I'm creating a simple games. I've put the expiry date on it. I want to stop that .swf file from working after it reaches expiry date. So far I have only come up with creating a movieclip manually which is sitting on top of the layer. Inside that clip is two frames. First frames has nothing and the second frame have rectangle which is faded. So basically, when the swf file reaches the expiry date, it will go and stop at frame 2 and it won't let anyone to interact with the game. I don't think this is how it's done. So any help will be much appreciate. Does anyone knows how to implement the expiry date and is it possible to make .swf file working ?
You can use the flash's date class to read local or universal time. You can read more on how to use that here, and here. As for the actual implementation, you could run a simple if statement when you go to init the movieclip and, at that point, switch it out for another one or whatever.
If you work with timeline code, you can make your verification on the first frame, if expiry date is not reached go to main logic game frame and if it reach expiry date go to another frame with no code in it.
If you use Classes, you can make your verification in your Main class end after that instanciate your main logic game class in case of expiry date not reached or just do nothing in the other case.
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I am relatively new to AS3. I have some data that are important to be saved constantly. I use SharedObject.getLocal command to save them. But as far as I know the changes in the data are applied whenever I close my program. It is important to assure they are saved, for instance, every five minutes to protect them against unexpected events like power cut. I would appreciate if you help me know if there is a way around.
I'm trying to make a program that can convert ORG files into WAV files directly. The ORG format is similar to MIDI, in the sense that it is a list of "instructions" about when and how to play specific instruments, and a program plays these instruments for it to create the song.
However, as I said, I want to generate a WAV directly, instead of just playing the ORG. So, in a sense, I want to "play" the sounds into a WAV. I do know the WAV format and have created some files from raw PCM samples, but this isn't as simple.
The sounds generated by the ORG come from a bunch of files containing WAV samples I have. They're mono, 8-bit samples should be played at 22050Hz. They're all under a second long, and the largest aren't more than 11KB. I would assume that to play them all after each other, I would simply put the samples into the WAV one after the other. It isn't that simple though, as the ORG can have up to 16 different instruments playing at once, and each note of each instrument also has a pan (i.e. a balance, allowing stereo sound). What's more, each ORG has its own tempo (i.e. milliseconds between each point a sound can be played), and some sounds may be longer than this tempo, which means that two sounds on the same instrument can overlap. For instance, a note plays on an instrument, 90 milliseconds later the same note plays on the same instrument, but the first not hasn't finished, hence the first note plays into the second.
I just thought to explain all of that to be sure the situation is clear. In any case, I'd basically like to know how I would go about converting or "playing" an ORG (or if you like, a MIDI (since they're essentially the same)) into a WAV. As I mentioned each note does have a pan/balance, so the WAV would also need to be stereo.
If it matters at all, I'll be doing this in ActionScript 3.0 in FlashDevelop. I don't need any code (as that would be asking someone to do the work for me), but I just want to know how I would go about doing this correctly. An algorithm or two may be handy as well.
First let me say AS3 is not the best language to do these kind of things. Super collider would be a better and easier choice.
But if you want to do it in AS3 here's a general approach. I haven't tested any of it, this is pure theory.
First, put all your sounds into an array, and then find a way of matching the notes from your midi file to a position in the array.
I don't know the format of midi in depth, but I know the smallest value is a tick, and the length of a tick depends on the BPM. Here's the formula to calculate a midi tick: Midi Ticks to Actual PlayBack Seconds !!! ( Midi Music)
Let's say your tick is 2ms in length. So now you have a base value. You can fill a Vector (like an Array but faster) with what happens at every tick. If nothing happens at a particular tick, then insert a null value.
Now the big problem is reading that Vector. It's a problem because the Timer class does not work at small values like 2ms. But what you can do is check the ellapsed time in ms since the app started using getTimer(). You can have some loop that will check the ellapsed time, and whenever you have 2ms more, you read the next index in the Vector. If there are notes on that index, you play the sounds. If not you wait for the next tick.
The problem with this, is that if a loop goes on for more than 15 seconds (I'm not sure of that value) Flash will think the program is not responding and will kill it. So you have to take care of that too, ending the loop and opening a new one before Flash kills your program.
