Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God

by Devon O.· July 04, 2008· in Flash, Liberty, Life· 0 comments
Every Fourth of July, I like to sit down and reflect a little on the meaning of the holiday. You can keep your Christmases, and Thanksgivings – in my opinion, Independence Day is the most important of the American holidays. It’s not just a time to get a day off of work, consume mass quantities of beer like a conehead, and blow stuff up (though I have nothing against those things). The Fourth of July is a celebration of a nation that stood up against tyranny. It is the celebration of (an albeit failed) Revolution, and we should acknowledge that while the holiday is still legally recognized in the U.S. Consider for a second the excitement on the street in those times. As Bob Dylan said, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. It was time for a new form of government and the citizens of budding nation not only recognized the fact, but took Action. What was the main purpose for a government at all, you ask. Well, they spelled it out quite clearly in the Declaration:   We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed […]
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George Carlin: 1937 – 2008

by Devon O.· June 26, 2008· in Liberty, Life· 2 comments
Boy everyone in this country is running around yammering about their fucking rights. “I have a right, you have no right, we have a right.” Folks I hate to spoil your fun, but… there’s no such thing as rights. They’re imaginary. We made ’em up. Like the boogie man. Like Three Little Pigs, Pinocio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea. They’re just imaginary. They’re a cute idea. Cute. But that’s all. Cute…and fictional. But if you think you do have rights, let me ask you this, “where do they come from?” People say, “They come from God. They’re God given rights.” Awww fuck, here we go again…here we go again. The God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument, “It came from God.” Anything we can’t describe must have come from God. Personally folks, I believe that if your rights came from God, he would’ve given you the right for some food every day, and he would’ve given you the right to a roof over your head. GOD would’ve been looking out for ya. You know that. He wouldn’t have been worried making sure you have a gun so you can […]
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OBO_Accordion: Another Scripted UI “Widget”

by Devon O.· June 03, 2008· in Life· 10 comments
Long ago, I created a package for handling “Complex Buttons” – that is buttons that remain selected until another button in the same “group” is selected. In a nutshell, the developer creates a class that describes visual states of his button and implements the interface IComplexButton. These classes are wrapped inside a ComplexButton instance. Several of these ComplexButton instances are then passed to a Menu class (which is finally added to the display list) which handles all mouse interaction (rollovers, dragovers, clicks, release outsides, etc) and maintains button state. For more information and some downloads, check out this old post over at Kirupa.com. Why do I blather on about all this, you ask? Well, when I was trying to create an Accordion widget to use in my ASDoc Gui (post before this), I thought this little Complex Button “framework” (for lack of better term) would be just the way to go. Well, I was right and I was wrong. It turns out that the way I had written the ComplexButton class it would not work for an accordion (for starters, it disables mouse communication with its children – something you definitely look for in an accordion. It just went downhill from there.). […]
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Double Sided Plane in Flash Player 10

by Devon O.· May 22, 2008· in Actionscript, Life· 4 comments
So I just returned from a two month “cruise” (Navy term for “hell on a ship”) to Europe and back to the states (survived the Bermuda Triangle incidentally) last night and I suddenly find out two things: our cat, Hildegard, has a brand new kitty home back in Ireland and Flash 10 beta is available for download and testing. Well, awhile back, I showed a fairly simple way to make a double sided plane using Papervision3d. Since Flash 10 supports basic 3d natively (!), I thought I’d do something similar for my first F10 experiment. The first thing you’ll notice that’ll annoy the snot out of you when playing with 3d in Flash is how z sorting is handled. Flash’s display index position will “always” (I use quotes as I very well could have overlooked something) override the 3d DisplayObject z property. Which is to say, if I add displayObject1 to the stage, then add displayObject2, with the same dimensions as the first, to the stage at the same coordinates, but set number 2’s z property to 1000 (e.g.), displayObject2 will appear much smaller, but will still appear on top of displayObject1. Ick. Hopefully that will be fixed in the final […]
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Pratique d’ActionScript 3

by Devon O.· April 28, 2008· in Life· 0 comments
I’ve been waiting for this one! Thibault Imbert of ByteArray.org has recently completed a book entitled “Pratique d’ActionScript 3” which was to be published by O’Reilly France. For reasons unspecified, the deal with O’Reilly apparently went belly up. Not one to deprive the world of knowledge, Mssr. Imbert has decided to release the book on his own in .pdf form free of charge to the public. Yes, the book is in French, but code, like math, is a universal language, and Thibault Imbert is a supergenius in the field and code examples abound in the work. You can download the 1200 page manual here. Enjoy – and a big fat merci beaucoup to the author…
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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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