Shadow-casting shaders in Stage3D - actionscript-3

I've been working a lot with AGAL vertex and fragment shaders. I've got individual objects lit correctly (including specular shading) but I'd like to have objects cast shadows on OTHER objects. I have looked online, but I think most people working directly with AGAL have built custom Stage3D libraries and the shadow-casting solution doesn't seem to be in the public domain. Anyone willing to change that?
I'd like to know how to get an object to cast a shadow on another. I can't post what I've tried, because I can't get my head around where to begin on this problem. How would you pass the information (whether other objects are blocking the light) into another object's shader?
Thanks.

IT's called Deferred shading, you have to do 2 pass of vertex and fragment shaders.
In the first pass you accumulate informations about distances, normals, occlusion...
In the second pass you render and apply the informations of the first pass to make shadows.
Another options is ShadowMapping:
Basic shadowmap
The basic shadowmap algorithm consists in two passes. First, the scene is rendered from the point of view of the light. Only the depth of each fragment is computed. Next, the scene is rendered as usual, but with an extra test to see it the current fragment is in the shadow.
The “being in the shadow” test is actually quite simple. If the current sample is further from the light than the shadowmap at the same point, this means that the scene contains an object that is closer to the light. In other words, the current fragment is in the shadow.

Related

Corona use object properties from Tiled layers

I am new to Lua scripting, and game development. So please I am just a noob in Lua.
I have searched the net for solutions to my problems, without any luck.
I use Photoshop, Corona, Dusk, json and Tiled on windows7.
I am creating a "board" like game, i.e. Setlers. I am using a world map, as the background. The background image of the game area is a world map (world.png file). I have no problem here.
I would like to create transparrent clickable objects matching the countrys borders on my gamemap with all parameters and values (I have added in Tiled) stored in the object. So When the player clicks on the country the transparrent object (on top of the map) is the one clicked and an eventlistener acts on the click.
In Tiled I can create all the objects I need, naming them + assigning parameters and other values.
If I add object.alpha value in Tiled, the alpha value is passed on to corona and working there.
How can I read these data from the json/tmx file in Corona and adding them to a lua table?
The way I am thinking to use the Tiled map and its objects, is to create one polyline trace of each country’s border (creating one object per country). Then place each “country traced object” on top of the world.png map, also naming the object with the countrys name like “object.name = TileBritannia” and also the other properties for use in game.
My problem is getting the objects info, like object.name, and an eventlistener reacting to a click on the object.
Is a polyline the right way to create a clickable area on a map, when I use a png file as a background image?
What is the best way to create a country border objects, in one layer or with all countries as individual object layers in Tiled.
Can I create one layer with sub objects and still access them in my code?
How do I get the object name and other properties, set in Tiled.
When I try to use the (local britannia = tiledMap:load("britannia.json")) the "load" is not working, getting a nil value.
I am looking for a code that will extract/get/read the object.name i.e. “objBritannia” or "TileBritannia". from the json/tmx file.
When I try to read the different parameters from the json file, I don't get the result I expect. I get the result = function: 046A73B0, was hoping for an object name of some sort.
Please provide links to or code example.
I have edited the question.
Thanks
For questions 1 and 2: I have not used Tiled, but based on Corona Tiled, you have the right strategy in mind. That page makes me think that you can just use tap event listener to detect tap. If you are having issues with the example on that web page, please update your question to be more specific. If tap event handling doesn't work (maybe you're talking about a different Tiled lib), look a Polygon fill and Point in Polygon detection, because that's basically what you need to do. Try some stuff from there. If it still doesn't work for you, then update your question with specifics otherwise it will be likely get closed (it is a little too broad as it is).
For #3, Lua is a dynamic language that supports adding properties to objects in one line. So upon the example on the Corona Tiled page, all you would have to do is
tiledMap = require("tiled")
local britannia = tiledMap:load("britannia.json")
britannia.name = "Britannnia"
local Zulu = tiledMap:load("zulu.json")
zulu.name = "zulu"
Naturally you will probably have a whole bunch so you will create a function that you call for each tile. It's not clear what map.layer["objBritannia "].nameIs("TileBritannia") is supposed to do so I can't comment.

