I’ve written a new tutorial up at the ActiveTuts+ website for the HYPE framework by Branden Hall and Joshua Davis. It’s aimed as an introduction to the framework in general and will give you an overview of building a composition and some of the core features such as Rhythms, Vibrations and ObjectPools.

You can find the tutorial here.

anton.

I have just finalised a new Flash tutorial on behalf of Computer Arts magazine and I was really excited about this one so and had to introduce it before it’s officially available yet!

Its focused on generating random art/designs using the AS3 HYPE framework from Joshua Davis and Branden Hall. It’s a fantastic framework and hopefully I’ve done it enough justice in the limited space we have in the tutorial section to arouse your interest in generative art.

I’ve included a teaser after the break and be sure to stop over at the HYPE homepage (http://www.hypeframework.org/) and have a look at some of the awesome examples on show.

anton.

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So I had a few minutes this morning to knock up a quick example of how to use Native Events with AS3Signals. While this example is ‘billy basics’ it should hopefully give you an idea of how to use Signals to handle regular AS3 Event’s, if not, give me a shout and I’ll put something else together! There are a number of benefits for using a Signal Event even though we have to still use a Native Event such as the Signals ease of adding, removing listeners, passing data and of course the impressive speed increase of using Signals over Native Events which you can read about here: http://alecmce.com/as3/events-and-signals-performance-tests.

So in this example we’re going to look at how we use Signals to interact with the Native MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN when invoked on a Sprite.

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Following on from my previous post in dealing with AS3 Signals, we’re going to look at how we would use Signals like custom Events and how data can be transmitted through them.

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I’m currently battling away with the mechanics for an iPhone/iPod game so I decided to take the afternoon off from Objective-C and after reading an post on Peter Elst’s blog regarding AS3 Signals I thought I’d show AS3 a little love as it’s had it’s nose pushed out recently.

For those who havent come across Signals yet, it’s a set of messaging tools created by robertpenner for wiring your application together, drastically cutting the amount of custom Events and the inherent boilerplate code. It’s one of those things I’ve heard about but never really looked in to it so it was good to finally have play around with it and after just 10 minutes of using it you know it’s instantly going to be really beneficial to your Flash projects, Peter said it’s the best thing since sliced bread…. you know what, he’s bloody right!

Over the next few post’s I’m going to put together a few examples of how you can use signals, this first post will show basic Signal usage and interaction with payloads.

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I’ve just completed some work with Augmented Reality and Flash and had the need to export a Collada 3D model from 3D Studio Max 2009 and import it to Papervision. What I found is that the default 3D Studio plugin that exports Collada files seems to export the files differently from what Papervision expects. So here’s a quick guide to hopefully help anyone having any problems with this and show you how o export Collada files from 3D Studio Max in to a format Papervision expects.

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Just been implementing TweenLite in to a current project here at Cube (more at a later date) and updated our source files to find TweenLite has been superseded by the fantastic Teening Platform v11 engine, the GreenSock stuff just gets better and better! if your in need of a small and extremely fast tweening engine you should deffinitely check out http://blog.greensock.com/ it’s packed full of features!

The particular part I like is the queueing system using TimelineLite, it’s so simple to get up and running but has a wealth of features to create incredibly complex queues of tweens (for more info check: http://blog.greensock.com/timelinelite):

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// create a tween queue
private var tweenQueue:TimelineLite = new TimelineLite({onComplete:queueComplete});
private function queueComplete():void
{
     trace("queue complete");
}
 
// populate it with tweens
for(var i:int = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
    tweenQueue.append(new TweenLite(desiredMC, 1, {x:i*50, y:100}));
}

It’s not everyday you get to feature in a magazine so I’m thrilled to have two features in one month! One for .NET magazine and the other for Computer Arts.

The Flash tutorial written for .NET magazine focuses on the Text Layout Framework Panel beta created by Adobe which offers vastly improved control of type in our Flash projects and some really interesting little features like columns and the ability to add images to text fields.

The Computer Arts tutorial teaches how to simply link Flash and Flickr by creating simple querys and displaying the results in Flash. It strives to teach the fundamentals of connectivity between the two but also gives the reader a 3D Stack Panel style image viewer they can use in their own projects.

Here are some photos if you haven’t seen them yet:

If you’ve read either of these and have any feedback or are having any problems then feel free to give me a shout either on my email address me@antonmills.com or on this thread and I’ll help out.

anton.