Ok, so now you have sounds playing. You can record the sounds that flash is making (wavs, mp3, mic) with a library called Standing Wave 3.
https://github.com/maxl0rd/standingwave3
This is very theoretical... and I'm quite sure depending on the number of sounds you want to play you can freeze your program... but I hope it will help to get you going.
After searching the net high and low, I just cannot for the life of me figure this out. I'm definitely a newbie with all things Flash, but I'm teaching myself where I can. I've gotten a simple Flash piano working, and would like to add record & play back functions. This is where the problem comes in- I can find any multitude of answers for recording from the microphone and saving/playing it back with Flash, but the only things I can find relating to internal audio (or Flash-based pianos) at all are questions like this one with either really vague answers or just no answers at all.
I have some sort of idea that I should be creating an array that tracks the clicks? (It's a mouse-playable piano at the moment, but if it's better for me to make it keyboard-based, that's something I can do at least). After (before? during?) creating that array, how do I keep the rhythm/timing correct?
I'm just super lost and really need your expertise...
You're on the right track in storing the clicks in an array. As far as rhythm and timing, when the user wants to start "recording" you can start a timer, I'd every 200ms or so. You can use that timer to determine at what point in time the key was clicked for use when playing it back.
I don't know if something like a long press is something you'd need, but to do that, with the same timer, you can set a start time and end time (press-->release) and just subtract the end time from the start time and now you have the duration of how long the key was pressed
EDIT: here is a quick example of what I was referring to in my original post: http://ronnieswietek.com/piano/piano_example.swf
the source: http://ronnieswietek.com/piano/piano_example.fla
I'm currently programming a little game which involved that a dynamically created music is playing, and on a specific tone, a function is called to update the game.
I have no problem with dynamically creating music, either using SampleDataEvent.SAMPLE_DATA or the wonderful standingwave2 lib, but I can't find out how to synchronize sound with code.
I know the "sync" note play every X ms (let's say 500), so I've tried to start a timer which ticks every 500ms right after starting the sound, but it gets eventually out of sync. I'm not sure if the timer isn't good enough to follow the path
I know there's a way to put music on Adobe IDE Frames, play sound as "stream" and then put some code on each frame so I can know where it's called, but I can't dynamically create music that way.
So, does anyone knows a way to synchronize my function call with the sound I'm creating ?
I think this depends on when and how does the music generation takes place. If you are generating that music prior to running the game, then you can yield time offset list in that music when the particular tone is generated into that music, then you make a sorted array out of those values, then when the music is actively started, you take flash.utils.getTimer() value and store it as your base time. After this, each frame you check if current getTimer() value is greater than current array position, and if so, the function you want is called, and you advance one position in the array, to be ready for the next pre-set occurrence of your desired tone.
If, on the other hand, you generate music on the fly, a couple of frames length each, then you have to lock getTimer() value at the start of the game and (supposedly) music generation, so that each pair of values you put into sampleData are exactly 1/44100 second of music played. You then count those pairs (on the fly, of course) until it'll be time to insert your desired tone into the generated music, then you'll have an offset from sound start. Convert it to milliseconds, then check each frame if current getTimer() minus stored tick count is greater or equal to discovered offset, and if true, call the function.
As I know sounds playing correlates with frames even if you add them dynamicaly. Try to use Event.ENTER_FRAME. If you know framerate (by default it's equal to 24 fps) and delay (X ms; when a "sync" note plays) then you can get a "sync" frame's index: index = fps * delay. Because for syncronization of a sound and frames important only a nominal fps, not real. Count frames in the Event.ENTER_FRAME handler. When you will achieve the "sync" frame then you can execute your code.
Why don't you just inform your mechanics code about what happens with music when you do render the music handling SampleDataEvent.SAMPLE_DATA? It should be pretty accurate, and you'll never be out of sync for more than one sound chunk (which is usually 2048-4096 float pairs as far as I remember, means 2048/44100 - 4096/44100 ~= 1/22 - 1/11 seconds). Also, I haven't checked this, but I believe, SAMPLE_DATA is fired right after the existing sound chunk started to play, so you can have the next one after it finishes ready, which would mean, if you write down the time of sound render start, then the actual sound will be played the exact that time later(if your system isn't overloaded), so you can calculate it very precisely, down to milliseconds.
