[kml_flashembed movie="experiments/convolution_filter.swf" height="510" width="577" /]

Thanks to the Adobe Developer Library for the example:

Convolution Filter:Convolution filtering is typically a part of multiple visual effects in most, if not all, pixel-editing applications. This is not surprising because using the filter effectively requires at least a working knowledge of matrices. The transformation capabilities made possible by matrices calculate pixel color values by combining values from adjacent pixels to produce a wide variety of image effects. These effects include, but are not limited to, blurring, sharpening, embossing, edge detection, and
brightness.

This small example was inspired by FlashMagazine’s tutorial on the Away3D engine. 3D is becoming the biggest rave in the flash world and has a bright future…Note that there are limitations on the flash player performance. Click on the image for the popup. Please be patient while it loads! (Too lazy to add a loader right now)

Links to resources in this example:
Away3D
JHT’S Planetary Pixel Emporium

Do you want to learn Flash? Better yet do you want to learn about the programming language Actionscript that is the impetus of most of the best flash designs in the world? Well here is a list of ways to learn Flash and Actionscript. Flash might look daunting to master for beginners but if you just grit your teeth and sink into it you will be amazed how quickly you can understand some of the basic concepts.

1. Some great tutorials for learning flash from the beginning to the advanced at Kirupa’s website. The list here is long and quite honestly very good for all levels. Do yourself a favor and check them out. You will see a mix of tutorials from animation to AS2 and AS3 and a whole hell of lot more. The team has really done a good job by bundling these tutes together for you all to learn from. Check out their forums as well.
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2. One great way to learn Flash is fire up the application and goto the inbuilt help file that ships with Flash. You can reference many books that Adobe has already selected for you with very useful and pertinent examples. If you read through the documentation you will surely be able to master the IDE (Internal Development Environment) quickly. What better way to learn than from the creators of the software?
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3. Also, be sure to look at the ActionScript 2.0 Migration document to see what functions and classes have been changed, moved, or removed. When changes exist between AS2 and AS3, this document often includes instructions for how you should change your approach.
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4. If you are seriously looking to learn flash then head over to Flashden and check out some of the stock flash files they have there. They are reasonably priced and by picking up just a couple of files you could learn a lot! Matter of fact some authors upload their files solely for learning purposes.
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5. You might want to learn from video tutorials – step by step instructions on how to code or animate in Flash Lynda.com offers many hours of video focused on Flash CS3 and ActionScript 2-3 for a low subscription price. Lee Brimlow’s site gotoAndLearn also offers free video tutorials about Flash.
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6. For the novice or advanced users there is no better way than to view the documentation at Adobes website. Be sure to check out Adobes Flash Developer Center and the Actionscript Technology Center. Or you could just goto the Adobe Developer Connection for a broader view of topics.
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7. All documentation available in the Flash CS3 product is available online on Adobe’s website, including many parts that may be downloaded in PDF form (if that’s your preference). For those that are new to programming, or maybe if you just need a bit of help learning about classes and objects, check out Getting Started with ActionScript in the documentation.
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8. Be sure to check out Senocular’s website and tutorial sections. They extremely helpful and they post a thread at the Kirupa forums called ActionScript 3.0 Tip of the Day.
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9. Another great way to learn Flash or Actionscript is by picking up a book on it. Here are some of the better titles out there.
   • Essential Actionscript 2
   • Essential Actionscript 3
   • Foundation Flash 8 for Actionscript
   • Foundation Actionscript for Flash CS3: Making things Move!
   • Actionscript 3 Cookbook
   • Actionscipt 2 Cookbook
   • Learning Actionscript 3
   • Object Orientated Actionscript
   • Actionscript 3 Bible
   • Foundation Actionscript 3.0 with Flash and Flex 2
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10. There are many forums out there to learn flash at. Google them or use your favorite search engine to find them.
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11. A great place to get free files is at FFiles Website. If you register with them you will be able to download free files from the website. They have many different categories of files for all levels and they are pretty darn useful!
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12. Use a flash decompiler to view other peoples code…Though it is not ethical to directly use anyone else’s code it is a great way to learn how professional build their websites. There are many out there so you can choose which one best suits you or which is the most accessible of the lot! Or ask someone for their code which you could learn from. If you asked me i most probably would be happy to help you on your way with small snippets of re-usable code.
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13. Lastly use a Java Bit Torrent Client such as Azureus to download torrents of your favorite flash books. Goto Extratorrent and type in Flash books and see what results you get. Just download that torrent and add it to you torrent Client to start the downloads. Better yet HERE is the direct link. You might also want to try Rapid Share Downloads and Repository.

Though there are alot more references for Flash on the web, these are the ones that come to my mind throughout my eternal search to learn more. Good Luck!

TAKE 1: Particles (Actionscript)

I have seen many particle experiments out there nowadays. Some of the code that captures the essence of particle emulation and recursion is quite simple to concoct and implement. I love particle coding and was looking to get my hands dirty in the Flash IDE. Recently i found a simple class authored by SebDeelisle. All of us coders out there know the meaning of simplicity especially in code. Yeah keep it simple you all then build from there. Here is an example of some stars crescent shaoes floating around looking for their maker – Ha!
 

[kml_flashembed movie="/experiments/Step 7.swf" height="300" width="550" /]

TAKE 2: Pointillism (Processing)

A basic image of some cricket fans with the ever so familiar crescent masks!

