Just last week, a company from Russia called “Alternativa” released a 3D engine developed in Flash using the new Actionscript language, Actionscript 3. This 3D engine packs a powerful punch for what is capable of doing. To name a few: dynamic lighting and shadows, bum mapping, parallax mapping, automatic UV-mapping, sprite lighting, texture objects, animation system, 3D-objects interactivity, and many more. Tracking back as far as their blog lets me, the company and team have worked on this engine for over 2 years, and it currently on version 5.0.1. Very impressive if you ask me.
Well I downloaded the files to see what magic I can do. The files come in a SWC format to prevent you from peeking around in their code. Also with SWC, you need to manually place the files in the Configuration/Components directory of where you have Flash installed on your computer. After restarting Flash, I opened the Components tab and placed the packages in my Library, created a new Actionscript file, and got to work on some fun 3D stuff. Moving from 2D to 3D takes a little more thinking power, but it was a whole lot of fun doing so! Anyways, enough boring talk, let me show you what I accomplished over the past of days:
A – move left
D – move right
W – move forward
S – move backward
SPACE – jump
MOUSE – click and drag to look around
Its a small city with random color building blocks and cones. I also made sidewalks to give it a more city feeling ;). Not too much to show, I know, but again, its a new 3D engine that just came out so there is much to learn.
I just wanted to share with you 2 small, yet very useful, functions that you could use in PHP: dir_create and dir_remove. The name of the function gives away the purpose of what they will do. From time to time, I will get stuck with “Why is PHP not creating the directory?” or “Why isn’t PHP removing the directory completely?”, and that is where these two functions come into play to help you with those pesky little simple questions. Here are the functions:
This sort of method is very useful for creating a star field. With a lot of stars. I thought of this method when reading through the book “Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development” by Glen Rhodes. In his book he provides an example of creating a star field with a effect called “parallax”. A parallax effect is created by multiple objects moving at different speeds. For example, a small ball in the distance would move very slowing and a large ball would move more quickly. Both the balls are on the same level/depth, but the appearance of the different sizes and speeds give it the effect. Parallax effect is highly used to create a 3D environment.
DomReady has been starting to become all the craze lately with the language Javascript to use for HTML pages. But what is it? DomReady allows you manipulate with all the elements on the HTML page before the entire page loads. What use can this be if you can just use window.onload instead? Well, imagine a large site like MySpace.com, or IGN.com, which have a lot of flashy banner ads and images to load. My guess for the entire page to load can take ~10 seconds, assuming we are on a fast connection speed to the Internet, respectively. That isn’t bad, most of us can wait 10 seconds for a page to load if it’s our favorite site to visit. But for some users who don’t have a high speed Internet, they will have to wait a lot longer for the page to load, and therefore the Javascript window.onload function won’t be executed until it takes it sweet time to load.
This site originally started out as a portfolio to help me get started in the web development career, which has helped me get to where I am now, I want it to make a site to help novice programmers get started and motivated writing websites using PHP and games with Flash (my personal 2 favorite languages). I am by no means an expert with programming, I don’t know all the technical terms to programming or all the functions and classes available for the languages I know. But I am very experienced with programming websites (both small and large scale), thinking of work-around ideas, problem shooting, and developing small Flash games that are more addicting than they appear (when I make Flash games, I focus on the game play and functionality – I don’t focus on graphics – that takes too much time).
With that said, I hope you find something useful for your projects, little or big. I am sure I will provide several programming ideas, or an interesting way of doing so, or an intriguing work-around, that could help you, but I can not guarantee it. Every programmer writes code completely different from one another even if taught or trained by an expert. And every programmer learns at a different pace even if the code is a couple of lines or hundreds of lines.