Character animation with bones for AS3 - actionscript-3

I'm developing some platform-like game in Flash using AS3. Everything is quite clean. The whole code is class based etc.
I've already done the most of the mechanics, and now I need to do some main character animations. I've already designed it, and it's waiting to be animated as a vector graphics.
A the problem starts here... What is the proper way of doing that? I would like to use bone tools to make it smooth. But as far as I tried to find any materials about it on the Internet everybody just do some simple animations and play it separately one after another. How about playing legs animation simultaneously arms and other parts of the body? Maybe some tricky usage of state machine... I don't know.. Is there any ready solution for that?
More tips is better here, or even some tutorials - just anything.

This tutorial by Chris Georgenes seems to be exactly what your looking for: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/character_animation_ik.html. Chris teaches the reader while animating a simple character. Having a strong overall knowledge of the bone tool will allow you to get the nice crisp animations you seek. I sincerely wish you the best of luck with your project.

Related

How can Cocos2dx particle system achieve a burst effect?

I am new to Cocos2dx, and I am playing with the awesome particle system in my game. However, I couldnt able to design the best effect in my mind.
What I would like to see is something like in this video.
I think the main difference is that I cannot configure to let all the particles appear at once and disappear at the same time afterward. The particle generation time seems to be random.
So my questions will be: Is there any workarounds that I can configure the effect like that link in Cocos2dx? Or is there any other suggested ways for me to stick with?
I have another solution in my mind which is use sprite animation instead. But then it will lose the flexibility. I love a configuration approach similar as particle system that can easily create different visual effect by only changing parameters.
Any help will be appreciated!
Thanks!
You can download Particle Editor for Cocos2dx and V-play from below link:-
http://games.v-play.net/particleeditor/
also you can show a demo here for various particle effects:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wUrf_veEvU

Beginner need some advice how to write code in AS3

I'm a beginner in programming world, never touch any programming language before. But last 3 days I decide to try make a flash game, I looked some tutorial about AS3, try it, yes I understand a little bit. But I'm still confused about this:
How do I know or to decide what codes I write first, what next? example: I want to add a hero, then a enemy, then a tiles, then a background, event listener.
Is it okay if I write code randomly, example: first I add enemy, then add tiles, add background, then add hero, etc?
What is the best way to completely learn all AS3 codes, especially about flash game dev?
I'm now in frustration mode, so I decide to learn from you all who have mastered AS3.
Check out this guide by Michael James Williams. I was in the same situation as you, and that guide helped me a lot. It goes through a lot of the basics and does a good job of explaining each step.
To answer some of your questions, the order in which you code stuff doesn't matter too much. You can always go back and adjust your old code, and you'll definitely end up doing that at some point.
For learning AS3 syntax, just look through some examples and tutorials, and don't be afraid to read the official AS3 docs. They might be intimidating at first, but once you start learning some of the terminology, they're very helpful.
you can try some video tutorials like these
http://www.lynda.com/ActionScript-tutorials/AS3-language-fundamentals/123492/129625-4.html
http://www.lynda.com/Flash-tutorials/Building-Flash-Games-Starling/98951-2.html?srchtrk=index:1%0Alinktypeid:2%0Aq:flash%2Bgames%0Apage:1%0As:relevance%0Asa:true%0Aproducttypeid:2
If you're frustrated NOW, are you sure that you're ready to invest a couple of YEARS in becoming half-good with Actionscript? You'll have to like learning from your mistakes (an excellent way to learn, actually), because you will make thousands of them and they will cost you thousands of hours!
Do NOT write 'randomly' unless you want to greatly lengthen your time to mastery. Everything you do should have a purpose. I would start (if I were starting again) by giving myself a series of the smallest challenges: make an object appear; make it disappear; make it appear in one second from now; make it appear when I tap a key or click my mouse; make it move across the screen; make it move back; make it follow my mouse... etc.
There are many hundreds of basic programmatic elements like these that will add to your growing grasp of logic, data-structures and language. There are usually many ways to accomplish the same task -- learn and practice all of them.
Luckily, the Internet is full of good tutorials and references to Actionscript, and some decent forums like this one where you can get help.
I know this is king of old but someone might still find this useful.
I think that if you are serious about game development and also want to learn some techniques that are independent of the platform (Flash/AS3 in this case) you should use a framework.
For Flash the best game framework is the Starling along with Feather for UI.
They run on Stage3D which means that run on the GPU not the CPU which make them very fast.
With Starling you can also create mobile games that run in AIR so I think it really is something to consider.
On hsharma.com you can find a free video tutorial that goes through everything you need to know to get starting with game development so it should answer the question on how to create enemies, backgrounds, etc.
Hope this helps someone.

