Excelent news from Alternative Platform! They have won the Russian Flash Awards, and will be representing Russian at AdobeMax in Milan. Through I am not Russian, I quite happy to see our global Flash community grow. Can’t wait to see what they do next!
Here is a link to their post: LINK
Its been a little while since the last post, but I have some code I have been wanting to share. A little while ago I had written a business card template editor with client/admin areas for a shopping cart solution I had been working on.
The editor needed to create JPG images on the fly and send the full resolution images back to the server. It also picked up the template descriptions from a mysql database through PHP and passed it to the AS3 App all through AMFPHP.
It became clear to me, that it was quite anoying having to put my method calls on a string every time I need some data, and go through they whole process of creating a listener for the call. So I wrote two classes to help me out roll out the code faster. The code allows calls to an AMFPHP gateway just as if it was part of the AS3 code with namespaces and methods. So calls can now be written in one or two lines of code like this:
— AS3 CODE: –
[cc lang="actionscript" tab_size="2" lines="40"]
import com.orellana.speed.remote.Remoting;
import com.orellana.speed.remote.Callback;
var remote:Remoting = new Remoting(’http://www.yourdomain.com/AMFPHP_gateway.php’);
remote.myservicefolder.myservice(args…).callback(__myCallbackFunc, __myErrorEventFunc);
[/cc]
So, service folders become namespaces, the php classes become as3 class, and the php function behaves just like a function in as3. The only difference is the callback object returned by that method which is used handle returned values and optionally error events.
More information about AMFPHP can be found here: http://osflash.org/projects/amfphp
I also I just found this Post on code czar about remote calls and type safety, but I’m not sure if its the same thing.
Here are the classes:
Remoting.as
CallBack.as
So here is the promised meatier content!
I’ve been playing with 3d lately. Now there are plenty of 3d engine/api implementations out there like papervision3d, alternativaplatform and sandy3d just to name the recently more popular. However, these engines are truly full featured engines with real 3d positions, calculations and what not. This make them a bit slow and sluggish on older systems and there isn’t much you can do when it comes to fast game action play (event on more current system). Now that flash10 is fast approaching with some nice texturing support, it will ease the job of these engines to make them faster. But for now, I thought about the good old days of Doom and Duke Nukem, and was wondering why no one has tried anything like it on flash.
So, I did some experiments, and have a short demo of what I’ve been working on. Now it’s not much competition to the other engines, but I thought it could actually be faster at this type of stuff, since it does no true 3D calculations other than screen projection. It currently has no textures, but that is coming soon. It is basically a portal engine, with convex sectors. I did it this way because it could be nice for level streaming. Any ways, check it out and let me know how it runs on your system (if any one is reading this).
