When you do lots of any language you build up libraries over time that are time savers that are repetitive and tedious if you do not consoildate into a library.  Taking a look at the CASALib, an as3 library of common functions for flash that was released I have many of the same things in my libraries but CASALib just has lots of extras that go a bit deeper than some libraries, is very clean and is organized pretty well.

One cool thing about it is the IDestroyable interface and the CasaMovieClip, CasaSprite, CasaTextField , etcthat all have a destroy() method that cleans up all events, removed instances and even removes it from the parent display object. Gets me thinking why this isn’t just part of DisplayObject in the first place.

From the release:

Here are a few of our favorite things in CASA Lib AS3:

• Standardized external load API
• Easily remove listeners with IRemovableEventDispatcher
• destroy methods make garbage collection easy
• Large group of utility classes for common manipulations

We will be elaborating further the power of CASA Lib in future blog posts.

As with any new release there will be bugs that emerge, but with your help we promise to release updates often to keep CASA Lib as stable as possible.

1.0.0 Downloads & Documentation

ZIP: http://as3.casalib.org/releases/1.0.0/1.0.0.zip
SVN: http://svn.as3.casalib.org/releases/1.0.0/
Documentation: http://as3.casalib.org/releases/1.0.0/docs/

[source]

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Nicolas Cannasse is at it again.  This time with a PBJ (Pixel Bender File) binary file reader and writer in haXe and Pixel Bender Assembler tools. What this can do is create and decompile PBJ files with haXe, the possibilities are limitless to how this is used including dynamic pbj file creation.

The latest haXe file format library contains complete support to read and write PBJ file, enabling you to write Pixel Bender assembler directly in haXe, then compile it on-the-fly into PBJ bytes, which can then be saved on disk or loaded directly in Flash.

I plan to have much more on Pixel Bender (shaders in flash) and Adobe Alchemy (compile other languages to which is a very cool technology that involves LLVM that Nicolas also has lots of great input on.

I am working with lots of content now that is flash and unity3d in game development for the web, and occasionally systems built in flash, javascript or other have to communicate with Unity3D and vice versa.  You can do this from the server side (WWW/WWWForm class or sockets) OR you can also communicate client side for many things such as sending name value pairs or variables into Unity3D, Flash or the javascript in page as needed. There are some great tools like UnityObject that is like swfobject (only you have to update it to work with latest browsers) that make this more simple to send in params and messages. The same can be applied to Silverlight. It is pretty simple all in all but having a sample to start with is good with all these technologies.

Paul Tondeur threw togetother a little sample that shows how you can integrate Unity3D, Flash and javascript in the page fairly simply with lots of great demos.  It really is just about passing parameters around into the objects from javascript, then within Flash calling ExternalInterface to call external javascript or within Unity3D calling Application.ExternalCall.

//Flash adding callback for javascript code
ExternalInterface.addCallback("functionNameInBrowser", functionNameInFlash );

//Unity3D calling javascript code
Application.ExternalCall("javascriptFunction", "Parameter1");

Nothing too tasking but if you want to see samples of this working together from flash, flex, javascript, unity3d then check it out. Zip on over to Paul’s site to grab the files and more demos and samples. All examples are bundled in one download, which includes all the Unity3D, Flash, Flex, Actionscript and Javascript files.

Here’s some demos

• Build a Unity3D “browserchat”
• Make Unity3D objects clickable and load content in Flash
• Drag a rectangle in Flash and drag an cube in Unity3D
• Add, delete and drag objects from the Flash interface and show this in Unity3D

Augmented reality is a very cool technology.  It is the star wars holograms that we always want, it is playing a game that maps out the physical world mixed with virtual assets, it is straight up cool.

The FLARToolKit is doing some of this cool in Flash.  This little toolkit is pretty sweet mapping points and sets of points to patterns, colors or other visual queues that technology can latch onto.  Combine this with a webcam and you have some pretty cool AR.

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The YouTube Chromeless Player works with AS3/ActionScript 3.

The demo shows great examples of the player with just the window canvas (chromeless) from both javascript and inside of flash.

The project is hosted on Google Code [youtubechromelesswrapper-as3]

Looks like they maybe had a contribution for this, so do it where you can.

This is something we’ve been wanting to provide for a while, and the YouTube API team greatly appreciates the work of developer Matthew Richmond of The Chopping Block for making it happen. Thanks Matthew!

