Flex Builder, Papervision and GTween - great way to get the ball rolling again
Greetings all, still haven’t fixed the PC, and no plans in buying a new one. 
But, being forced to use a Macbook with no games installed(damn DotA) and a slow connection, I managed to find some time to get back into Flash and ActionScript. 
I finally figured out how to setup external class libraries in FlexBuilder, which took longer than I would have hoped. Now I can use Papervision3D, Away3D and have a central library for all other API’s and classes. It’s not as enjoyable as FlashDevelop, but, it’s better than nothing.
I also started playing with PV3D, which is just awesome. Very fun to play around with, and I can’t wait to make something I could use for my eternally work-in-progress site.
And finally, there’s a new tweening engine on the block. It’s called gTween and it’s made by Grant Skinner, so you know it’s great. Like TweenLite, it aims for speed and it’s also very lightweight. It’s still in beta, and not as powerful and feature-packed as TweenMax or other tweening engines. I haven’t tested it enough to choose it over TweenLite yet, but, I like it’s different approach to creating and managing (yep, you could manage, edit, reuse and even nest) tweens. Check it out here.
And, yeah, I would post my little “experiment” with Papervision, but I can’t seem to extract/find the swf file. I even tried using the .as file as a Document class to a Flash file, but I still can’t double-click and play the movie.
I am also having trouble with FlexBuilder, whenever I Run/Play button to test a project, it often doesn’t show anything until several retries or not at all, but using the .as file as a Doc class to a Flash file, it plays fine. 
Any help would be very much appreciated.
R.I.P.
My PC died earlier this week. It took with it all my files and experiments, but no worries, I have uploaded some of them here and I already learned from all of them. I also don’t have the latest files for my website now (which is getting cold), so I guess I should just start a new one. But, the worst part is, I only have a Mac to work on now, which doesn’t have FlashDevelop . I either have to try to work on FlexBuilder or just be idle for a few days (or weeks!) until I fix my PC or maybe get a new one *sigh*.
Aviary beta testing
I recently got an invite from someone at the kirupa.com forums to some Aviary tools. I only have access to two tools at the moment (Phoenix and Peacock), and only tested Phoenix (Peacock was a bit too complicated to test).
All I’ve got to say is, wow. This toolset is quite impressive. It has some very nice basic features, a few filter effects, hotkeys (!), and it is very smooth (it’s slow at times, but that’s because of my limited CPU). The interface is very nice, although the icons and panels are a little too big and take a lot of real estate IMO.
Still, it’s a little buggy, and there a Feedback menu on the toolbar for easy, well, feedback. 
I’m going to play more with Phoenix and try to make something cool. I really want to test Hummingbird (the 3D editor), but I don’t know how to sign up for the beta or even if it’s available.
I have a few invites remaining, so if you want to try them, just post.
[Learn] A “pixelating” effect on a Bitmap
I did a little experimenting with the BitmapData class, and came up with this.
I found this effect from a gallery somewhere, and thought it would be cool to try my hand at it, for learning purposes.
Click on the image below to see the effect.
What’s happening is, I get the size of the image, divide it by the size of the “pixels” I want, then create an array of Rectangles positioned in a grid over the image.
I then fill each Rectangle with the color of the pixel in it’s center by using the getPixel() and fillRect() methods of the BitmapData class.
Here is the central function doing the pixelating.
private function pixelate(bitmap:Bitmap, strength:Number):void {
var _x:int = 0; // position of the rectangle
var _y:int = 0;
if (strength > 1){
_strength = 1;
}
var _strength:Number = strength; // multiplier for size of "pixels"
var _w:Number = bitmap.bitmapData.width * _strength; //size of "pixels"
var _h:Number = bitmap.bitmapData.height * _strength;
var nH:int = Math.ceil(bitmap.bitmapData.width / _w); // number of rectangles needed horizontally
var nV:int = Math.ceil(bitmap.bitmapData.height / _h);// number of rectangles needed vertically
var rectangles:Array = []; // Rectangles array
//create rectangles
for (var i:int = 0; i < nV; i ++){
var targH:Number = _h;
if (i >= nV - 1){
targH = bitmap.bitmapData.height - _y;
}
for (var j:int = 0; j < nH; j ++){
var targW:Number = _w;
if (j >= nH - 1){
targW = bitmap.bitmapData.width - _x;
}
rectangles.push(new Rectangle(_x, _y, targW, targH));
_x += _w;
}
_x = 0;
_y += _h;
}
//fill in rectangles
for (i = 0; i < rectangles.length; i++){
var rect:Rectangle = rectangles[i];
var pix:uint = _states[0].getPixel((rect.x + rect.width / 2), (rect.y + rect.height / 2));
bitmap.bitmapData.fillRect(rect, pix);
}
saveCurrentState(bitmap.bitmapData);
}
Now for the reverting to the original image part, I had to improvise. Since I overwrote the BitmapData with a bunch of filled rectangles, I couldn’t do much with it.
