SWFAddress 2.2 has been released.  SWFAddress is pretty much THE solution for deep linking in flash and works greatly in combo with THE embedding solution into (X)HTML/Javascript for flash SWFObject.

The new SWFAddress has just arrived after seven months of active development, various contributions and lots of positive feedback from the community. The list of changes includes the following:

• Refactored JavaScript implementation
• New SWFAddress.swc AS3 component
• New CS4 based Splash screen sample
• New Digg API sample
• New up() method for easier deep linking path navigation
• New XSS protection that doesn’t affect special characters
• Support for Internet Explorer 8
• Support for custom HTTP status messages in the SEO sample
• Improved title handling
• Improved unload event handling for IE
• Updated Rails sample
• Fixed getBaseURL() for AS3
• Fixed Safari 2.0-2.0.3 support
• Build-in fix for the Firefox 3/Mac OSX blinking effect
• Additional onLoad fix for application/xml content type
• Fixed optional options parameter for the popup method
• Cross platform build script
• Various optimizations

I believe that this new version is pretty stable and won’t require an update soon. There are two known Safari bugs (19202 and 20355) that currently affect the project and we can only hope that they will make it’s way into the next major release of the browser.

SWFAddress has grown significantly in the last two years and it’s very likely that we’re going to provide a lite version for users who need just the basic functionality. Very soon the same API will become available for Silverlight and we’re also scheduling the development of a jQuery plugin.

• Post about the release
• Download SWFAddress 2.2

I have mentioned before that flash to unity3d communication is a key part of game development for the web now where you are using Unity3D as a higher end renderer and some of your other page elements might be flash. Now there is a new open source kit for this called u3dobject.

To get Flash and Unity3D to talk to one another in an HTML/XHTML page is pretty simple with javascript and with the internal Unity3D Application object and the ExternalInterface in Flash.  But there are lots of elements of that communication that can be consolidated and reused so you don’t have to recreate that over and over.  Various studios and programmers come up with their own kits but when it becomes a shared activity to get the best integration and make it more of a platform that is where things like swfobject, swfaddress and u3dobject come in.

So far swfobject is the standard for flash html embedding and unityObject is a similar take (but a bit dated) on that but now we have u3dObject that is open as well and a more official open source project for unity3D <–> flash integration and test harnesses for development when those two technologies are used together.

Unity3D <-> Flash Embedding Info:

• u3dobject hosted at google code
• Older unityobject from unity3d wiki (outdated)
• Recent post on the same topic and some examples from Paul Tondeur
• ExternalInterface for Flash
• Unity Web Player and browser communication

This is pretty impressive.  This is Moonlight for mono (a silverlight clone in mono.net for multiplatform) running inside of Ogre3D (a 3d renderer) as a material.

Argiris Kirtzidi (one of the developers behind Managed OGRE) modified Moonlight to run inside the Ogre3D engine. You can render Moonlight applications or XAML files inside Ogre3D.

Some details in no particular order:

-Moonlight uses cairo for the graphics. I developed a new backend for cairo that fully utilizes the GPU (through Ogre’s RenderSystem) for rendering. This is completely independent from Moonbeam and can be used standalone.

-Moonlight’s core is a native C++ engine and is not dependent in Mono. It is flexible enough to be scripted by anything, javascript, managed code, native code, etc. I’ve got it working on both Mono and the .NET framework and I plan on embedding and trying out Lua for more lightweight stuff.

-If you opt for using managed code, it should be possible, in theory, to utilize the silverlight controls, develop a silverlight widget using visual studio and have it run through moonbeam with full debugging support.

-Getting it to work on Windows was no small task as the moonlight team is completely focused on linux, and there doesn’t seem to be much consideration about cross-platform-ness. I think this is reasonable, though, since moonlight is a young project and their specific goal is to implement silverlight for *nix systems. The downside is that it reduces its flexibility, e.g. in order to inject keyboard/mouse events I will have to create and pass to it GDK events or make heavy patches to it.
Hopefully, there will be more push in the future to get the *nix dependencies abstracted away from the core moonlight engine.

• The Moonlight Calculator Example.
• Miguel’s post about this
• Original post about the technique from the author

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.

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.