Update 3:
This is a very old page imported from my previous blog. If there is missing content below or anything that doesn’t make sense then please check the page on my old blog.
Update 2:
These examples were created with the very first beta of actionscript 3 and run on the very first beta of the flash player 8.5. Unfortunately they don’t work on any release version of the player because of changes Macromedia/ Adobe made.
Macromedia have just released the Flex 2 Product Line which includes the Flash Player 8.5 and ActionScript 3. It’s only an alpha but it’s a good chance to start playing around with the next generation of the Flash Platform.
Below is my first little experiment. It’s currently very simple and doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do with Flash 8 but I think coming up with simple little projects like this and making them is a good way to learn the new syntax.
First up, here is the swf (note that you will need the flash player 8.5 to view it):
And here is the code that generated the swf:
As you can see, we load a jpeg in and then loop over it getting the colour every TILE_SIZE pixels. We then create a new Sprite which we draw a bunch of Shape’s (in this case squares) onto. The result is a mosaic like effect (I remember doing this in the early days of Flash 5 - a much more complicated process involving using PHP to analyse the image data).
Obviously a lot of room for improvement (getting the average pixel colour for a tile, having the image be dynamic rather than programmed into the AS etc etc) but not bad for the first couple of hours with a new language.
Any questions or suggestions for better ways I could have done things please use the comments :)
4 Comments, Comment or Ping
Would you be willing to post the whole project? I am not sure how to use your Mosaic class in an applicaiton.
October 31st, 2005
This is the complete project! To use it just right click in the “Navigator” in Flex Builder 2 and select “New > ActionScript Project”. Put whatever you like as the “Project Name” and Mosaic.as as the “Main application file” then paste in the code from above.
There is a video showing how to create an actionscript 3 project here which may make it clearer.
Hope that helps :)
October 31st, 2005
Thanks.
I was using a Flex Project. Have you experimented with controlling (scripting) dynamically loaded SWFs from ActionScript 3?
November 2nd, 2005
Ahh – does it work from a Flex Project? I haven’t played around with Flex yet…
And no, I haven’t played with scripting loaded SWFs from AS3, in fact I haven’t had any time to play with AS3 for a while now… You will find all my experiments here. Hopefully I’ll get a chance this weekend or at the start of next week to do some more….
Cheers :)
November 5th, 2005
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