I have a class which extends a SWC , in the swc i have two boxes, front and back and an animation on the same timeline. The animation works fine without swapping when I swap them the animation stops working. Anyway I can make it work?
I have the following code :
var frontTemp:DisplayObject = this.animationInstance.getChildByName("front");
var backTemp:DisplayObject = this.animationInstance.getChildByName("back");
this.animationInstance.swapChildren(frontTemp,backTemp);
this.animationInstance.gotoAndPlay("animation");
The short answer is, you should avoid using both frame animations and scripts on the same objects. Basically, frame animations and scripts are two different ways to control the properties of clips (position, size, stacking order, etc). And if you use them both, Flash has no unambiguous way to know which set of instructions should take precedence. The way Flash deals with this problem is, once you use scripts to update something, it is no longer affected by frame animations from then on (unless it gets removed from the stage and re-added).
I posted a couple of general ways to fix this kind of issue in answer to this question - please have a look.
Related
Since I don't know english very well, I'm not able to find clear examples and/or tutorials for what I'm trying to do.
So the (maybe stupid) question is:
How can I strongly customize tweens using Starling framework and make my Sprites(or MovieClips) following a line, curve or create every other non-linear movement that doesn't exist in Transition Class?
I have no problem with Basic Starling animation. So it should be a good start point.
Thanks in advance for examples, resources or suggestions.
PS. I already visit the "Starling Wiki" page about custom Transitions but, as a Beginner(almost Intermediate) coder I wasn't able to completely understand it.
I know there are many online resources about AS3/Starling/Flash/Nape/Box2D but it's not easy for a non-english Beginner programmer to understand them.
You can simple move Starling's movieClip by set .x .y .rotation
Since now, I haven't heard of scripted transition to make predefined non linear movement. As you said, you can move object from one position to another, but it won't happen in a curved line.
What I've done in the past is to predefine the path of the movement, as I needed exactly the same weird path. I did a path tween in Flash, then used one simple function to loop through all frames (using gotoAndStop()) and getting x and y property of the object, storing them in an array. This was done when initializing. Later on I could start animation on all my weird paths whenever I wanted, using onUpdate method of tween, and passing positions from the array I've populated in the beginning.
This of course is good if you have very weird paths. If you want very little curves, you could try to do a mathematical equation. Tween classes have an update function, which will be called on each frame. So on each frame you could do some calculations and modify the parameters. For example if you tween x and y properties, you could use the update function to add a random number to those values. Of course this will make very uncontrolled movement, I'm just giving an example.
The best solution I could think of, speaking of complexity/result ratio - to use Greensock's TweenMax (look at the second example) - it has a built in bezier tweening. This means it could move from point A to point B within a bezier curve. I think this will be a good solution for your problem :)
I'm a beginner to AS3 and programming in general, but have learned enough that I want to now start learning how to render animations on the screen. These are the methods that I know of from two days of "researching" on google.
I'm not in a situation where I could afford to take courses from an educational institution, so my only means of learning are through online sources.
Update an objects x or y positions in a loop on every frame. Very basic. Of course any kind of advanced animation (say, showing a character running) is not possible with this method alone.
Using Flash and creating animation on a movie clip's timeline and, combined with moving the position of the object we can achieve some proper animation this way. However I cannot afford Flash, so this is not an option available to me. It also doesn't seem to be a popular option among more experienced programmers either (I think, due to having poor performance when lots of objects animating on the screen?)
Using a sprite sheet and then blitting the relevant image from the sprite sheet onto the screen.
Is there any other way to put an image from a sprite sheet onto the screen other than blitting?
And what other methods of rendering animation are available?
Some online websites claim that blitting is all I'll ever need, but I want to know all the options available so I could choose the most appropriate one for any given situation.
Any help would be appreciated :)
Another option for blitting is Stage3D. Take a look at Starling for 2D animations.
Blitting would be my best opinion. The only other thing I can think of is manually taking the images from the sprite sheet and putting it into each frame of an animation.
To render animation, you can create a frame in a MovieClip and convert it into a MovieClip and name the frame 'running'. Then you need to create an Enter Frame event where the MovieClip's instance name is 'Guy' and in the code on the function write 'Guy.x += 5;' to make your MovieClip go 5 pixels to the right every frame and also in the function write "Guy.gotoAndStop('running');"
Use TweenMax engine for better animation purposes. Easy coding, more Animation!!
I have been working on a website for a while now (http://strobepage.com/ ATTENTION: do not click if you are suffering of epillepsy)..
Basically the idea is that the viewer can chose between different strobe illusions and colours..
I got thinking, and I thought, I can make things a hell of a lot easier by allowing users to select the 2+ colours in a strobe animation instead of me making a number of different specific animations that have various different colours.. Possibly, there could be different SWF's that the user can pick from (on the home page) and these different SWF's could all have a different number of colour rotations in the strobe, for example 3 repeating colours.. I realise that this would only be relevant if its not possible to integrate everything into a single file..
Anyway, I have tried and tried many methods and I cant get anything to work.. It needs to work with what i have.. a base strobe with a "fullscreen" button, launching the strobe into fulscreen, then I want the user to be greeted with a screen with a GUI that allows them to select the colour(s) and then click to proceed.. also maybe a colour selector that is present while the strobe is running..