So I used an array which stores each “state” the BitmapData is in. And I could just retrieve the BitmapData in the array and copy it into the original BitmapData.
private function saveCurrentState(bitmapData:BitmapData):void {
_states.push(bitmapData.clone());
}
private function revertToState(stage:int):void {
try{
bmData.copyPixels(_states[stage], bmData.rect, new Point(bmData.rect.x, bmData.rect.y));
}catch (e:Error){
throw new Error("Invalid state. ");
}
}
To create the animation, I just called the pixelate() function through a Timer at 300 milliseconds.
Slideshow on ActionScript 3
Just found this great resource for learning AS3. It is a slideshow created by Grant Skinner showing the basics of the language and some optimization tips. Each page worth an article itself, all 167 of them. It not only sounds good, it looks good.
http://gskinner.com/talks/as3workshop/
A little heads-up about the Flash Player 9 Garbage Collector
I want to give a heads-up to all those just beginning with AS3 about how it handles memory. I had to find out about this the hard way, and now have to redo a lot of stuff.
Flash Player 9 introduced a new system management feature called a garbage collector (GC). Basically, what it does is “sweep” for objects that can not be used/accessed anymore, and delete them, freeing memory. Until those ‘null’ objects are removed by the GC, they will sit in memory until the Player is closed.
So, whenever you want something to be deleted (escpecially with CPU intensive particle systems), you must be aware of what and where you are referencing your objects, so you could easily remove them. You have to do this by hand. One method is to set all objects you want to delete, and all references to it, to null. Even then, you have to wait for the GC to do its “sweeping motion” for those objects to be deleted.
Another thing to watch out for are event listeners. Make sure you remove any listeners (by calling removeEventListener()) from objects you want to delete, since they also hold a reference to your objects.
Check this article series for more details and info about the GC and resource management in Flash Player 9/AS3.
And lastly, it is about unloading external swf’s through Loader. You might think that using unload() from a Loader would remove that swf completely, but that isn’t the case. In fact, unload() does a pretty poor job at “unloading” swfs. Here is a quote from another article that explains this in great detail:
In AS3, calling Loader.unload() simply removes the reference to the loaded movie. If any other references exist to the loaded content, it will not be unloaded.
My site has been delayed by almost a month now, trying to figure out and fix my memory leak problem. I finally have an idea of what’s wrong, now I have to figure out a solution.
[Learn] Using TweenLite
TweenLite is a light-weight tweening engine for AS2 and AS3.
Tweening engines make animating objects through code a breeze. Instead of figuring out how to get to a certain point or value of an object’s property, all you need to do is figure out where you want that property to be (or where you want it to come from), the time it takes to get there, and you have movement.
There are a lot of tweening engines out there, but I prefer TweenLite because it is light (only 3kb), it is easy to use, does what I want it to do, and if I want more functionality, it has two older brothers*.
To get started, first you need to download TweenLite (I’ll be discussing the AS3 version here), and save it into your classpath.
There are 2 static methods you need to know, TweenLite.to() and TweenLite.from().
Those two methods take in three arguments:
- The object you want to animate
- The time, in seconds, the animation will span
- A dynamic Object instance target with predefined properties (this is where you put the values you want to reach)
So, to animate a box, it only takes one line to make it do some crazy stuff.
import gs.TweenLite; // import TweenLite
box_mc.x = 0;
box_mc.y = 100;
TweenLite.to(box_mc, 2, {x: stage.stageWidth, y: 200, rotation: 360, scaleX: 2, scaleY:2, alpha: .5});
//this will move the box to the edge of the stage, move it down 100 px, rotate it, scale it to 2x its
//size, and make it transparent, for 2 seconds.
Note that the TweenLite.from() method does the exact opposite of TweenLite.to(). It transforms your object to your third argument properties, and animates them towards the state the object has on the stage (very useful).
There are comments in the .as file itself, and explains some important things. This was to show how useful and indispensible tweening engines are. I can’t beleive how long I’ve strayed away from them, but now, I can’t live without them.
*TweenFilterLite - TweenLite + filtering capabilities
TweenMax - TweenFilterLite + bezier curves
