Wow, it’s been so long since I blogged about anything related to Flash. Anyhow, while working on our game, we came across a problem where we needed to add effects to dynamic text. Those who’ve tried this know that it can be a real pain. Flash doesn’t have proper tools to allow that.

I’ve seen that it’s better to record a video of how things are done in tutorials, because people can follow things easily. Thus, I’ve prepared a video rather than writing long boring paras.

Enjoy and I’m sure this will help people who need it.

Throughout this time, I’ve been working on porting Opensteer to flash, I’ve learned so much about technologies.  This project gave me a lot of insight into the flash low level techniques. I left the project midway, but I’ve seen that people have always been interested in using it on flash. However, I felt that Flash does not have the proper “horse power” and “ability” to render Opensteer properly. I was wrong. Flash does a great job but needs proper drawing acceleration.

Papervision3D helped me a lot too. At first, I created a pure ActionScript 3 project, which didn’t even have an example. But now, I’ve almost completely ported the whole opensteer library to Actionscript 3. I did this because I’m waiting for the next Flash player . More on that later.

For now, I’ve finished work on AS3Steer and I won’t be working on it anymore. Papersteer will be the only thing, I’ll be updating in the future.  I’ve uploaded massive updates to the papersteer google code repo. So do check it out. Here are some examples and a demo of Papersteer as well .

Click to Focus then Press TAB to change demos. Press C to change camera views. Press A to toggle Annotation. Press F to change frame rates.

Here’s a demo of the AS3 branch, click on the image to load it:

Here’s a demo of a Predator and Fish, click to view:

Download PaperSteer here. AS3Steer here, (example1,example2). Alternatively, you can just head over to the repository to download and compile all of them yourself.

Hey guys,

It has been so long since I wrote a technical or programming post. One reason is that I am busy with an awesome social game project at the company I’m working with right now, White Rabbit Online. I’m having a great time with the project but have also been working with Papersteer, more on that in another post.

While working with Papersteer, I created many solutions for the ActionScript world and I learned a lot as well. During this time, I came along a problem which required me to create filled circles using Papervision. Initially, I searched around the net and found Seb’s 3D Circle post. However, that did not solve my problem and I needed filled 3d circles/disks. I looked into Vectorvision for Pv3D as well but the absence of true 3D geometry forced me to trash that as well.

I missed TriangleFan because I’ve used in C# and other platforms. So, I went ahead and tried to simulate a TriangleFan algorithm.  It didn’t take me long and all I needed to do was create a rotated path for the common triangle vectors. Voila, see below:

Patterns? . Click on the snapshot below to view the original image. This one uses 500 segments to draw the circle.

There may be better ways to make this. If there are, do let me know. Download the source with demo here.