Manipulating an image of a face with Flash and AS3

everyone. This isn't as much of an specific technical question as it is about asking for some guidance on which steps should I follow.
The thing is I haven't worked with Flash in general for over a year and I'm very rusty, but now, here at work, I need to create an app that takes a picture, detects the face in said picture and then applies a certain animation effect. For example a slap to the face, so the detected face would shake from side-to-side or maybe something similar to the Fatify app, where it takes the pic, makes the person look fat and then you can touch it anywhere to see it animate. You get the idea.
So, my main problem is, that even after doing some extensive research, I'm still not clear on what the best method is or which would be the best tools to accomplish the animation effects on the detected face. I have read about Joa Ebert's Image Processing Library, but that seems to have been forgotten for quite a while and seeing as I have been out of the loop from the world of Flash for quite a while, I don't know if there's any novelty that could be what I'm looking for. I have also looked at countless image manipulation blog posts and tutorials, but most of it is simple stuff that doesn't really apply to what I need.
So, in summary, I would really apreciate it if anyone could point me to resources or topics that I should look into, that might prove useful for what I need to accomplish.
Thanks.
You should be using OpenCV. The library is quite extensive and has been ported to operate in many languages. OpenCV has an api for facial tracking. We've used it in our studio before for simple face tracking games.
These links are kind of dated, but should put you on the right track.
http://www.francois-tarlier.com/blog/marilena-opencv-port-to-actionscript-3-as3-flash/
http://www.marcpelland.com/2009/03/16/face-detection-opencv-in-as3/

Paper.js VS EaselJS VS Fabric.js vs KineticJS

paper.js
EaselJS
fabric.js
KineticJS
Hello guys I am new in html5 canvas development and I am lost in choosing canvas frameworks. There are so many of them that I can't find out what to use. So here I am! I want your help to choose which one is better for my needs. There are my needs
1) I want the framework used Vector graphics, I know canvas is not DOM, I realy don't care about it but what I mean is I want to manipulate with objects after its creation, PaperJS has this feature I don't know about others. If advanced mouse events will be available it would be better.
2) I want to use the framework for images, I will load image and animate them with canvas, move, animate some colors...
3) I want the framework to be fast because of my needs (image animation should be smooth)
4) I want the framework to have good community because I know I will need some help.
So what do you think which one is better for me? and please if you can write down from my list which are the strength and weakness for each framework?
HTML5 canvas is still very fresh environment. You can get impression there is a lot of tools already available, they are often quite immature though.
My answer will cover only part of your question because I used only KineticJS and EaselJS.
You can start from reading opinions at this page (mine is the last one at the bottom).
Speaking shortly KineticJS has lower entry barrier. It's simple drawing library and has some support for mouse events too. At the time I was trying to use it it was barely extendable. I found it really hard to customize for my needs.
EaselJS is a bit harder to start with, but it's more advanced too. Now it's part of other libs set known all together as CreateJS. It seems that lot of development going around there.
Both Kinetic and Easel supports mouse event. I don't remember
well the Kinetic, sensing 'onMouseOver' is costy with Easel though.
Also both mentioned libs allows objects manipulation. You can find
here TweenJS also useful as addition.
Again both Kinetic and Easel allows this. Easel also has support for
sprites - 'animated images' well known for web game developers.
I'm not sure about Kinetic as I haven't reached animation part of my
project before I dropped it (the lib, not the project). With Easel
speed is tricky. It has some optimization methods implemented like
for example objects cache or snapToPixel flag. Examples seems to run
really well. However for my project using Easel smoothness still is
an issue despite quite a lot of effort put in optimization. Maybe I
misused the API or there is still place for more optimalization I
haven't noticed.
Both libs are quite young but seems to be actively developed.
Authors are rather responsive. Community still isn't big, but I
guess CreateJS as more complete set of tools for creating games will
grow faster.
If you want to check here is the project I mentioned. It's a web page made with usage of EaselJS + TweenJS. Still needs some minor tweaking though.

Flash - Page tear animation?

Can anyone recommend a decent tutorial, add-on or approach to creating a page rip off effect in flash?
I want to create a notepad where each page can be ripped off to reveal further content.
Thanks
Paul
are you looking for a pageFlip with a tearing feature? if so it does exist even though I can't find the link (anyway it was AS2).
if you want more flexibility, you can take a look at a cloth simulation ; derschmale did a great example and pixelero did sort of the same with linked lists (=faster)
there's also this particle physics engine called Traer that have been ported from java and that allows you to get the cloth behaviour with fewer lines of code and some fine tuning (stiffness, damping a.s.o. ).
the general idea is to subdivide the displayObject you want to tear off into a series of triangles, take a snapshot of that object in a BitmapData, then redraw the distorted grid with the drawTriangles() method.
I think it is how they do the thing in the cloth examples.