Category Archives: ActionScript

The delivery man just dropped off a big box labeled, “Author’s Copies”! I usually get them a few days before they are in the stores, and Amazon says in stock on the 27th. So if you pre-ordered, you should get … Continue reading →

Caught up in 25-line fever, I started hacking away at a Strange attractor generator and got it down to 6 lines. 🙂 [as]var bmp:Bitmap = addChild(new Bitmap(new BitmapData(800, 800, false, 0xffffff))) as Bitmap; for(var i:int = 0; i < 12; … Continue reading →

Seems like the word is spreading pretty well by itself, but I should mention it here anyway… The judges have picked their favorites and we came up with not 10, but 12 finalists. The stuff that was created is pretty … Continue reading →

Last night I approved the cover copy proof and sent that back. That’s pretty much the end. It’s off to the printer in a few days and should appear on the shelves some number of weeks later. Not sure the … Continue reading →

We have rules. We have judges. We have prizes. Now we need code. The contest begins at 12:00:01 a.m. tomorrow morning EST (GMT – 5). Check it out.

In the comments of this post, Emanuele Cipolloni put forth the idea that Flash 10 3D is simply done behind the scenes using drawTriangles. That was a interesting realization for me. Made sense, so I decided to test it out. … Continue reading →

One more problem you might run into with Flash 10 3D is when you rotate a display object in 3D. Display objects are perfect planes, which means they don’t have any thickness. The old joke, “he’s so thin that if … Continue reading →

I’ve done tons of 3D in ActionScript over the years. I wrote 3 chapters about 3D in Making Things Move. I could code that kind of simple 3D in my sleep. When I say 3D, I’m not talking about the … Continue reading →

AS3 has a new type known as Vector, which is essentially a typed array. So you can say: var myList:Vector.< Point > = new Vector.< Point >(); Now myList functions almost exactly like an array – has most of the … Continue reading →

Lee Brimelow mentioned recently that he had picked up this book while in Singapore. It looked pretty interesting, so I grabbed it off Amazon, and it does have some cool concepts in there. For me, it seems just about the … Continue reading →