Links

• Demo
• Google Code [youtubechromelesswrapper-as3]
• Article about the library
• Download the source (get from google code recommended)
• Javascript Player Reference

Capabilities/API

Public Methods

player.loadVideoById(id:String, startSeconds:Number = 0):void

Loads and plays video based on specified id.

player.cueNewVideo(id:String, startSeconds:Number = 0):void

Loads but does not automatically play video based on specified id.

player.clearVideo():void

Clears currently cued/loaded video.

player.setSize(w:Number, h:Number):void

Sets the size of YouTubePlayer instance.

player.play():void

Plays the currently cued/loaded video.

player.pause():void

Pauses the currently cued/loaded video.

player.stop():void

Stops the currently cued/loaded video.

player.seekTo(seconds:Number):void

Seeks to specified time within the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getPlayerState():String

Returns the current state of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getBytesLoaded():Number

Returns the value of current bytes loaded of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getBytesTotal():Number

Returns the value of total bytes loaded of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getCurrentTime():Number

Returns the current position in time of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getDuration():Number

Returns the current duration of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getStartBytes():Number

Returns the start bytes of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.setVolume(newVolume:Number):void

Sets the volume of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getVolume():Number

Returns the current volume of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.mute():void

Stores the current volume and changes the volume of the currently cued/loaded video to 0.

player.unmute():void

Returns the volume of the currently cued/loaded video to the last stored value when muted.

player.getEmbedCode():String

Returns the current YouTube embed code of the currently cued/loaded video.

player.getVideoUrl():String

Returns the current YouTube video url of the currently cued/loaded video.

Events

YouTubeLoaderEvent.LOADED

Fired once the Chromeless Player has successfully completed loading and is ready to accept operations calls.

YouTubeLoaderEvent.STATE_CHANGE

Fired whenever the player’s state changes. The YouTubeLoader class translates the JavaScript API numbers to their related string values, the YouTubeLoaderEvent class stores the current event in a variable called state. Possible values are unstarted, ended, playing, paused, buffering, video cued. When the SWF is first loaded, it will broadcast an unstarted event. When the video is cued and ready to play, it will broadcast a video cued event.

YouTubeLoaderEvent.IO_ERROR

Fired when an error in the player occurs. There are two error codes possible: 100 is broadcasted when the video requested is not found. This occurs when a video has been removed (for any reason), or it has been marked as private. 101 is broadcasted when the video requested does not allow playback in the embedded players.

Mike Chambers posted that Flash Player 10 is officially live. This completes your 1-2 punch of RIA/game platform releases of Silverlight and Flash this week.

Flash Player 10 is great news. There are so many things in it from a new data structure (Vector), to local FileReference, to Matrix and 3D helpers, to speed improvements and video enhancements being able to play other video types and more (this was actually in a late version of flash player 9 as well but will be used more here). It does take time for flash versions to get out in the wild, about 9 months to where they are in the 90%-95% range where you can convince people to use it in production, but getting those skills now is good.  The scripting platform is still Actionscript 3 so anyone still making Flash Player 8 and AS2 stuff is now two revolutions behind.

Another thing I am looking forward to soon (next week) that is missing from both Flash and Silverlight, is the ability to develop for the iPhone, which Unity3D is dropping the iPhone kit on Oct 22nd. Unity3D has effectively taken Director’s 3d game development (hardware accelerated) market lead away this year and late last year and is a great platform. Director who?

Lots of great tools and platforms to create the innovative new applications, games and markets that are so needed right now. Go create!

as3isolib is a great isometric library for actionscript 3 by Justin Opitz.  This is a lower level isometric library that could be used in building your own isometric gaming engine or learning more about the popular isometric view in games or other flash content.

From building basic blocks…

To constructing sprites and objects with individual iso objects with their own bounding boxes.

This sample shows a two piece tree, a common issue with sprites in isometric is where to slice them up.  This sample shows a tree with the leaves able to be in front of a character so that you could walk under the tree and be in front of the trunk but covered by the trees.  Essentially height is respected.

Sample code for the tree tutorial:

package
{
import as3isolib.display.IsoSprite;
import as3isolib.display.primitive.IsoBox;
import as3isolib.display.scene.IsoGrid;
import as3isolib.display.scene.IsoScene;
 
import flash.display.Loader;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.net.URLRequest;
 
public class IsoApplication extends Sprite
{
 private var scene:IsoScene;
 private var assets:Object;
 
 private var loader:Loader
 
 private function loadAssets ():void
 {
  loader = new Loader();
  loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.INIT, loader_initHandler);
  loader.load(new URLRequest("assets/swf/assets.swf"));
 }
 
 private function loader_initHandler (evt:Event):void
 {
  buildScene();
 }
 
 private function buildScene ():void
 {
  scene = new IsoScene();
  scene.hostContainer = this;
  scene.container.x = 200;
  scene.container.y = 200;
 
  var treeTrunkClass:Class = loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition("TreeTrunk") as Class;
  var treeLeavesClass:Class = loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition("TreeLeaves") as Class;
 
  var grid:IsoGrid = new IsoGrid();
  grid.showOrigin = false;
  scene.addChild(grid);
 
  var s0:IsoSprite = new IsoSprite();
  s0.setSize(25, 25, 65);
  s0.moveTo(50, 50, 0);
  s0.sprites = [treeTrunkClass];
  scene.addChild(s0);
 
  var s1:IsoSprite = new IsoSprite();
  s1.setSize(125, 125, 100);
  s1.moveTo(0, 0, 75);
  s1.sprites = [treeLeavesClass];
  scene.addChild(s1);
 
  scene.render();
 }
 
 public function IsoApplication ()
 {
  loadAssets();
 }
}
}

current features

• simple scene creation
• 3 primitive types
• base class for displaying user-created content
• plenty of styling option on vector based primitives
• integrates well with a variety of tween engines
• standard 3D isometric positional sorting