Any suggestions will have to work with the functions and controls i already have in place, and if you can suggest the AS to use aswell, that would be awsome.. but just a bunch of ideas would be great also.
Thanks, I look forward to reading some interesting ideas ;)
You might want to add some warning for people with epilepsy to not click on that link. People might get hurt.
As for your question, you can always color movieclips using this:
var c:ColorTransform = new ColorTransform();
c.color = (0xFF0000); // should be red
myMovieclip.transform.colorTransform = c;
This would require your animations to be based on Movieclips and not 'just' tweens. As for tweens, you might be able to put the whole thing into a Movieclip and color it, all depending on how you did it in the first place.
I am trying to create an animation for lemon juice and baking soda experiment, and I was wondering how can I create a foaming effect such as the one shown in this image:
The idea I have in mind is to simply draw a foam in photoshop and then use motion tween to change the size. I was hoping I could find a better solution to this.
I have something somewhat similar that you can probably use as a springboard for doing your own thing.
http://www.shaunhusain.com/SteamEffect/
http://www.shaunhusain.com/SteamEffect/srcview/index.html
Currently I'm just drawing some circles with this and then setting a blur on them (not very efficient I know but it served the purposed as I didn't need it to create a bajillion particles to still be effective as "steam" which was the intended goal). You could swap out the shapes/filter I'm using for your own drawing and use the same basic structure.
EDIT
Perhaps this requires at least a little explanation:
Basically you'd want to look at the two files SteamCanvas.mxml and BitOfSteam.as. To be honest I have no idea why I decided to write SteamCanvas as an mxml file. I chose to use Canvas as the base class so I could just wrap it around any other component as a container and be able to detect mouse clicks anywhere within a region. If this is being used in a pure Flash environment, that is one not using the Flex libraries (or mxmlc compiler) it could be changed to extend from Sprite and be written purely in AS3, essentially just the creationComplete code should be moved to the constructor. How this works is the SteamCanvas is a wrapper for whatever controls or components you want to put in it (just like a normal canvas uses absolute positioning, but could have containers that define layout nested within it if need be). The SteamCanvas sets up a timer and if the mouse is down when the timer ticks, it creates instances of BitOfSteam and sets the properties for the steam based on the SteamCanvases own currently set properties. In the project you'll also see a SteamEffectTest.mxml which is just the file you see running that has the sliders on it to change the properties of the SteamCanvas, I used these to come up with what I thought were good values to make somewhat realistic steam. If I remember I'll revisit this component tomorrow and try to take Marty's suggestions to get it updated.
Wasn't sure if this question belongs here, but I'll try. So I'm about to move my project from Director | Shockwave Player (if you ever heard of these) to Flash Player for numerous reasons and while I'm thinking how to better start off I got a question which really made me wonder. To the point.
Currently in Director each game window in the user interface (like small alerts or large windows with lot of elements in them) is drawn upon need - meaning that the actual window's graphical image is being put together from configuration (all sorts of properties like width, height and all elements and their properties) from numerous pieces of graphics (e.g. window background is made from 9 small pieces like the 4 corners, 4 middle pieces between corners for dynamic width and height and 1 central piece to fill the window) and then added to stage. This approach makes it easy to edit each graphical element without having to redraw the actual windows and everything in them if we would like to change the color scheme or improve something in a element. It also saves the resources as windows are being drawn only when requested.
Now I got to figure out if it's worth writing such code in Flash too as opposite to just creating all the windows and placing them in the library and adding to stage when they are requested. What do you think? Is it worth writing such implementation?
IMO, it depends on 1) How comfortable you are with Flash's drawing API / graphics class, and 2) How flexible each window/dialog needs to be.
If it's easier to just throw them together as static objects -- and if they don't necessarily need the flexibility to change dimensions/style much (can you count on one hand how many times they've needed to change since it was originally done in Director many years ago?), it's obviously easier to do this than going through the time/energy to recreate them dynamically, especially if you're not very comfortable with Flash's drawing API.
That said, a lot can be accomplished dynamically with Flash's drawing API, so if you have the time/interest I'd certainly suggest digging in and doing it the "right" way if you want to familiarize yourself with the drawing API.
My method for doing this sort of thing usually goes like this:
Create a separate class that extends Sprite/MovieClip; something like 'Dialog.as'.
Create public init(), show(), and hide() methods, and a private build() method.
init() is called just once upon initialization of your app, and takes some global parameters to hold on to internally (padding, colors, etc).
show() takes an argument of either text (a String), or even a Sprite/MovieClip -- whatever it is you want to show in this dialog. When called (when you want to spawn a window), it uses this -- plus whatever init parameters were originally passed in during init() -- to draw itself, and then unhides itself (tween the .alpha property, or simply set the .visible property).
When you want to close the dialog, make sure to invoke the hide() method, which first hides itself, and then cleans up whatever was created (removing listeners, etc) so that the next time it is called upon it can draw itself fresh.
It might also make sense to pass into this object a reference to the Stage (in the original init() call), so that it can center and size itself accordingly on the stage, and also addChild itself to the top of the display list so that it's always above everything else.
I hope this helps.
If is 2D you can check this:
http://pushbuttonengine.com/
if is 3D you can start here:
http://alternativaplatform.com/en/alternativa3d/
I can suggest you also Unity3D but this is outside of flash
Hope it helps