This morning Macromedia made several press announcements regarding the Flash Platform, Flash Player, Macromedia’s support of the Eclipse Foundation, and an upcoming toolset for Flex development, code-named Zorn.
actionscript
Will Flash 8 support E4X?
An unintentionally mail posted in the Flex mailing list talks about one of the new Flex 2.0 features, the support of E4X.
This means that probably the new flash player will support it also… This should be a great step over the old “DOM” flash support.. in this case XML entities will be threated as builtins objects Read more about ECMAScript for XML (E4X) Specification: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-357.htm
Nice 3D engine
Today I published under the Flash Download section a 3D engine which Antonin Stefanutti sent to me. 3DFS’s features are :
- polygonal object rendering (a face can be any 3D convex polygon);
- camera management (track, dolly, tumble, pan & shake functions);
- visible surface determination via S-Buffer implementation (perfect object intersection);
- clipping (front, left, right, back planes);
- backface culling (per object or face enabling);
- flat shading with lighting coefficients : ambiant, diffuse & specular;
- variable rendering resolution and simple variable blur rendering;
- user defined object mouse events : onMouseOver, onPress, onRelease, etc;
- usual math transformations : scaling, Euler & quaternion rotating, etc;
- XML format scene loader;
- command line 3DS Max ‘.ASE’ format converter (‘tri’ or ‘quad’ modes available);
I found this project very clear and well done, even if I never got into 3D stuff in deep (I didnt want headache at all…)
Here some examples:
For more info visit: http://3dfs.alpha-sigma.net/3DFS.html His files are released under the GNU General Public License
Download it here:
[attachments docid=628 fields=caption,description force_saveas=”0″ logged_users=”0″]
mtasc 1.04 have been released
I just read today about the new release of MTASC.
Changes are :
- “for” optional first parameter and expression
- fixed while( o )++ i;
- added error when duplicate import statement (with same or different package)
- added class-exist import check => import will now link classes
- fixed typing error with single “var” in a block
- fixed parser error with a?b:c and big left-expression
- fixed bug when catching “imported” exception class
- changed boolean operators typing
- added -flash6 for F6 compilation
- added -trace for custom trace function
- added optional color component for header
About new -trace: you can new use TRACE(….) (uppercase) in your code. such calls will be eithere removed if you don’t specify -trace from MTASC commandline or will be replaced by -trace specified function. Exemple :
class A {
function test() {
TRACE("hello !");
}
}
when calling mtasc -trace MyClass.myLogFunction will be compiled as : MyClass.myLogFunction(“hello !”, “A::test”, “A.as”, 3 );
This way you can get class name , method name, file and line from which the trace occured, and log them using your custom trace function.
It’s a while i’m using mtasc integrated in sepy for checking syntax and I’m very happy how it works, checking syntax better than MM internal compiler…
Foundation PHP 5 for Flash
It was from days of Flash 5 which this book first time appeared. Long time has elapsed (expecially considering the informatic times).
Today I see that friends of Ed has published a new version of this book covering ActionScript 2.0, PHP 5 and MySQL 4.1.
Taking a look at the sample PDF chapter available it seems quite well done, clear and simple to read (ok, that is 2nd chapter and it talks of very basic things already…), but i noticed that it also threats of things/problems which often occured if you use php and flash everyday.. for example escape characters, magic_quotes_gpc etc..
I think i will going to get a copy of the book, it’s always useful take my mind under exercise…
XML2Object revisited
An XML2Object revisited class.
Basically it works in the same ways as the previius one, but now in the parseXML method it can be defined a 2nd parameter which will tell to the parser to put all xml nodes into arrays. In this way all variables created into the returned object will be stored into array. for example:
import it.sephiroth.XMLObject;
myxml.onLoad = function(){
var data = new XMLObject().parseXML( this, true );
}
The second addition to this class is the parseObject method, which will convert any object into an xml. for example, this code:
import it.sephiroth.XMLObject;
myobject = {
attributes : {
name : "custom object",
type : 1 },
item : [ { name : "Varese", code : "VA" }, { name : "Milano", code : "MI" } ],
channel : { name : "City", country : "Italy" } }
data = new XMLObject().parseObject(myobject,"TEST");
will produce this xml string:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <TEST type="1" name="custom object"> <item> <name>Varese</name> <code>VA</code> </item> <item> <name>Milano</name> <code>MI</code> </item> <channel> <name>City</name> <country>Italy</country> </channel> </TEST>
And here’s the class code: XMLObject.as
Admin Tool
Some days ago a friend of mine showed me a “strange” (this is what i was thinking looking at that) application which made a complete debug of its flash movie.
Wow, incredible easier easier and easier than the Flash builtin debugger!!
Thus I immediately downloaded it and i was surprised of the impressive work this guy made!
Reading from admin tool’s web page: The AdminTool (AT) is a “snapshot viewer” of the current state of your Flash application without impacting the performance or the file size of your application. … It Works when published in the FlashIDE, local player, web browser. This means that you can debug your application at runtime from its intended location.
Basically it works with a Flash component (an mxp extension) which resides in your swf library and open a localconnection to the main admin tool interface.
Moreover you can change in realtime every property of your running swf to see what happens with that change.
And you can execute actionscript code in runtime from the admin tool, and see that code executed in you swf!! You can see also every video and sound from the swf.
The only requirement is that swf must be compiled for AS2 only. Downloads (mxp, win exe, mac exe and help files) are availables here: http://acmewebworks.typepad.com/…/admin_tool_down.html
Natural Docs
I recently discovered this project (opensource) thanks to a post in SEPY feature requests. Natural Docs is an open-source, extensible, multi-language documentation generator.
It has native support for C#, Perl and ActionScript2 (PHP, Python, etc. has basic support).
It seems a really valid project, the problem (for me) actually is that is doesn’t support javadoc, even if I read on its forum that he’s planning to support it in the future.
Natural Docs requires Perl 5.05 or higher to run. If you’re using Linux or Mac OS X, you should already have it. If you’re using Windows and haven’t installed it yet, you can get ActiveState’s ActivePerl for free.
There are free versions available for many other platforms as well.
Download Version 1.34 from sourceforge.net site