speech classes as well as the proxy file Dan created (Note you’ll need php and curl installed to take advantage of the proxy).

While this is a step in the right direction it turns out there are still some issues surrounding special characters, but regardless thanks for your input Dan!

MovieClip Loop Control

Posted by Pete Shand in Actionscript, Flash

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import net.peteshand.utils.LoopCtrl;
LoopCtrl.setLoops(this,3,40); 
// Parameters:
   // Target MovieClip, 
   // Number of Loops, 
   // Frames of end of timeline to stop at (default = 0)

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package net.peteshand.utils
{
	import flash.display.MovieClip;
	import flash.events.Event;
	import flash.events.EventDispatcher;
 
	public class LoopCtrl extends EventDispatcher
	{
		/** @private **/
		private static var ref:MovieClip;
		private static var loops:int;
 
		public function LoopCtrl ()
		{
 
		}
 
		public static function setLoops(_ref:MovieClip, _loops:int=1, preEndFrame:int=0):void
		{
			ref = _ref;
			loops = _loops;
			var count:int = 0;
 
			ref.addFrameScript(ref.totalFrames-1-preEndFrame, LastFrame);
			function LastFrame():void
			{
				count++;
				if (count == loops){
					ref.stop();
					ref.dispatchEvent(new Event("LoopEnd"));
				}
			}
		}
	}
}