This post will probably go round t’ internet like wild fire, but i’m a shameless fire stoker.

AS3 hidden treasure in the mm.cfg file. Revealing and documenting many Flash secrets!http://jpauclair.net/2010/02/10/mmcfg-treasure/

I’ve been messing around a bit with the face-recognition library which I came across here.

Not much to report quite yet, but it’s pretty straightforward to use, I have a few issues with it, such that it’s ability to crop to the face at a distance is limited I think. Perhaps this is just my shoddy use of it. In any case enjoy a snapshot of my current use of it, namely to put moustaches onto faces, the perfect technology!

I managed to get something up and running in FLARToolkit and PV3D. It’s pretty simple but it helped me understand some basic things which will (hopefully) mean I can make something a bit more impressive next time!

1. Print out this marker. It’s better to have it lying flat on a book or something to stop crinkling.
2. Make sure you have a webcam plugged in.
3. Click ‘Allow’ on the Flash movie below. (If you can’t see the movie you will need to install the latest Flash Player by clicking on the ‘Get Adobe Flash Player’ button)

Well now, before dashing off home tonight I wanted to just have a go with the new Flash EventListener method of picking up user interaction.

It’s pretty straightforward however I do have one major issue with the way they work – the fact that I can’t pass a parameter when an event is triggered baffles me. I looked into it and apparently I can create a custom event and override the default Event class? any tips are welcome.

In any case I made a very basic file to see the basic effects of bubbling events:

The on/off button switches the MovieClip.mouseChildren property to true/false respectively. The files are here.

So Marc suggested I try out Grant Skinners Tweening engine – GTween. I knew this was much faster however more tricky to use. My vague recollections on the documentation suggested i’d have to keep references to tweens and clean up after myself. I didn’t like the sound of that so much. No..i’m not lazy ! I just don’t consider it a good trade-off between ease-of-use and resources if you know your app’s running on a good system.

A wee bit of research yielded GTweener which is mixture of Tweener and GTween. It is slightly slower than GTween but has the same ease-of-use as Tweener. I gave it a shot.

AS3 Using Tweener

1000 randomly moving balls

AS3 Using GTweener

1000 randomly moving balls

To the naked eye there’s not much in it as far as I can tell. For anyone interested, below are some benchmarks given by the creator of GTweener:

10,000 objects, simultaneous x, y and alpha tween, no easing

• GTween: 12,406ms
• Tweener: 31,313ms
• GTweener: 12,657ms

You can download GTweener here.

GTweener isn’t a bad thing to use at all although I don’t see why it’s interface couldn’t have been more like Tweener. In any case it’s easy to pick up and if speed is a neccesity it seems like a good option.

When I first started patchily to learn AS3 I thought it’d be a good idea to take AS2 files and convert tem to AS3. Let me say after 2 months that that’s not really a good idea. At least it wasn’t for me. It just invites a lot of time being spent cursing AS3.

The problem being that it is sufficiently similar to AS2 syntax for your brain to think it knows how things should work, and sufficiently different for you to get nothing but a screen full of errors.

So this week i’m approaching it as though it is actually a completely different beast, which of course it is. And my ability to comprehend it has vastly improved. Although I don’t like the idea that all my previous stored knowledge has to be dumped, it’s got to happen.

In any case I thought i’d try a simple experiment in adding MovieClips and using Tweener and see what the performance differences were.

Actionscript 2 version

600 MC’s with glow filters moving to random coordinates

Actionscript 3 version

600 MC’s with glow filters moving to random coordinates

It is a good idea to wait for them both to stop before replaying one of them. That way you get  a better idea of the performance without the added strain of the other file playing.

I thought the AS3 file would be a lot more complex than it actually turned out to be. I’ve included the zipped up files for anyone who wants a look. Any AS3′ers can have a look for a laugh .
AS3 Zip File

Note: you will need to have the AS3 version of Tweener to use this, you can find it here:
Tweener for AS3

I’d just like to say as an initial disclaimer that i’m well aware of how late I am in porting my brain to AS3. This entire process won’t be anything new to most flash people, I hope you all feel really smug and happy with yourselves

When Actionscript 3 first came out I was developing flash (Actionscript 2) apps for mobiles and totally unconcerned about the developments going on outside of this niche arena. Coming out of that environment was of course quite brutal as I realised that I didn’t understand most of the terms being thrown about by other flash developers.  I think I may even have said that I was too old for this shit. But apparently the world moves on irrespective of your personal opinions on Actionscript being just fine as it is….

Actually, from the outside looking in AS3 seems to work like any new technology. You don’t know you need it till you try it and then you turn overnight into a crazed, frothing AS3 evangelist bore. The thought of this terrifies me, I reckon I have about 2 weeks at which point someone’s going to have to de-condition me.

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