How To Merge Objects In AS3, So That They Become Draggable as a Whole

I'm quite new to as3, and I'm heading with a (for me complex) problem.
I have some identical objects (movieclips), wich I made draggable sqaures.
But I want to achieve the following thing:
When I drag one of these objects to another one, I want them to "attach" to each other, just like in some "building games".
And after two (or more) objects are attached, I need them to be draggable as a new whole.
Which means if you click on any of them, every object drags along, en they stay om the same attached position.
I honestly don't know how to do this.
I would appreciate if anyone could provide some examples or code.
Thanksin advance!
Here's a simple algorithm for you:
1) Make an array that will hold "draggable" objects.
2) Upon selecting the first object add it to the array.
3) On FRAME_ENTER move (translate) all the object that are in the draggable array and check objects in the array collision with other objects. If the collision is true, add those objects to the draggable item array.
People here won't write code for you, it's up to you. But if you run into a problem where your code does not work how you intend it, feel free to post it and surely some help will come!

Anyone know a list of flash.includes? (as3)

I'm looking for a list of flash.include.whatever.whatever for as3.
If no one knows a list then can someone tell me the flash.include to use for drawing rectangle with the startFill and endFill things? Thanks for any help.
I didn't find anything on either of these googling, and the place I got the code for drawing a rectangle of course didn't have the flash.includes included in the example code... is their a reason so many people do that? Any way I can get around it?
Do you mean you want a list of the packages and classes that come with AS3? That is typically called the documentation and can be found here:
Adobe ActionScript® 3 API Reference
For drawing a Rectangle, you can start at flash.display.Shape. It has a graphics object with the methods .beginFill() and .endFill().
you can using a Graphics.
The Graphics class contains a set of methods that you can use to
create a vector shape. Display objects that support drawing include
Sprite and Shape objects. Each of these classes includes a graphics
property that is a Graphics object. The following are among those
helper functions provided for ease of use: drawRect(),
drawRoundRect(), drawCircle(), and drawEllipse(). You cannot create a
Graphics object directly from ActionScript code. If you call new
Graphics(), an exception is thrown.
The Graphics class is final; it cannot be subclassed.
here is a sample
import flash.display.*;
this.graphics.beginFill(0xff0000);
this.graphics.drawRect(0,0,100,100);
here is a Adobe Tutorial
AS3 all display class list here
You do not necessarily need to default AS3 include. fine compile. But include only the code you can see the hint. perhaps, CS4 after that if you use a specific class will automatically include. or ctrl+space is autocompletion.
As follows by default when you install the flash is because of the SWC path.
As per I know, there is not such a thing like Flash.include. May be you're trying to ask something else or may be i am still unknown about this feature.
If you found any positive thing about this, please let me know, i want to know that new thing.

How to extract the shape of MovieClip?

We have a flash application that we are planning on converting to javascript. It's a pretty simple map application with an image as the background and a bunch of simple polygon movie clips that represent destinations on the map.
I would like to iterate through each movie clip and extract the shape into an array of x,y points to redraw the polygon using an external javascript function.
Is this possible with actionscript?
If you want to export the shape coordinates at author time, you can do try the JSFL script recommented by #strille or this one or export transparent images (if that's not too limiting for your application).
If you need to export the shapes at runtime, you can use the awesome as3swf library to decompile the swf and export the shapes. Have a look at the ShapeExport wiki as there are couple of handy exporters for js like JSCanvasShapeExporter and the more generic JSONShapeExporter
There are ways you can read the coordinates from an SWF. For instance, I've written a parser in PHP (link). Getting the data doesn't help though, as it turns out. The Flash painting model is different enough from the HTML5 one enough to make transfer exceeding difficult. The main obstacle I discovered is that in Flash, a path can be filled with two fill styles: one for area enclosed by the path, the other for enclosed area considered to be "outside" by the even-odd rule (e.g. the pentagon in the middle of a star). Since the HTML5 canvas let you specify only one fill style, you can't redraw shapes from Flash accurately. I was trying to create a tool that extract shapes as SVG and was getting a lot of gap and holes in the result.
Flash Player 11.6 introduced readGraphicsData() which does exactly what you ask for.
If you need to target an earlier version, then there's no simple way to read shape coordinates from a display object with ActionScript at runtime unfortunately.
If you just want to extract the shape coordinates once someone has written a jsfl script for Flash CS3 which looks like it might be able to help you out.

