visualcondition blog - flash & ruby on rails

Whew, Twease 1.1 is hot off the desktop of yours truly. Been working on this one off and on for a few weeks, and it’s a nice little upgrade.

Twease Homepage

We’ve got new Array tweening features, Penner Easing Equations are now included, some bug fixes and optimizations, and a new beta Extend class. This Extend class is still an infant, and only really provides a getTweens function for now. We’re also under 200 lines of code for the core Twease class now, and still only 2k, even with new features!

Expect color and bezier in 1.2 as well as polishing off the Extend class and squashing any bugs that come up in this release. 1.3 I’m thinking will be the filter tweening release. After that, it’s pretty much done.

I know I know, AS3 AS3. I haven’t even touched it yet, I’ve been a bit busy ya know?

This release fixes critical bugs for Twease.

1st bug - Garbage collection would set the Twease engine active to false, preventing any new tweens from running. New tweens now detect this and start the engine back up again.

2nd bug - This one was quite silly and should have never been published. Delays and cycles would not work together, and I think delays cut off a tween’s total time. I think this came about during optimizations.

This update is highly recommended and is pretty much mandatory for proper engine function.

Twease is a new tweening engine and sequencer I’ve just developed for AS2.

So check it out, and enjoy!

http://play.visualcondition.com/twease/

Paprvision 3d

The mailing list has been almost annoyingly busy, so these guys have been hard at work. I don’t even have time to play with it, but they’ve done some really great things with Flash.

I discovered a neat little trick when using the ‘add’ blendmode. Normally, the lighter the background, the less visible it is, and using it on a white background will make it invisible. There’s a nice little trick I found to work around this.

All you do is apply a ‘drop shadow’ filter to the movieclip, and set the quality to low, and blur, strength, and distance to 0. This in effect will render no drop shadow, but you will see your movieclip without any loss in visibility.

This will be especially useful in things like, oh I don’t know, particle effects?

http://www.gskinner.com/talks/50reasonsAS3/

I didn’t really even know what half of any of that meant, but boy do I want it! I thought I knew most of the new things, but that really helped bring it together.

Seriously though, I can’t wait to get into AS3.

From the site: “These are just 4 out of the 100+ preset effects available in Desuade Partigen: the first real-time and integrated particle effect solution for Adobe Flash.”

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While working with Flash components (creating my own), I noticed the size was ridiculously high when using the exported SWC’s in other files. Being who I am, I knew there was something I could do to fix this, and I wouldn’t stop until I at least found out the culprit.

(more…)

For the past 2 weeks I’ve been busy developing a licensing platform for Flash. It’s been designed for scalability, so other developers will be able to use the platform and create trials and sell sell licesnses for their Flash. If you are interested in this, please let me know. It will be integrated with you-know-what, and after that release will be open for public signup.

I can’t really say much about it, but trust me, it’s pretty neat.

I just finished version 2 of my Fuse IDE panel for Flash. This is what’s been keeping me busy, and led to the development of Shasi.

So head over to the Fuse page on my playground and take a look.