I'm creating an app with Alternativa3d (8.17.0), and would like to add labels to some cubes. But it doesn't seem like the Alternativa API provides a way to do it...
Now I know I can either:
Add a TextField to the Flash display list in the normal manner
Render the text as a bitmap beforehand and upload as a resource to the GPU
Render the text to a bitmap at run time, and upload as a resource to the GPU
BUT I need the content to be added directly to the Alternativa cube (which precludes the first option) and the text is dynamic (i.e. not known at compile time - precludes the second) and the third just feels hacky.
Is there a clean way to do this?
Depending on how you want the text displayed you could do a number of different things..
You could use a Sprite3D and add the text rendered as a bitmap. You can place the sprite3d near the cube and it will always face the camera so as you move around the cubes they will appear in 3d space but facing you at all times.
Another option is to add it to the actual cube as suggested by danii using a movieclip. However the link to that MovieClipMaterial is no longer valid and is actually for a previous version of Alternativa not version 8. I have created my own movieclipmaterial for version 8 here ( http://davidejones.com/blog/1392-moviematerial-alternativa3d-8/ ) should you want to do that.
Lastly you could render the text to bitmap and merge this with the cubes bitmap so the text is layered on top and then set this material onto the cube.
Personallt i'd use the sprite3d method its alot easier and i think will give a better effect. Take a look at this example which uses the same effect ( http://gkb40.ur.ru/web/map40a3d.swf )
Just put your TextField inside a MovieClip, and use the class MovieClipMaterial to set that MovieClip as a material for one of the sides of the cube.
Related
I have a project i'm working on that allows the user to "Type" text onto a graphics object (in this case it is a canvas). So the text follows the mouse cursor and whenever a user types text appears on the graphics object. If the user clicks, the text is pasted down onto the graphics object. I need to figure out how to allow the user to make this text go away (for when the graphics object gets too crowded). What method could I use to erase all the text inside the graphics object?
Screenshot (hopefully this helps, I know this is a difficult to understand question):
The white background is the graphics object and the text is "pasted down". Now my objective is to create a button to clear all the text on the graphics object. Instinctively I would use graphicsObject.graphics.clear() but this is obviously not the solution here.
The answer is: as long as you don not store each element which should be drawn separately, you can not just delete the text. By this I mean that you need a stack with all the elements to draw and each time one of the elements changes, is added or removed, you clear the whole canvas and repaint every element from the stack.
I am working on flash professional cs5.5 and actionscript 3. I need to use symbols of customized sizes to test the hitTestOjbect() function. However, when i convert the bitmap to a symbol, by default it goes into a rectangular size and the empty space all around is also detected as part of the symbol.
Is there any way to keep the size of the symbol customized ?
That is the nature of a bitmap. Technically, bitmaps are always rectangular. Transparent areas are just fills with alpha-0. When you convert a bitmap to a symbol, the bitmap still exists, just inside the context of the symbol.
One of the fastest ways to fix this is to use a mask inside your MovieClip. Create a plain drawing object in the exact shape of the hit area you want. Then, place that on your timeline on it's own layer. Right-click the layer with the mask, click "Mask", and then drag the bitmap's layer under the mask one. Lock both layers, and exit symbol editing.
Now your hit area will be limited to only the masked area.
EDIT: I appear to be mistaken - hitTestArea is always rectangular. See the top answer to hitTestObject Collision Not Registering Correctly.
I have a MovieClip in Flash with 100 frames. Each frame contains a certain icon I need to use in a project. I create instances of this icon MovieClip wherever I need an icon to appear, and gotoAndStop to a certain frame to display that icon.
Will storing a 100 icons in a single movieclip cause every single icon to be created in memory whenever I create an instance of the MovieClip? If I stored each icon in the library and attached only the icon that is needed, would that consume less memory than creating this MovieClip that has all the icons in it?
To answer your question: When you go to a frame with an icon on it, Flash will create a new instance of that icon. When you leave that frame, Flash will make that icon eligible for garbage collection, unless you force it to hold the instance in memory somehow, such as using addEvenListener where the method that is the listener is the icon or somewhere inside it.
I think the memory usage is likely to be higher for the goToAndStop vs. the new instance. If you are not experiencing problems with goToAndStop(), you are unlikely to experience additional issues by instantiating a new icon each time you switch from one icon to another. The other people who have answered are quite right that you will use fewer CPU cycles by instantiating all the icons only once (by whatever method), and then simply using the same one every time you use that icon. However, your overall memory footprint will be higher, because you will have all of the icons (even ones you are not currently using) in memory all the time.
