Cool Stuff with the Flash Platform - 2/14/2012
Posted on Feb 14, 2012
OMFG! That is all I can say. I leave for a couple weeks, to attend the HTML5 Summit in Miami and a department offsite in San Jose, only to return to an enormous backlog of awesome posts from the Flash community. First off, the innovation happening in Stage3D only seems to be accelerating lately as people become more comfortable with the tools it provides. Second, there seems to be a ton of interest in working with AIR and Microsoft Kinect, with multiple ANE solutions and some impressive demos. Lastly, there are a growing number of Stage3D frameworks, to the point that I decided in this issue to group posts by their framework topic. If anyone tries to tell you the Flash community is fading, just point them here. Enjoy!
Cool Stage3D Stuff
Adobe evangelist Andrew Trice ported an earlier Stage3D mobile demo to use Stage3D and Flex in a desktop browser and shares the source code for the application. In all ways it is essentially identical to the mobile example, short of changing mobile-specific components.
Nicolas Chesne shares a demo of a sound spectrum visualizer built with Stage3D and using the FrequencyAnalyser built by Ben Stucki.
Flash Daily links to a demo with source code called Stage3D Wonderfl that adds a particle effect to an uploaded picture and lets you rotate it and move the camera in 3D space. Flash Daily also links to a number of resources and demos for an open source (MIT) project called Nest3D, which says it is a lightweight Stage3D 3D engine. Finally, Flash Daily links to a video by Simon Morris who is working on a Kinect AS3 AIR native extension that shows Kinect controlling model in Flash using Stage3D.
Bjorn Acker shares a character export script for 3ds Max written in MAXScript that can be used to export characters to sprites for use with Starling or ND2D.
Away3D
Rob Dodson posts a video demonstration of an Away3D 4 experiment that involved particles on a 32" 3M C3266PW multi-touch display.
Niels van Dijk shares a short code hack for Away3D to parse embedded 3DS files without using the AssetLibrary.
Adobe evangelist Serge Jespers shows a video created by Wouter Verweirder to demonstrate his AIR Native Extension that controls a 3D model built with Stage3D on AIR using Away3D and controlled via Microsoft Kinect, via his ANE.
Minko
Jean-Marc Le Roux posts a screenshot and some code of a previous AIR 3.2, Stage3D and Minko demo, however in this case it is running on Stage3D on Android (specifically Android 2.2 on an HTC Desire). Jean-Marc also posts about ShaderLab, an incredible looking visual interface for creating and editing shaders via a web interface (built in Flex). He discusses one of the powerful features which is that you can share shaders with others via the tool and embed them in an web page. Finally, Jean-Marc shares a demo created by one of Aerys engineers, Alexandre Cyprien, using Minko ShaderLab that is a waves simulation on the GPU with Flash and Stage3D.
Christopher Caleb was also impressed with ShaderLab and shares a demo video, created by Aerys, demonstrating some of what ShaderLab can do.
Pierre Chamberlain shares the code and a demo for a simple 2D particle system built with AGAL and Stage3D that was the result of some experimenting with the technologies on his part.
Adobe evangelist Tom Krcha interviews Jean-Marc Le Roux about the BlackSun game created with Stage3D and Minko.
ND2D
With the release of version 0.9.13 of his ND2D framework, lars gerckens shares some general best practices and how-to's for GPU-accelerated development using Stage3D. Lars also links to a number of game demos, tutorials and a 2D physics extension for ND2D.
Bjorn Acker posts and shares the source for an advanced camera with parallax layers for ND2D. The demo demonstrates usage. Bjorn also shares another sample project showing how to add "alpha holes" in ND2D to create an effect like fog in his game.
Starling
Ben demonstrates a painting application he built using Stage3D and Starling.
Cool ActionScript/Flash Stuff
Adobe's Lee Brimelow posts a video tutorial on how to take advantage of the new mouse lock feature that was released in Flash Player 11.2.
Ariel Sommeria posts a follow up to his post on looping audio in Flash.
Jackson Dunstan follows up a prior post, going into more detail on why static variables and functions are slow. Jackson also tests his repeatable random number function and compares its performance to Math.random().
Emanuele Feronato continues his tutorial series on using StencylWorks for creating Flash games with a post on creating an in-game tutorial. Emanuele also releases the source code for an older Box2D game he created called SamePhysics.
Justin Opitz modified an existing Python script to create an ActionScript3 code obfuscator.
Cool AIR for Desktop Stuff
Nick Kwiatkowski discusses an application he built using Microsoft Kinect and Adobe AIR for the Michigan Historical Museum celebration of Michigan's 175th Birthday.
Justin posts about a new version of AIRKinect, version 1.7, was released. Wouter posts the upcoming AIRKinect 2 release which will include point cloud features.
Cool Mobile & Devices Stuff
Barbara Kaskosz discusses and posts a sample application, with source, on displaying web content within an AIR mobile app. She covers navigateToURL(), which would leave your application, and StageWebView, which would display web content within your application.
Bill Sanders covers the GestureEvent and how to work with gestures on mobile using ActionScript and AIR. Bill also discusses using a grid state for managing movement within a game on mobile employing the state design pattern.
Mark Aplet posts about a new AIR mobile application developed by ASFusion, creators of the Conqu application, called OnePound, which is a weight tracking app.
Android
Michelle Rueda posts a video demo and apk of an application called Simmer that uses a voice commands ANE for Android that she developed. In a follow up post she shares the actual Voice Command AIR native extension and a sample application that you can use in your Android applications.
iOS
David Flatley starts a two part tutorial that demonstrates how to create and use AIR Native Extension for iOS Game Center. Part one focused on creating the ANE, while part 2 shows you how to use your ANE in your AIR application.
Adobe evangelist Tom Krcha responds to a common question by covering how to join multiple SWF files into one for AIR on iOS as was done in Machinarium. Tom also shows how to cast Number, String, int/uint and Boolean with from AS3 to C to be used in iOS for an AIR native extension. In a follow up he shows how to do the same, casting Array and Vector from AS3 to C.
Cool Flex & Flash Builder Stuff
Ryan Frishberg discusses a change, due to a bug fix, in Flex 4.6's version of itemRendererFunction that can cause memory leaks in code that worked in 4.5, and shows how to avoid it.
Cool ColdFusion Stuff
Craig Kaminsky released an open source ColdFusion component (CFC) wrapper for Amazon's DynamoDB NOSQL database solution.
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