The same cricket fans redone in processing with the code for pointillism attached. Not the best rendering but at this moment I’ll gladly take it.
/*
* Pointillism
* by Ahad Bokhari
*
* Mouse horizontal location controls size of dots.
* Creates a simple pointillist effect using ellipses colored
* according to pixels in an image.
*
* Created 5th April, 2008
*/

PImage a;

void setup()
{
a = loadImage(”crick.jpg”);
size(415,318);
noStroke();
background(255);
smooth();
}

void draw()
{
float pointillize = map(mouseX, 0, width, 2, 18);
int x = int(random(a.width));
int y = int(random(a.height));
color pix = a.get(x, y);
fill(pix, 126);
ellipse(x, y, pointillize, pointillize);
}

A new Isometric Engine has been released to the flash open source community. Check it out here. I checked it recently and its definitely worth a post – it seemed very responsive and i enjoyed walking around in the examples provided for you on FFiilmation. Moving around seems quite easy however when you walk around shadows the character becomes a little slow. Nevertheless it still looks like a great AS3 Isometric Engine to start a game with.

Here are some features and plans for the engine:

• Have a programming interface as small and easy as possible, no matter how complex the internal code is. From a software engineering point of view, the OOP structure may not be as correct and clean as it could have been. It is not messy, but several decisions where made that improved performance and simplicity at the cost of breaking some “good OO programming” conventions.
• Rendering performance is a major concern when designing all the algorythms. Some of them have been rewritten 4 or 5 times from scratch until one fastest enought was found. If it doesn’t perform well, it is not usable. We’ve all seen several impressive actionscript demos that look really cool and invite to be used in your next project. But then if the effect takes 90% of your CPU, you can’t build anything on top of that.
• Graphic designers should be able to work on the application’s ( game or not ) environments without any programming skills, visually, and with almost immediate previews of what they are doing. Using the engine should be fun to some degree. If you have this terrific engine and adding a wall to your dungeon means you have to write 10 lines of OO gibberish, lazyness will eventually win you over. If art directors can draw and place the walls and lights an floors and enemies and see them appearing onscreen, you have more chances of reaching your deadline.
• Flash has built-in drawing and animation tools. You should be able to take advantage of them !!

All this is important because in reality projects depend on limited resources. Resources are money and time, but also the enthusiasm of indie developers or single individuals doing stuff “for fun” in their bedrooms. Projects, specially the “for fun” ones, have more chances of completion if the production process is gratifying to some degree.

Here’s a list of highlited features:

• One engine capable of handling several isometric scenes of different complexities.
• Create scenes from human-readable XML definitions, allowing easy edition of the scene’s topology and contents
• Graphic media can be split into several external resources and loaded when an scene needs them
• Flat textures. Paint your grahics directly into flash. Walls, floors and celings are edited as 2D graphics and projected by the engine. Elements and animated characters can be animated via flash timeline, no need for complex programming.
• Dynamic lighting, global lighting, real-time shadow projection. Multiple lights from multiple sources affecting the same objects.
• Bump-mapped surfaces. Still somehow buggy and a serious performance killer, but already there.
• An extendable material interface. MovieClip materials, autotiled materials, procedural materials.
• Automatic zSorting of all surfaces and objects
• Built-in collision detection. No need to program complex coordinate comparisions, simple listen to COLLISION events generated by the engine.
• Basic AI API helpers such as “is character A visible from character B’s position ?”

Here are some other game engines you might be interested in:

• Alternativa Platform Development
• Zen Bullets
  

The author of this engine still remains unknown and i don’t think thats a good idea. We hope that you disclose your name soon!!

I have been tinkering around with AS3 alot these days – i’ll admit i am behind par, but it’s never too late to get into it!!
I’m basically finding all the little nuances that come along with migrating to this much more powerful and structured addition to an already great OOP language in the Flash IDE.

To cut to the little example (with code – of course!!) i have created a simple menu in Flash with ActionScript 3. This will help you understand the Tween Class and show you how showing and hiding a menu or panel can reduce clutter in your flash application.

[kml_flashembed movie="/experiments/simpleTween_as3.swf" height="400" width="415" /]

The Adobe ActionScript Reference for Rich Internet application development provides an alphabetical reference for all native ActionScript APIS for the Adobe technology platform rntimes – Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex Framework.  Great for those who want to learn about the ActionScript APIs that are available within the runtimes.

As any actionScript 3.0 programmer you will spend alot of time researching properties and methods of the many class files available to you. The best place is to start is the ActionScript 3.0 Online Language Reference (For Flex) and ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components Reference.

To get to the Flex ActionScript 3.0 Language Reference in Flex select Help > Find in Language Reference.

You will see that during your career as an ActionScript 3.0 programmer, you will be spending a fair amount of your time on these sites.

Many thanks to Peter Elst, Rock on Flash and Google code for making this possible….There are many out there who like AfterEffects, InDesign (keyframing and video, but i love the Flash IDE- these guys have made it possible for us to play around with Papervision in the Flash IDE) I have been watching papervision gain popularity over the months and am really excited about learning new stuff about it. Also many thanks to Allesandro Crugnola who created the .dae file for this experiment.

I used a friend here, Mr. X a, .NET developer i once knew in Karachi who has moved to Australia (and taken that beard along with him!!)

“Well Mr. Y (a dear colleague and friend of mine) we got him all cubed up here, the way it should be LOL !!!”

[kml_flashembed movie="/experiments/bin/Main.swf" height="400" width="400" /]
Some great code here by Joa Ebert. I’m right there Mr. Ebert trying to figure this whole image processing library out. Tell you all its great fun not only to learn but to be challenged learning from one another. Many thanks to Joa and *Andre Michelle for opening my eyes.