Daryl Teo

I subscribe to the Papervision3D RSS feed, and once in awhile something interesting comes along and gets me thinking. This recent entry was as such: a gallery of sites that utilise Papervision3D to create new, innovative graphical user interfaces for their users. Looking at them got me psyched up to start on my own (long overdue) site.

However, going through some of the sites raised a common issue, and that issue is one of userability.

History

As someone in the comments noted, History repeats itself. Looking back to the early days of gratuitous .gif animations, unusable Flash websites, and then to the more recent AJAX revolution of Web2.0. Whenever something innovative comes forward, people struggle to find “proper” use for it, and instead end up throwing it all at the user in the hope that they will be “shocked and awed” by it. Perhaps, in the Dark Ages of Web1.0, this strategy would have worked (and it did, for a time). However, people on the internet are now tech-savvy: they want their stuff, and they know how to get it. To prevent them from doing so in any way would be a death-sentence to any website. Read the rest of this entry »

PQ DVD is running a promotion for all bloggers for their new AS3.0 application called PQ Talking Photo. PQ Talking Photo allows you to animate a photo together with full Lip-synching! And for a limited time, blog about PQ Talking Photo to receive this software ABSOLUTELY FREE!

Then you can put talking animals in your blog, your mySpace, like you see below.

Give it a whirl!

Did a quick little experiment with Line-Of-Sight Calculations in AS3.0. I’m not too happy with it at the moment, and trying to find a balance between performance and accuracy, but you can see what I have done so far in the Labs.

Experiment Focus:

• flash.geom.Point;
• Line of Sight

View Experiment

Came across a post by Wayne Marsh today, documenting the tools he uses to develop in Actionscript 3.0 without his wallet being set back by a dollar. And it is exactly the same as how I do it as well, with the long awaited release of FlashDevelop 3 looming.

So be sure to go over for a look at how you can start developing in Actionscript 3.0 for less than a penny.

Introduction

I write this article because it seems to me that quite a few people still have no idea how to duplicate external assets (such as duplicating MovieClips, for example). Thus, I decided to take this opportunity despite there being quite a few articles that document this. If I haven’t bored your by now, read on!

First, Some History

Assets in Flash are normally quite coupled with the SWF. This is probably a result of the long years of timeline scripting that has been burnt into our memories. In Actionscript 2.0, however, the process of abstracting Assets from Actionscript was slightly alleviated through the copious use of duplicateMovieClip(). I too, used to be an avid user of duplicateMovieClip(), until I made the transition to Actionscript 3.0, But before then, duplicateMovieClip() was my quick and dirty solution to many situations I came across in Flash.

Abstracting Assets from Actionscript in Actionscipt 2.0 was relatively simple. One need only separate his/her assets into separate swf files, and simply loadClip() them into the SWF, and employ the use of duplicateMovieClip(). In Actionscript 3.0, however, this situation has changed as Adobe saw fit to remove (or shall we say, omit) the duplicateMovieClip() method.

Now, Adobe recommends the use of the “new” keyword to instantiate multiple instances of a Class. From the Actionscript 2.0 Migration reference:

In ActionScript 3.0, use the new operator to create a new instance.

This doesn’t really help us abstract our Assets from Actionscript. Most of us who have played around enough in Actionscript 3.0 would know that this requires that the Class be part of the SWF calling it, and in facts forces us to embed our assets within the SWF. Using the Loader class to import external SWFs does not expose any classes that we may use to invoke the “new” operation. At least, not obviously, as we shall see later.

Read the rest of this entry »

I will be attending Mix On Campus 2007 at Melbourne! There are a few sessions I’m extremely interested in (XNA, web development), although I’m not exactly sold on Popfly. Still very much a supporter of Flash over Silverlight, so I guess this is their chance to sell it to me!

Very excited (first convention I’m attending) so anyway, be sure to RSVP at their site if you are interested as well else you’ll miss out!

And with that, I now have more time to spend playing around with Flash and AS3. For the past few days I’ve been working on Aria, as well as a game that I will submit to Kongregate (working with Tetrominos are a pain, by the way), so I will be posting more often for the next few months.

Glidias has created a very awesome looking fireworks creator. Its only a test, but still equally impressive. Click here!

Note: don’t ask me how old my country is. I am pretty sure it is 42, but don’t expect me to actually get this sort of things right.

Gah! What is with all the clipping issues I get? The problem arises specifically at angles close to multiples of 90. I suppose these are problems arising mathematically due to some special trigonometric properties, and seriously hope they get fixed soon.

Again, of course, the library is still currently in Beta status. So it is probably not perfect. However these are the kind of things I’m hoping they will iron out as time goes along.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to grasp 3D Rendering techniques, and I won’t be making my own engine anytime soon! There goes my Rubik’s Cube idea…

Seems that my contact form has finally been spidered by spammers. Therefore, I will be taking it down, since it is flooding my mailbox.

Some people really need a life… No I don’t need a new ToyAta or a Lexus give me a break!