BackSpaceStudios Blog

Casting Shadows in PV3

Andy Zupko posted some very cool PV3 tests yesterday on Papervision Shadow casting. I will definitely be trying this and will post my resutls.

AS3 GIF Player

I came across a great post at ByteArray.org where Thibault Imbert was discussing one of his new AS3 experiments, the AS3 GIF Player Class 0.2. As you may already know, it is not possible to load animated GIF’s into the player. If you load a GIF file with the flash.display.Loader class you will only get the first frame of the animation.

this has all chanegd with the GIFPlayer class!

To load an animated GIF :

// we create the GIFPlayer, it plays automatically by default
var myGIFPlayer:GIFPlayer = new GIFPlayer();
// we show it
addChild ( myGIFPlayer );
// we load a gif file
myGIFPlayer.load ( new URLRequest ("animation.gif") );
// you can also load any valid GIF stream (ByteArray)
//with the loadBytes method (version 0.2)
myGIFPlayer.loadBytes ( gifStream );
// listen for the IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR event,
//dispatched when the GIF fails to load
myGIFPlayer.addEventListener ( IOErrorEvent.IO_ERROR, onIOError );
// listen for the GIFPlayerEvent.COMPLETE event,
//dispatched when GIF is loaded
myGIFPlayer.addEventListener ( GIFPlayerEvent.COMPLETE, onCompleteGIFLoad );
// listen for the FrameEvent.FRAME_RENDERED event,
//dispatched when a GIF frame is rendered on screen
myGIFPlayer.addEventListener ( FrameEvent.FRAME_RENDERED, onFrameRendered );
// listen for the FileTypeEvent.INVALID event,
//dispatched when an invalid file is loaded
myGIFPlayer.addEventListener ( FileTypeEvent.INVALID, onInvalidFileLoaded );
// get total frames
myGIFPlayer.totalFrames;
// standard methods
myGIFPlayer.play();
myGIFPlayer.stop();
myGIFPlayer.gotoAndStop(3);
myGIFPlayer.gotoAndPlay(3);

Here’s a sample from ByteArray.org . Please don’t load huge GIF files!

Online Demo :
***Click on Load GIF File and paste this in the path >> http://www.backspacestudios.com/beaker/GIFPlayer/diego.gif

Sources and documentation available at http://code.google.com/p/as3gif/

AS3 Sound Visuals using computeSpectrum

Over the past few weeks I have become obsessed with the computeSpectrum function.

I have been creating all kinds of really great visualizers using standard AS3 and Flash, The examples are primitive and very much in the experimental stage of development click here to check them out…

A few days ago I began to wonder how the computeSpectrum function could work with papervision3D. After doing some research and coming across lots of great examples,

I have began working on a concept for the next PV3World.com project.

I had found the inspiration and learned how to work with it from the 3D sound Visualizer contest on Lee Brimelow’s theflashblog.com, and by working through some tutorials over at gotoandlearn.com

Stay tuned here on the BackSpaceBlabber and over at PV3World.com as I develop these ideas I’ll keep updates and write some tutorials along the way.

Flash Kaleidescope from zeefrank.com

Here’s another really neat Flash toy from www.zeefrank.com

http://www.zefrank.com/byokal/kal2.html

3D engine from nulldesign

Lars Gerckens, a freelance Flash developer and the man behind NULLDESIGN, has always been someone I’ve looked up to when it comes to experimental Flash. I have been following his blog for a while now and he has always been an inspiration for some of my own experimental work. A good friend or mine and Technical Director of BackSpaceStudios has been experimenting with PV3 recently and has begun his own open source project called PV3World.

I’ve been so busy lately experimenting with red5, that I’ve falling a bit out of the Flash 3D loop, so when Geoff passed a long a few files from NULLDESIGN I was amazed to see the work that Lars has been doing building his own 3D engine!

Ok, enough of the banter on to the examples…

Here are 6, of the many, cool examples that Lars has been working on using his 3D engine. Enjoy!