The Super Flash Bros » Code

A Real Page-Turner

Tom — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:15:35 +0000

Here’s a little bit of fiddling I did with pixelbender, the shader language that’s built into Flash these days.

I remember a time when the page-turning effect was the hottest thing around in flash, but most were just a clever combination of masks and gradients, at best. My effort uses the pixelbender filter to reposition and shade every pixel in a fairly realistic fashion, modelled on a simple hyperbolic curve (x^2 – y^2 = 1).

Play with it here (reacts to mouse movement within the flash box)

Get the source here

Tom-

Retro Sound Effects

Tom — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:24:23 +0000

In my spare moments over the last week or two, I’ve been porting the excellent sfxr by Tomas Pettersson into AS3, and it’s finally done!

If you haven’t used sfxr before, it’s a really neat app that lets you generate your own custom game sound effects, using the same kind of synthesizers that the classic consoles used. When you’re done tweaking the sound, you can save it out as a .wav ready to import into Flash

I’ve added a few features into my version, like history buttons and copy/paste functionality, but everything from the original is there too, even the .wav export feature!

Play around with the app here

Even better, I’ve made it open source too, so you can use the synthesizer in your own code. That means for roughly 10kB, you can have as many sound effects in your game/movie as you like, without adding more filesize for each one. Check out the google code description page for a very simple demo of how to use SfxrSynth in your work, and to download the source code.

Google Code project here

AS3, FP10 only though I’m afraid!

My Alchemy Presentation

Tom — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:44:10 +0000

Here in London, Tink hosts a monthly meeting of Flash developers and artists called the London Flash Platform User Group. Every last Thursday of the month, we have two talks on Flash related topics, and then a little bit of drinking and networking and such (well, if you’re going to hold it in a bar…)

This month just gone, I gave the first of the two presentations. I chose the topic of Adobe’s Alchemy project, since it’s pretty exciting stuff, and no-one had done a talk on it yet. The video (recorded on Tink’s webcam) is below. I haven’t spoken in public for some time, but I don’t think it went too badly considering. I’ve also put up the slides in SWF form, and the source from my examples.

Mike very kindly agreed to let me link to the Doom source code talked about in the presentation too.

My source and slides

Mikes Doom source

This movie requires Flash Player 9