If you want to go the route of only instantiating each on once, I'd suggest you go with Lazy Loading, where you only instantiate each icon when it is first used. One way to do this is to use what you already have and visit the frame the first time you want to use a specific icon, then store the BitmapData or a reference to the icon itself after that and reuse it. Another way is to build a swc and use a similar pattern.
None of this requires a static variable BTW, since it sounds like you're not using tons of different copies of your icon MC. Even if you are, it's probably better to handle referencing the icons you have through dependency injection.
I think you are probably asking about file size, however, vs. actual memory usage. The answer to that questions is that all assets that are used by your fla get compiled into the swf, regardless of whether they are in a MovieClip, a SWC, or in the library with Export for Actionscript in Frame N checked.
I get it, I've got boobs, I'm guessing
Try this, to verify my "guess."
Create a swf that has a keyframe on frame 1.
Draw a circle there.
Put another keyframe on frame 10. Draw a square.
In Publish Settings, check "Generate size report."
Now, you know (or you should know) that this swf can display the circle on frame 1, even if the assets compiled on frame 10 have not yet been downloaded. So, is there any possible way that the square could be loaded into memory before Frame 10 has been downloaded? Hint: the answer is no.
Now ask yourself this: Do you think Macromedia wrote a special version of MC that is incapable of lazy loading that the MC that is the main Document Class that Flash generated for the movie you made above so obviously handles so well?
The Macromedia engineers did a lot of things that in hindsight look pretty stupid, but they're not that incompetent.
If each icon that goes into the 100 frames MovieClip is an image you can easily enough export that image for actionscript and access only the image you need.
Another idea is to create a static class that stores each icon frame as a symbol in a static array(if you want to access the icon by index) or Dictionary(if you want to retrieve it by name).
e.g.
package{
import flash.display.Bitmap;
public class Icons{
public static const assets:Vector.<Bitmap> = Vector.<Bitmap>([new Icon01ASExportName(),//instance bitmaps once
new Icon02ASExportName(),//reuse them later multiple times
...
new Icon99ASExportName()]);
}
}
Yet another is to generate a SpriteSheet, either once and save it as a file, either at runtime, then copyPixels() to paste the icon from the right rectangle of the main spritesheet. You've got multiple tools available for generating the spritesheet:
Zoë
SWFSheet
Flash CS6
TexturePacker (if you have movieclips, you can export them as an image sequence to drop into the software)
There are also ways to generate a spritesheet at runtime.
For some nicely explained video tutorials on spritesheets and BitmapData by Lee Brimelow: Sprite Sheets and Blitting - Part 1,2 and 3.
If your icons are Bitmaps then each movieclip will share the same data - the only memory increase will be due to more movieclips, rather than their contents (which shouldnt be a problem).
If your icons are not Bitmaps (other movieclips, shapes, buttons etc), then everything gets duplicated, so memory usage will increase a lot faster as more movieclips are added.
Another consideration is that lots of movieclips on screen will have more of an effect on FPS than simpler objects so you may want to consider adding the icon itself rather than the movieclip even if you are using Bitmaps.
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.
I've created a Canvas class which has an Array of multiple instances of CanvasEntity. Each of these has a skin property which is a reference to a previously created instance of BitmapData, representing some graphics that can be used.
The Canvas runs through this list each frame to perform a render:
lock() the canvas
Clear the canvas using fillRect().
Loop through the aforementioned Array and use copyPixels() on each of the instances' skin properties.
unlock() the canvas.
This is all fine, but now I'm a bit unsure of the best way to approach rendering text in the same fashion.
Do I need to make a sprite sheet with all of my glyphs on it, just like I do for all the frames of any other object? Or is there a simpler way to create a piece of BitmapData that will represent these?
Making a sprite sheets seems painful as there would need to be individual objects representing each glyph to be rendered.
So far I have this as a sprite sheet:
You don't need an individual object for every character. If you want a low-cost text display, have a single class that extends CanvasEntity and accepts a string in the constructor, copies relevant data from the spritesheet to the skin.
The average game doesn't contain that many text. It's generally not a performance critical part that requires to much optimization. You could just create a normal sprite, add a TextField with the text and style you need and copy that graphic to canvas. Maybe chache the text graphics if you need them more often.
If you want some animation (character-by-character-appears-with-annoying-sound-of-typewriter-effect), you probably should go with the sprite sheet. But you can create that dynamically just once, using the same technique. Loop through every possible character of your font, draw it to your sheet.