The third and final alternative. Lemme warn you, its complicated, but its worth it. Because you will be able to make a flash preloader for a unity scene, which basicly gives you the ultimate freedom (well unless you wanna have a 3D preloader, then refer to part 2 of this tutorial).
Read the rest of this entry »
A custom preloader in Unity part 3/3
December 10th, 2009A custom preloader in Unity part 2/3
December 10th, 2009The second way to do it resembles very much how it works in flash: first you load a small movie, which is just the preloader, which will load the big movie.
Read the rest of this entry »
A custom preloader in Unity part 1/3
December 10th, 2009Unity 2.6 is now out and they made the indie version free! Thanks unity team!
Unity is used a lot for offline and iphone content and perhaps not so much as a 3D replacement for flash. As a flash programmer, there’s certain things you wanna know, like how to make a preloader.
I will describe 3 ways to make a preloader, the last being the most complex and most impressive 
The first way is just to customize the default preloader.
Read the rest of this entry »
Custom tween in Tweener
August 18th, 2009
I recently needed a tween that is different from the ones you see on the cheat sheet. All tweens you’ll find there have the property that the movement hardly goes outside the bounds of begin-to-endpoint (0…1). What I needed, was a tween that swings completely beyond its target, almost as far as the begin point (0…-1…1).
Digging into CS4 perspective
July 13th, 2009I finally managed to completely copy the flash internal perspective with a manual perspective.
In flash cs4, you can make a plane, say, a 100×100 plane sitting on (0,0). Then, you can rotate it in 3D, using the properties rotationX, rotationY and rotationZ. Say you would rotate it by x and y by 20 degrees each, you end up with a nice plane in perspective.
Now this is really cool, but if would be quite a pain to display a 3D mesh in such a way.
Read the rest of this entry »
Rtmp protocol released
June 16th, 2009Adobe finally released the RTMP protocol to the developer community, so reverse engineering it should no longer be needed if you wanna work with the flash networking protocol, but cannot afford Flash Media Server or are not working with a flash client.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/rtmp/
This is great news, because now we (programmers) can all use the more difficult AMF0 and media streaming features of it!
We should be seeing an increase in live streaming applications now.
Making a 3D map with google maps and flex4
June 2nd, 2009It has been ages since I last posted cause I have been really busy working on a 3d world in Unity3D to which I cannot yet show you a link, but you can see the presentation Paul gave on it here: http://www.adobeusergroup.nl/site/list_messages/270
Anyway as most flash developers know, in flash player 10 any sprite can have a 3D rotation and position to create the illusion of 3D. Now, I wanted to test out the latest version of the google maps flash api, so I figured why not throw the google map on a plane in 3D space and see if it still works.
Amazingly enough: it does!
Here it is: http://bugshake.com/pages/googleflex4/
c# style trace
April 14th, 2009Hi, just a little handy AS3 snippet I thought I’d share. It simulates the string.format from dotnet in a trace statement. I decided to name it tracef like printf in c (f = format)
tracef("my location = ({0}, {1}), my name is {2}", x, y, name)
Here’s the debug function:
private function tracef(msg:String, ...arguments):void { for( var i:uint = 0; i < arguments.length; ++i ) { msg = msg.split("{"+i+"}").join(arguments[i]); } trace( msg ); }
Btw, msg’s are bad for you, at least in your food, but that’s a different story.
HP Service
March 11th, 2009Allow me to flame the Hewlet Packard helpdesk a bit while helping others with the same problem. This issue should be in their FAQ, but… well… it isn’t.
The problem is that you get random reboots, hangups or BSOD’s (blue screen of death). It happens on my HP Pavilion Media PC (8170.nl), which comes with Microsoft Vista.
The cause, or at least part of the cause, became apparent after I completely reinstalled the computer, including a hardrive format. It worked fine, but after installing the windows auto update nvidia drivers, the problem came back.
Turns out, nvidia offers much newer drivers on their website then windows update does.
Dynamic Textfield with custom font
February 18th, 2009I noticed a little bug in flash (at least, in my version), for which I wanted to share the fix.
The bug is as follows: you create a TextField, you change it’s text and then it looks empty.