UltraVisual Blog » Actionscript 3.0

swffit – great javascript utility for controlling browser windows

UltraVisual — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:38:58 +0000

Ever had a problem where a site or application you are creating looks great when scaled to the browser window at a large screen size but crap when viewed on smaller screens? A major issue with sites that are embedded via SWFObject and set to 100% x 100% is that when viewed via a smaller [...]

Breaking up bitmaps

UltraVisual — Wed, 05 May 2010 21:29:11 +0000

Well it has been some time since my last blog post - nearly three and a half months and now finally I seem to have found a little free time to dedicate to some writing, I tell you dispite all of the fuss in the press lately with the Apple - Adobe thing and also Flash vs HTML5, it seems to me that it sure is a great time to be a flash developer as we seem to be so in demand!

Anyway, to ease my self back into my blog writing I am going to post a little class which I knocked up when working on a project recently as a nice transition effect for adding / removing images.

Are there any benefits to getters and setters?

UltraVisual — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:48:01 +0000

Well once upon a time, my answer would of definately been a resounding no....I, along with many other people from what I have read and heard never really saw the point to them. Why go through all the hassle of typing out all that extra code when you can just declare your variables as public [...]

TweetParser updated to include usernames and hashtags

UltraVisual — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 21:28:20 +0000

Well the title says it all, the tweet parser I created and mentioned in an earlier post has been updated to include @usernames and also #hashtags. The parser will format these tags into html formatted links ready to be included in your htmlText for your AS3 text fields. Updated source files here

Messing about with the AS3DMod library

UltraVisual — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:57:20 +0000

I don't know why but I have had AS3DMod in my collection of libraries for some time now, but have never gotten around to having a play with it....what fun I have been missing out on!. It is a nice lightweight library that allows you to modify the vertex geometry of primitives in many of the [...]

My two part Flixel game tutorial now up on Active.tutsplus

UltraVisual — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:35:07 +0000

A few weeks ago after messing around with the Flixel game engine I created a tutorial for active.tutsplus.com. The video tute took quite a lot of planning and recording and was finally broken into two parts, each split into four sections and totalling 2 hours and 20 minutes. I tried to include as much as [...]

Tweet parser to format urls in your text fields

UltraVisual — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:36:07 +0000

A while back I created a tutorial on Active.tutsplus.com on how to create a twitter widget for your website. This tutorial has resulted in a lot of emails and great comments from people who have viewed it.....mostly good thankfully and a lot for help and advice on how to manipualte tweets etc. A few recently [...]

FDT Flash player 10 target path tip

UltraVisual — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:31:59 +0000

I have seen loads of posts and tips across the net with regards to using FDT to code in your AS3 projects and how to make it target Flash player 10 when using the Flex SDK 3.4. All seem to recommend going to the run dialog and assigning a compiler argument to tell the compiler [...]

Nearing completion of AIR application – call for beta testers.

UltraVisual — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:24:24 +0000

OK so in my journey into working freelance as a flash developer / designer, one thing that has bothered me is the type of invoicing / billing software available out there, you either need intensive training to get to grips with some of the software, and quite honestly, I can't spare the time or it [...]

AS3 3D Tunnel effect tutorial now up on Vimeo

UltraVisual — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:54:21 +0000

3D Tunnel effect tutorial - Flash & Actionscript 3.0 from UltraVisual on Vimeo. Re-creation of a tutorial I recently saw which created the same effect but with AS2...so I thought I would bring things up to date and show you how simple this was to create using Actionscript 3.0 instead. I have just recently finished my first [...]

Effective splash screens for Adobe AIR applications

UltraVisual — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:21:18 +0000

I have recently been working very furiously on an AIR application and one feature needed as a lot of data is pulled in from a SQLite database was a splash screen so that the application didn't hang whilst data was loaded. I searched around and found a few simple splash screen scripts available but none [...]

Simple grass / hair effect with actionscript

UltraVisual — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:15:25 +0000

Well I have been very busy lately and sadly away from flash and totally immersed in Blender3D for a current project. I love Blender to bits but missing flash and actionscript badly. Anyway Blender has some great effects and one is the hairs creation from particles, which gave me an idea for a little test [...]

WOW & Papervision3D cloth physics effects.

UltraVisual — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:37:19 +0000

Well after some time of seeing many examples available across the web, I finally decided to see how hard it would be to simulate cloth dynamics in 3D in actionscript and have to say with the help of Papervision3d and the WOW physics library that it was actually incredibally easy! I have never tackled WOW [...]

Scrollbar video tutorial featured on new site Flash.tutsplus.com!

UltraVisual — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:23:43 +0000

I am very pleased to announce my first ever video tutorial has been featured on the new Flash tutorial website - Flash tuts +. The website which is part of the envato network and follows on from the very successful Psd-tutes + and Vector-tutes +, was finally launched on 29th March 2009 and my [...]

Animating text fields with Actionscript

UltraVisual — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:10:01 +0000

Well after a little period of no posts due to being insanely busy, I thought I would share a little technique I discovered through trial and error and a little thought. Ever wanted to tween individual letters from a text field with AS3 rather than on the time line in flash? Well it is incredibly [...]

Simple but effective button transition in AS3

UltraVisual — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:23:39 +0000

Thought I would show you how to create a simple button animation created totally in actionscript, which recreates a button animation I saw posted on a Cartoon Smart.com tutorial which was originally created on the time line. This method is very simple and easily customizable. The artwork for the button is created in the Flash authoring [...]

Create a Scratch card game in Actionscript 3.0

UltraVisual — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:13:41 +0000

OK Flash games are so much fun not only to create but also for the end user as they make the web so interesting. So here I am going to show you how to create a simple Actionscript 3.0 scratch card game that can be used for an ad or game or just for fun. The [...]

Creating a custom Event really is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

UltraVisual — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:26:06 +0000

Until recently although I knew you could do it, I had never really needed to create a custom event for a class that I had created. So when in a current project I needed to get my class to fire an event that would effect my document class I knew that this would be the [...]

Creating a clock in Actionscript 3.0 with the Date class.

UltraVisual — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:38:42 +0000

After seeing a recent application, for some reason recently created and built in AS2!!?? I thought it would be great to create a similar application in AS3 to show how simple, effective and great this would be. As you can see from the code, I have created an instance of the Date class to ascertain the [...]

Importance of ADDED_TO_STAGE event listener.

UltraVisual — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:52:00 +0000

Quite a lot lately I have been using the ADDED_TO_STAGE event listener in the main document class of my projects, for a couple of reasons: The best method of pre-loading an application seems to be creating a preloader swf and loading the main swf into it, this ensures that the complete application is loaded first before [...]