Taking an intro Flash/AS3 course; problems with MVC pattern

Okay, so I've been busting my hump the last week or so on this project for my OOP/AS3 course and this past Sunday I realized that my approach wasn't going to work so I scrapped the better part of it and started over.
Our assignment is to create an XML based flash menu that demonstrates an understanding of the OOP patterns we've just learned. It was kind of a 'test the waters' project where he gave us a ton of tutorials and information and told us to make our best attempt at making sense of it so I'm certain there are more efficient ways to do what I'm doing, but that's a moot point.
We need to employ at least two patterns in our menu, though at the moment I'm just focusing on MVC so that I can get the mainUI working before I finalize the second part of the UI. It essentially flows like so:
MainUI has 4 menus that slide out.
Each slider has 3 thumbnails on it.
Clicking on any of the thumbnails will move to the next part of the UI. This functionality is currently disabled.
The program runs with 0 compiler errors, but the images are not being placed on the stage correctly and I can't figure out why. All the image paths are being pulled and stored from the XML properly. The main background image is pulled once and is supposed to be only placed once (if statement that uses a count to determine whether to run the placement function or not), but it is being placed 4 times with the sliding menu image. The sliders are being placed in the correct positions (switch statement that iterates through the mainUI function in the View class and creates a separate loader for each one), but the thumbnails are not all showing up. So here is what I'm seeking help with:
The mainPanel image should only be placed once, rather than 4 times with each slider.
The sliders, while being placed correctly, must be tweened in different directions through the as (using TweenMax), but each instance is unidentifiable from the other so right now they all have an eventListener that calls the same tween method. How can I distinguish them in a way that lets me apply a different tween to each (This will likely be a concern with the thumbnail functionality later as I will need to load different XML data based on which thumb is clicked).
I have added what I hope are very informative comments to each script so hopefully people can help. Also included are images of what I want the mainUI to eventually look like and how it's coming out currently.
pastebin with all 3 classes and XML (2 hyperlink limit) - http://pastebin.com/u/crookedparadigm
top image is how the stage is outputting, bottom image is what I'd like to to be - http://imgur.com/a/bOmsS
Last quick note, stage is currently set to 600x480 with a black background. Ideally, to reinforce OOP principles, our professor wants us to avoid using the timeline or library if possible.
Any advice at all will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Install FlexPMD This is a very good add on( sometimes hard to install ) It basically is used to show areas of your code that you are not following standards. For example your classes lack the use of "this". And you should avoid passing parameters in constructors. It would be good practice to develop standardized writing skills while you are still new.
Looking at your code I see you are calling buildUI from within a loop.
buildUI is assigning a MainView object to mainUI.
So each time you go through a loop iteration you are reassigning mainUI.
In the end mainUI will only be the last iteration of that loop.
Not sure this is your issue but is an issue.
[EDIT]
Excellent Singleton guide for Flex SDK
Part 1
Part 2
Some Good writing on pure AS3 Singletons.
I would prolly start from scratch as your XML data is miss formatted.
your XML should resemble something like this.
<MainProject>
<MainUI>
<Thumbnail Name="Spring">
<Destination Name="Spring" Price="99" ratingPath="images/SP1/SP1rating.png" />
</Thumbnail>
<Thumbnail Name="Winter">
<Destination Name="Winter" Price="152" ratingPath="images/SP1/SP2rating.png" />
</Thumbnail>
</MainUI>
</MainProject>
Then you should have the following structure on your stage. These movieclips should be empty and already placed inside on your stage with instance name.
Stage
MenuUI MovieClip
ThumbNail1 MovieClip <- feed it thumbnail from the XML
ThumbNail2 MovieClip <- feed it thumbnail from the XML
ThumbNail3 MovieClip <- feed it thumbnail from the XML
ThumbNail4 MovieClip <- feed it thumbnail from the XML
This might be a bit too vague, just tell me if you need more details.
Hope this helps !