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Posts tagged ‘as3’

4
Sep

Compiz-like wobbling windows in AS3

This code was intended to be released back in October last year, but i never managed to do it since it needed some refactoring, some changes and had to be quite decent to present: then in November i got the chance to work with some very talented guys over at Jooce, in Paris, so i never got back to write something about it.
Btw, if you never tried Jooce then give it a try, it really deserves it!
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17
Oct

An AS3 profiler

NOTE
This post has been previously published on 2007/Oct/17: due to my move to another server i’m now in the process to manually recover the comments for this article. Fixed!

I’m currently working on an early-stage, more of a proof-of-concept thing, but i needed to know more about the code performances: googling for an ActionScript profiler just showed up ASProf, an AS2 profiler. So i decided to port to AS3 the C++ profiler i wrote for Aqua, the cross-platform framework i was working on until April: the original C++ implementation has been developed after being inspired by an article of Steve Rabin in the Game Programming Gems 1 book, that’s a nice one to have on the shelf together with some other great books of which i could post something about them later.
It is always wise to remember that if you are serious about code profiling, you’ll be better to search for some professional tools: in the C++ arena my choice would be this one, but if you plan to have lunch and dinner for the next couple of months give Eletric’s one a try, it really deserves a look.
Unfortunately for the AS3 world, i just haven’t found anything really usable for it up to now, so i just thought to release it under a zlib/png license and some hints on how it works here.

ProfilerConfig.Width = stage.stageWidth;
ProfilerConfig.ShowMinMax = true;
prof = new Profiler( 32 );
addChild( prof );

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11
Aug

Carpet’s sources

Here is the source code for the Magic Carpet demo, just unpack it in your project directory of choice and import the project in Flex Builder, making sure to resolve the dependancies as it makes use of the following packages:

Let me explain the modifications in APE: i just wanted the engine to perform the timestep in a fixed fashion, so i initially modified it to accept a value, expressed in Hz, that represents the integrator’s timestep to be used, this way no matter if different machines have different framerates, animating will be the same everywhere.
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10
Aug

The Magic Carpet

>> Looking for the source code? Just go the next post here<<

I managed to have some time to put together the simulation i was talking about last week: roughly based on a “Flade” (now APE) demo of that time, it makes use of APE for the physics and Papervision3D for the rasterization process.
Actually, using PV3D for merely rasterizing polygons its obviously an ugly solution if you, like me, don’t need all the scene management and just need to stretch bitmaps around: the real reason behind that choice is simply i was curious to see (1) how PV3D performed in a similar situation and (2) how to be able to bind APE and PV3D together.
Anyway, just modelling and simulating the carpet wasn’t enough: the motion were great and performing quite well, but it was lacking completely the sense and taste of realism one would expect from such a scene and the particular type of motion one can interact with.
I started by adding a (really) fake shadow that i’m too lazy to change and, since then, i liked the idea and adding a reflection was the next logical step for that context: it was still lacking some motion “feeling” so i also tried to mimic a directional blur simply by programmatically reducing the amount of blur on the slowest x-y direction.

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