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.
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.
[sourcecode language='js']
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.
[/sourcecode]
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