You need to enapsulate that WAV generated music within a FLV stream (using only audio tags). Between the FLV audio tags insert FLV metadata tags, which you will receive through onMetaData just when that portion is playing. Since you are generating music on the fly, you might wanna use NetStream.appendBytes() instead of just passing WAV files to NetStream.
You need to familiarize yourself with how FLV works, how appendBytes works and how to create a FLV (which you write into appendBytes() as if you are writing it to a file) which contains WAV audio.
I'm building a remote presentation tool in AS3. In a nutshell, one user (the presenter) has access to a "table of contents" HTML page with links for each slide in the presentation, and an arbitrary number of viewers can watch the presentation on another page, which in turn is in the form of a SWF that polls the server every second to ensure that it's on the right slide. Whenever the admin clicks a slide link in the TOC, the database gets updated, and on its next request the presentation swf compares the label of the slide it's currently displaying to the response it got from the server. If the response differs from the current label, the swf scrubs through the timeline until it finds the right frame label; otherwise, it does nothing and waits for the next poll result (a second later).
Each slide consists of a movieclip with its own nested timeline that loops as long as the slide is displayed. There's no actionscript controlling any of the nested movieclips, nor is there any actionscript on the main timeline except the stop();s on each keyframe (each of which is a slide in the presentation).
Everything is built and working perfectly. The only thing that's troubling is that if the presentation swf is open for long enough (say, 20 minutes), the polling starts to have a noticeable effect on the framerate of the movieclips animating on any given slide. That is, every second, there's a noticeable drop in the framerate of the animations that lasts about three-tenths of a second, which is quite noticeable (and hence is a deal-breaker for the whole presentation suite!).
I know that AS3 has issues with memory management, and I've tried to be diligent in my re-use of objects and event listeners. The code itself is dead simple; there's a Timer instance that fires every second, which triggers a new URLRequest to be loaded by a URLLoader. The URLLoader is reused from call to call, while the URLRequest is not (it needs to be initialized with a new cache-killing value each time, retrieved from a call to new Date().time). The only objects instantiated in the entire class are the Timer, the URLLoader, the various URLRequests (which should be garbage-collected), and the only event listeners are on the Timer (added once), the URLLoader (added once), and on the routines that scrub backwards and forwards in the timeline to find the right slide (and they're removed once the correct slide is found).
I've been using mr doob's stats package to monitor memory usage, which definitely grows over time, so there's gotta be a leak somewhere (it grows from ~30 MB initially to > 200 MB after some scrubbing and about 25 minutes of uptime).
Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing the performance problems?
UPDATE: I'm not entirely sure the performance troubles are tied directly to memory; I ran an instance of the presentation swf for about 15 minutes and although memory usage only climbed to around 70 MB (and stayed there), a noticeable hiccup started appearing at one-second intervals, coinciding with the polling calls (tracked via Firebug's Net panel). What else might cause stuttering movieclips?
I know this is coming a bit late, but I have been using Flash Builder's profiler frequently and one thing I found is that the TimerEvent generated by the timer class
uses up quite a bit of memory individually and
seems to not get released properly during garbage collection (even if you stopped the timer and removed all references to it).
A new event is generated for each Timer tick. I use setInterval instead, even though a few AS3 evangelists seem to recommend against that. I don't know why. setInterval still generates timer events, but they appear to be garbage-collected properly over time.
So one strategy may be that
you replace the Timer with a call to setInterval() ... which is arguably more robust code anyway and
(CAUTION) force garbage collection on each slide scrub (but not on each poll). See this question for more details on the pros and cons.
The second suggestion is only a stop-gap measure. I really encourage you to use the profiling tools to find the leak. Flash Builder Pro has a 60-day trial that might help.
Finally, when moving to a completely new slide SWF (not a new timeline position in the current slide), how are you making sure that the previous slide SWF got unloaded properly? Or am I misunderstanding your setup and there is only one actual slide SWF?
Just two things that came into my mind:
Depending on the version of the Flash player and the cpu usage the garbage collections sometimes does not start before 250 MB (or even more) memory are consumed.
Moviesclips, Sprites, Loader and whatever that has an Eventlistener listening will not be killed by the garbage collection.
So I believe your problem is, that either the slides or the loader are not cleaned correctly after you used them, so the were keept in memory.
A good point to start reading: http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2006/06/as3_resource_ma.html