Learning AGAL with AGALMacroAssembler and OpenGL Examples

by Devon O.· June 03, 2012· in Actionscript, Flash, Shaders· 16 comments tags: agal, agalmacroassembler, glsl, opengl, stage3d
So the other day I sat down and thought to myself: self, it’s high time you learn you some of this new fancy pants AGAL that’s all the rage these days. Now, after a few days of playing around I am by no means a master at the art of shader programming, but due to the still huge lack of available material on the subject, I figured I’d share a few things I’ve learned. Please feel free to post some comments correcting me where I’m wrong as I’m bound to be. I’m hoping though, that this may help out a few folks who, like me, learned programming via actionscript and have never actually written a shader in their life. I’m not going to go into the very basics of AGAL and uploading index and vertex data. There are plenty of tutorials out there about that. And if you’re looking for a book, this one by Christer Kaitila (aka Breakdance McFunkypants) is fantastic. In fact, here, I’m only going to use the utmost basic of vertex shaders and focus entirely on fragment shaders. I know when most people start getting into shader programming they jump straight into the world of 3D. If […]
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UV Scrolling in Starling

by Devon O.· May 07, 2012· in Actionscript, Flash· 5 comments tags: stage3d, starling
One of the things that really appealed to me about ND2D over the Starling Framework was the ability to scroll textures by manipulating their UV coordinates like this. Obviously this could come in pretty darned handy for space games, side scrollers, etc, etc. Well, as it turns out, doing the same thing is also pretty easy in Starling using the Image object’s setTexCoords() method. Generally speaking, you loop through the four vertex points of the Image in question, get the coordinates of each vertex using getTexCoords() (which returns a Point instance), add a very small amount to the x and y properties of that point, then reset the coordinates of that vertex with setTexCoords() (which takes the vertex id and a Point). Stealing assets like some mad pirate (the star fields from the ND2D example above and the ship from Lee Brimelow’s space game), I came up from this quick example here (around 430k with no preloader). And the full source for the Starling bit (the magic taking place in updateStarfields() )… [crayon-61e8e09e5d2f7984674290/]
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It’s a Starling Halloween

by Devon O.· October 30, 2011· in Flash· 1 comments tags: stage3d, starling
So after making my Starling Particle Editor, I thought I’d take the time to actually build a little something in the framework. And what better thing than a Zombie Shooting Gallery made with the help of my wonderful wife. It’s a 3 meg download with a boring preloader, but it’s fairly well worth the wait. To play, just shoot as many zombies as you can in the allotted 15 seconds. Make sure to use the spacebar to cock the shotgun before each shot. And in case you’ve never seen a zombie movie in your life, be sure to shoot the bastards in the head. It’s funner with the sound turned up as well. One of the main things I wanted to learn in this exercise was how to use Texture Packer. There were a few technical difficulties though. While the latest version of  Texture Packer will make sprite sheets from .swf files, it does not support 3D transformations within those .swf files. A bit of searching around and I found Zoe from Grant Skinner. While Zoe does support 3D transformations in .swf files, it doesn’t export an .xml file in a format compatible with Starling. After a bit of tinkering (and […]
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Particle Editor for Starling Framework

by Devon O.· October 01, 2011· in Flash· 65 comments tags: stage3d, starling
So I finally had time to sit down and have a bit of a play with the Starling 2D framework for Flash’s GPU accelerated Stage3D the other day (as well as read through the extensive and thorough documentation). It looks to me quite promising and certainly fun to play with  (although this tweet from Iain Lobb suggests it may have some texture caching issues, I’m hoping those will be hammered out as work on the framework progresses). One of the things I was really excited to play around with was particles. Everyone loves particle effects. At this last Flash on the Beach, Lee Brimelow gave a cool sneak peak at using this very slick looking UI to create some particle effects, export them as a .pex file, then use that .pex file in a separate project (I mentioned that briefly in my last post). Little did I know at the time, but Lee was using the Starling framework and the slick looking particle editor he was demoing was Particle Designer from SeventyOne Squared. Needless to say, I was quite disappointed to discover that Particle Designer was (a) for Mac’s only, and (b) a commercial piece of software (though it only […]
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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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