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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Starling Filter Collection

by Devon O.· July 05, 2013· in Actionscript, Shaders· 9 comments tags: agal, starling
I mentioned this earlier, but it was really just a footnote at the bottom of a previous post, so it may have been easily overlooked. In any case, I’ve set up a Github repo containing a collection of filters for the Starling framework I’ve written (or ported as the case may be) which may be used for personal or professional projects. Of course, if you’re not a fan of Starling or are using another Stage3D framework, you could always just grab the AGAL from these and use it elsewhere. At the the moment, the collection contains these items: Warp Filter: does bezier curve warping on the left and right edges of the display object being filtered. Could be animated to produce a Mac ‘genie’ style effect. example God Rays Filter: creates a god rays or fake volumetric lighting effect on the filtered display object. Not compatible with Context3DProfile.BASELINE_CONSTRAINED mode. example Two Spotlight Filters: The first is an oldie that has a decent flicker effect example The thing I disliked most about the original version though, is that on rectangular textures, the effect will be oval shaped (stretched by the texture itself). The new version (Spotlight2Filter.as) remains round on any texture and […]
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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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Alpha in Starling Filters and Basic Branching in AGAL

by Devon O.· December 09, 2012· in Actionscript, Shaders· 3 comments tags: agal, starling
Back in September, a Chris posted a comment on this blog asking about a Starling filter that would create a circular mask over an image. Being the lazy sort I am, I never got back to the commenter (Sorry, Chris). Some stuff I was doing at work the other day reminded me of the question, though; and, although it’s a relatively simple thing to do, the task raises two interesting problems I thought deserved a whole post rather than just a quick response. In plain English to create a circular mask we would want to do something like this: Find the distance of every pixel in an image from the center of our circle. If that distance is greater than the radius of our circle then we should set its alpha to zero. Well, to find distances we can turn to the good ol’ Pythagorean theorem – distance equals the square root of distance x times distance x plus distance y times distance y (I’m still amazed I use information I learned in high school in my day to day life. Who’d a thunk those teachers were on to something?). In a sort of pseudo/AS3 code, our operation may look […]
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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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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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