Animated Particles, Books, and Code – It’s a New Year

by Devon O.· January 01, 2014· in Actionscript, Flash, Life· 3 comments tags: particles, starling
2014 It doesn’t even sound real. Like an unreachable year in an 80’s sci-fi b movie. And yet, for better or worse, here we are. Seems my last post was quite some time ago (I think WordPress has had 16 releases since then) and a bit negative (bug report), so it’s time to start the new year off right. Animated Particles First on the agenda is something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile, but just never got the time until this Christmas/New Year’s holiday. Now, I really love the Starling particle extension. I mean, hell, who doesn’t love particles? But I always thought it would be nice if the particles could be animated (think flocks of flying birds or schools of swimming fish), so I sat down and added the possibility. First, the downside. I was hoping I could simply extend the current Starling particle extension and tweak it a bit. In theory this would be possible. Unfortunately, in practice, the properties and methods that needed tweaking were private class members. So, unfortunately, I had to basically duplicate a good deal of the code. First I just copied ParticleSystem.as into a new class named OpenParticleSystem and set the private […]
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Logical Or Assignment Bug in ASC2

by Devon O.· August 25, 2013· in Actionscript, AIR, Flash· 6 comments tags: ASC2.0
So, here’s something to keep an eye on if switching to AIR 3.8 (or 3.7 with the ASC2 compiler). Last week at work we decided to finally make the jump from AIR 3.5 to AIR 3.8; something I was pretty excited about and had been looking forward to for awhile. After applying the update, though, I noticed some unit tests failing and sat down to investigate. Several places in our app, we map loaded xml files to data objects – a pretty common thing to do. In the parse methods we may use typical logical or assignment to fill properties with default values if they aren’t present in the xml. So it’s not uncommon to run across a line like this: this.name = xml.@name || “Default Name”; Now, in the ASC1 compiler this always worked fine. After switching to the ASC2 compiler in AIR 3.8, though, this is where our unit tests began falling down. In the case above, rather than assigning the “Default Name”, the name property was being assigned an empty string. So I decided to have a little look under the hood and see exactly what was going on. So here’s a real quick test class file […]
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Warp Filter for Starling

by Devon O.· May 26, 2013· in Actionscript, Flash, Shaders· 5 comments tags: agal, starling
So, perusing teh internets once again, looking for something interesting to play around with, I came across this blog post of Pavan Podila (from 2008!). In the post, Pavan presents a WPF pixel shader which warps an image using bezier curves. I thought I’d have a go and reproduce the effect in AGAL and plunk it into a Starling filter. Essentially, the filter adds 8 control/anchor points to the filtered display object – 4 on the left edge and 4 on the right. You can move those points from 0 (far left) to 1 (far right) and the image will warp and curve to fit those points. You can check out the end product here. In theory, with a little patience and finesse, you could animate those points to create a nice looking Mac style genie effect. Or, whatever. As I was working on that filter, though, I realized I had a decent sized Starling filter collection built up and spread out all over the shop. For that reason, I decided to put them all together and upload them to Github. So, now, you can download all the filters I’ve posted about (and one or two that I haven’t), including […]
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Playing With a Couple Game Ideas

by Devon O.· September 16, 2012· in Actionscript, Flash, Games· 10 comments tags: away3d, starling
Just a couple game fragments, really – prototypes, if you will; but some fun nonetheless, and it’s always good to tinker with new ideas… After working on some various filters for Starling (cf. the last two posts here), I was itching to make something that actually used one. So, that in mind, here’s a little top-down-shoot-a zombie-with-a-flame-thrower game that makes use of the SpotlightFilter from when last I wrote: Zombie Roast. Also, since Away3D 4 made its official debut and added the ability to combine itself with Starling, I’ve been wanting to do something with that awesome combination. And that led to this little Tron like Light Cycle game idea (the scrolling background is Starling, while the bikes, of course are in Away3D). Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to whilst waiting for the axe to fall… Bonus: Here’s one more Starling Framework filter for y’all: MotionBlur. You can see an example in action here. There’s actually two drawbacks to this filter: it will only work in the ‘Baseline’ profile (not ‘BaselineConstrained’); and, to avoid image clipping, it requires a lot of empty space around what you want to blur (e.g. in the example, the image is a 300×300 png […]
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One More Filter For Starling

by Devon O.· September 10, 2012· in Actionscript, Flash, Games, Shaders· 5 comments tags: starling
As an addendum to the post I made yesterday, here is one other filter which can be used in the Starling framework that could probably come in quite handy for a few. In essence, it’s sort of a spotlight effect that illuminates a specified oval area of a Starling DisplayObject. Though I mainly see it being used for games where you only want to light up an area around your player (to move the light around, you just adjust the centerX and centerY properties), I suppose it could also produce a nice vignette effect as well. In any case you can see an example here. After the swf loads (around 200k or so), move your mouse around to see the filter in action. And if you’re looking for a flickering torch/dying flashlight or old movie effect, you can set the useFlicker property to true. In the example, clicking the image will toggle the flicker. As usual, feel free to play around and use it as you’d like. [crayon-61530ec8cd4e8666107537/]
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Devon O. Wolfgang

AIR | Unity3D | AR/VR

Unity Certified Developer

Technical Reviewer of “The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development” and “Starling Game Development Essentials”

Reviewer of “The Starling Handbook”

Unity Engineer at Touch Press.

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