Here’s Flash Player 10
GPU compositing and surfacing. New drawing API. New text API. Simple 3d for accurate plane rotation. Custom effects with Hydra and AIF (now called Pixel Bender). New File Reference for local file reading. Support for larger bitmaps. New context menu goodies. Something for dynamic sound generation. Yes, Astro is now in public beta.
Demos here. Install here. More information here. See the release notes. This is another good third-party post. As always, Tinic Uro has some more details for the nerds.
Edit: oh f*ck, a new playerglobal.swc is available already (allowing people to compile Flash 10 content with Flex).
Posted on 15/May/2008 at 7:45 am | No Comments | Categories: AIF/Hydra, Actionscript, Flash
FIVe3D goes all the way
FIVe3D - the vector-based 3d rendering framework by Mathieu Badimon - has just received a significant update, bringing it to version 2.1. New features this version brings:
Back Face Culling, Flat Shading, Z-sorting, Space Drawing functions, Bitmap3D class, Video3D class, Sprite2D Class, Letter Spacing, Text Width
I’d be content with just z-sorting, but the number of new features is pretty overwhelming, bringing this class on par to the bitmap drawing features of existing 3d packages such as Papervision3d, Away3D and Sandy. Awesome.
As a showcase of the new capabilities, you can see an example of a 3d video being played here.
Posted on 12/May/2008 at 9:18 am | No Comments | Categories: Actionscript, FIVe3D
FIVe3D now available for AS3
FIVe3D, the vector-based 3d engine for Flash by Mathieu Badimon, has just been ported to Actionscript 3 and is available for download on the project page. Also important, Mathieu has made available the panel component used to create the Actionscript-based font data (describing the lines and curves of each font glyph for text drawing in 3d). With this in their hands, people can even create extrude and plane-creating functions for other 3d packages if they need.
I first posted about some adventures about FIVe3D here, and everything that’s written there still stands, so it’s worth reading for people who doesn’t know FIVe3D yet.
Posted on 13/Apr/2008 at 9:09 pm | No Comments | Categories: Actionscript
Adobe AIR for Linux Alpha released
Adobe has just released an alpha version of AIR for Linux. It’s not feature complete but now that the framework structure is there, I guess we’ll see it reach stable status in no time. An SDK is also available.
You know what’s funny? There’s a project I’m building that I’ll want to make available as a standalone download later this year. I knew AIR was available for Windows and OSX only, but the Linux demographic is an important part of my project’s target. So here was I thinking “Hey, I wonder if Adobe AIR will be ported to Linux some day?”, when I decided to go looking for information about it on Google, having one of the first results returned being the news that it has just been released. Creepy.
Posted on 31/Mar/2008 at 9:28 am | 3 Comments | Categories: AIR, Flash, Fnk
An initiative for more serious sound control with Actionscript
I had seen this before, but have to admit I ignored it at first (I had the impression it was just some random Adobe conference, based on the name): the Adobe, Make Some Noise initiative is a “campaign for enhancing Flash Audio”. Led by André Michelle, Joa Ebert and Kai-Philipp Schöllmann, they aim to convince the powers that be that Flash needs to support audio in a more powerful way. And even if AS3 is already a huge improvement in terms of audio support, I have to agree - with Flash 10’s great new visual features such as AIF support, advanced audio control would be a good match. Still, anyone in doubt can have a look at the audio projects these guys gave under their belt and know how well-founded their requests are.
Coincidentally, advanced audio composition and synthesis in Actionscript is one of the important points that I’m tackling on my graduation paper/project (due later this year), so I’ll be following these developments closely…
Source: Agit8
Posted on 21/Mar/2008 at 6:22 pm | No Comments | Categories: Actionscript, Flash, Fnk, Misc
Tweener extensions
The fair lady time has been specially rigorous with me as of lately, not giving me too many opportunities to fall into the hands of my mistress of spare time experimentation and open-source maintenance. As a result, I haven’t posted here in a while and, worst of all, there are a lot of Tweener updates (including a considerable internal rewrite and updating the example sources) that I have to constantly pause. The world goes on, though, so here’s some long-distance winking she has been sending me.
While Tweener doesn’t have special property modifiers for Catmull-Rom curves yet, Makc has a great post explaining how to convert Catmull-Rom splines to Bezier splices. For some odd reason I seem to have missed his original post on the Tweener mailing list so I hadn’t seen the actual code, but let me take this opportunity to congratulate and thank him on some cool code.
Takayuki Fukatsu has also just sent me notice of an AS3 special property class he has created for Tweener. It’s called MatrixShortcuts and it can be used to Tween properties of a DisplayObject’s transformation matrix, as well as some global transformation properties.
Always a flirt.
Posted on 6/Mar/2008 at 8:13 am | 6 Comments | Categories: Tweener
Election 2008: Do the right thing
I don’t live in the United States and obviously I don’t vote there, but I believe the decisions of its leader have ramifications on a global scale and, as as many other earthlings do, I hope the best candidate will be picked by voters.
In that vein, I’d like to suggest actual voters to read CNET News’ tech-friendly candidate comparison and see how their candidates stand on a number of different tech- and internet-related topics.
Furthermore, CNET also has a special section for coverage of the 2008 elections. It covers tech-related news about the candidates, and has a number of different links that may help one deciding on a candidate worth a vote.
Posted on 8/Feb/2008 at 10:16 am | 4 Comments | Categories: Misc
New gotoAndLearn website
The year of 2008 starts with a bang as Lee Brimelow releases version 2 of the gotoAndLearn website. There are plenty of Flash and Actionscript tutorial videos featured on the website, including video, sound, and 3d, and I’m quite pleasured to find one of them being about animating with Tweener. Thanks, Lee! (also, thanks to Jeff Guthrie for the tip).
Posted on 2/Jan/2008 at 11:56 am | 2 Comments | Categories: Actionscript, Flash, Typography
BulkLoader is released
Arthur Debert - lead developer at Gringo and also one of the contributors to Tweener - has just released his new ActionScript 3 loading class, BulkLoader, publicly. The class allows you to load data from files in an streamlined way, and provides a series of features - like maximum number of retries, cache bypass, and others - that makes the whole process a lot easier than it would normally be in AS3.
For more information, see his post here, or go straight to the BulkLoader project at Google Code.
Posted on 27/Nov/2007 at 5:17 am | 2 Comments | Categories: Actionscript
Hydra changes, adds new head
Adobe is gearing up for the next release of their AIF Toolkit - the editor/preview tool for the shader revolution that’ll arrive with Flash 10 - and they have some small/big changes for the next version.
I’ve been working on the next version of the toolkit and I’m hoping it will make a bunch of you hydra developers happy. I’ve rolled in a lot of feature requests from the forums and the big news is that it should work on ALL supported platforms (OS 10.4.10+, XP, Vista) REGARDLESS OF YOUR VIDEO CARD. (…) We have made a language change to Hydra that will be in this next release. It is small, but it will break any existing filters. (…) Images will now be available by name in kernel scope instead of EvaluatePixel scope and that means that they can be used in per-frame functions like EvaluateDependencies and the region reasoning functions more simply.
Wonderful. I think he means evaluateDependents instead of EvaluateDependencies though. This function is called once per frame and actually demystifies one of the issues I had with the language - the inability to build a lookup table or “constant” values outside of the pixel iterator. Now I know.
Anyhow, read more about it here, on Adobe’s Kevin Goldsmith’s blog.