So get busy building the flash version of roller coaster tycoon…

• Features of the library
• Online docs
• Download as3isolib at Google Cod
• as3isolib_tutorial_001 – Intro single block
• as3isolib_tutorial_002 – Multiple blocks
• as3isolib_tutorial_003 – Customizing sides
• as3isolib_tutorial_004 – Sprites and construction
• Blog post about the release

Nicolas Cannasse has released haXe 2.01 that now has flash 10 support with a simple switch including the new Vector class.

Another very good news is that haXe has now complete support for Flash 10.
You only have to use -swf-version 10 as commandline parameter to be able to access the new Flash10 APIs (don’t forget to install first the FP10 from labs.adobe.com).

I think it is very possible for haXe to catch on big time, but it takes time as stated. Just remember that Python was worked on almost solely by Guido van Rossum for about 5-years, and then 10-years later it was picked up by Google heavily and the rest is history.  I think it takes 10 years for anything to really catch on from standards to languages.

code_swarm – Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

This project is stacked with cool, but is also useful, an ogg/vorbis player in flash/as3.  Arek Korbik at barelyfocused implemented a port for a pure Ogg/Vorbis audio library called FVorbis.  Check out the demo (need flash player 10). Groovy.

The name is: FVorbis. Which stands for more or less “Ogg and Vorbis in Flash”. That’s right, pure ActionScript 3 implementation of the Ogg and Vorbis libraries that require no kind of native support from the Flash Player. A simple Vorbis player implemented using the new FVorbis lib compiles to about 46KB SWF file. And that’s it.

To top it off the code is actually written in haXe, a favorite of the flasherati. This version was iterated from the Cortado’s JOrbis code.

Ogg Vorbis is a great open source audio format which is widely popular in game engines such as recent tools like Unity3D (which will be launching their iPhone dev kit on Oct 22 btw but I digress), so it is great to see it starting to appear in flash. Thanks Arek.

• Try the sample
  

• Get the code (bzr)
  

Flash 10 security changes requiring user interaction are pretty breaking but they are for good reason.  Still though, the user could be inundated with prompts much like UAC on Vista. But, it is necessary otherwise security holes can be troublesome with the flash player and the “sandbox” of the web.  Much like Java signing, Active-X acceptance, and thus local file access, these actions need some user approval, it is that liability thing.

But what is a bit lost in this is some of the new support specifically for game development and app development.

Support for things like RTMFP which is bringing UDP support to flash.  UDP and reliable UDP (ordered) is really needed when it comes to larger scale networking applications and support for p2p apps.  Games for instance, that are large like MMOs and highly interactive real-time engines, need UDP to be able to scale.  So this is pretty useful, yet it currently looks like it is tied to Flash Media Server.  It appears Adobe is staying ahead of SmartFox, Red5 and OpenFMS with stuff like this.

Another great move in the way of security updates for Flash 10 for games is the allowing input from keyboard keys while in full screen mode. All these games and apps look pretty sweet in full screen until you try to use them.  There is only support for “Tab, the Spacebar, and the (up, down, left, right) arrow keys” but that is a start.  Enough keys for a casual game.  But still most keys could safely be used it must be a multi-platform support thing.

Limited full-screen keyboard input

Currently Flash Player does not allow keyboard input when displaying content in full-screen mode. Flash Player 10 beta will change this, allowing for a limited number of keys to be usable in full-screen mode. These include Tab, the Spacebar, and the (up, down, left, right) arrow keys.

Flash 10 is getting local save and load, this is great for any type of online editor, game or application. The ability to work on a file immediately without the server round trip initially is great.  I hope this is extended much further to local save and load with very high limits, there has been some confusion on the file size limitations here. Ideally this would be extended much further if the product direction is right. Typically making apps or games with more than 5-25MB of content quickly become non-economical in bandwidth such as gaming assets due to browser cache size limitations (defaults IE=50MB, Safari 5-25MB, FF3=50MB), I wish there was a better way to allow local saving for long periods of time.  Almost installing apps via flash with extended cache, talk about killer app feature. Downloading 10 MB of gaming assets that you know will be there for the month rather than the day.

Paste events can read the clipboard.  Using the clipboard is another great useful tool in applications and online editors.

Data can be read from the Clipboard inside a paste event handler

In Flash Player 9, the system Clipboard could not be read at any time. With Flash Player 10 beta, the new ActionScript 3.0 method Clipboard.generalClipboard.getData() may be used to read the contents of the system Clipboard, but only when it is called from within an event handler processing a flash.events.Event.PASTE event.

So yes, the security user interaction changes do break current features but it also takes this platform a bit more into secure applications and game features from security changes, hopefully these features are extended much further but they are on the right track.