Messing about with the AS3DMod library

Posted on 10 December, 2009 by UltraVisual

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 most popular AS3 3D engines. It is very simple to use and applying a modifier is as simple as creating a modifier stack – targeting which ever 3D library you want which AS3Dmod supports, creating an instance of the modifier wanted and adding it to the stack. You can animate the variables of the modifer with your favourite tweening engine and come up with some nice effects.


The Flash plugin is required to view this object.


In the example here, I have used the four modifiers I think work best with a plane primitive and letting the tweens interact with each other if they have tweened in. I have also used Keith Peters minimalComps library for the radio buttons due to their simplicity and very low footprint, which are great for testing apps. You will also need to have the tweenLite library for this example and of course for the 3D library I have used Papervision.

If you want to have a look you can get the source here.

If I get a bit more time later I will have more of a play and see if I can produce something more interesting!

Posted in AS3 3D, Actionscript 3.0 | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

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

Posted on 1 December, 2009 by UltraVisual


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 I could about the Flixel engine and went over the basics of creating a game with the engine from creating assets to adding interactivity and states along with monitoring lives / levels etc. The tutorial is designed to be a base for people to try and learn about this simple yet very powerful library and I am proud to say that Flixel seem to have included it in their wiki as a beginners tutorial.

So any way if you want to check out the tutorial you can see part one here and part two here and if you want to just have a play with the demo either click the image above this post or go here.

Posted in Actionscript 3.0, Games, Tutes | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Tweet parser to format urls in your text fields

Posted on 30 November, 2009 by UltraVisual

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 were about formatting the links in tweets to be clickable in a normal text field in flash. This is incredibally simple if you know how and so I have created a simple class which would parse your tweet, format the url into a 'href' tag and assign your chosen colour to the link. Then once added to a text field as htmlText would function the same as a clickable link on any web page.

The class is available here and all you need to do is include it in your source files and as the method is a public static function you do not need to instantiate it you just make reference to it like so:

PLAIN TEXT
Actionscript:
  1. myTwitterWidgetTextField.htmlText = TwitParser.parseTwit(pulledInTweet, 0x00FF00);

The two parameters needed are the text to be parsed and a hex value for the color of the link text...and thats it!

Happy tweeting!

Posted in Actionscript 3.0 | Tagged , | 1 Comment