Posts tagged as 'Actionscript'

Signals from Robert Penner

Robert Penner has just released the source for his event system, called AS3 Signals. It’s an interesting read and the sort of project I like – a small feature set in need of good architectural design. And I like the design.

I like to think that Robert may have been inspired in part by my work with events in AS2, but I doubt it.

The conversation’s just kicked off on Twitter and Robert’s Blog. Josh McDonald in particular has already made some good suggestions. My comments on bubbling are awaiting moderation.

Posted on 8 September 2009 | 1 comment | continue reading

The I in Interface

I’m often asked why the interfaces in Flint don’t start with a letter I. The simple reason is that I think this practice, while common among Actionscript developers, is so seriously flawed that it’s better not to do it, even if it is common among other developers and may cause some initial confusion for some…

Posted on 6 August 2009 | 14 comments | continue reading

Object Pool class

Two of the slow operations in the flash player are object creation and garbage collection. If we pool objects – save objects when they’re no longer needed and reuse them later when another object of the same type is required – then object creation is kept to a minimum and garbage collection is reduced to zero…

Posted on 8 October 2008 | 10 comments | continue reading

Garbage Collection

I recently received a support query on Flint regarding garbage collection. In discussions on the forum I was reminded that many Actionscript developers don’t know how the Flash Player’s garbage collection works…

Posted on 12 August 2008 | 1 comment | continue reading

The parentheses operator

It’s not uncommon for less experienced Actionscript developers, particularly self-taught developers, to be a little confused about the purpose of the parentheses you put after a function name when calling the function. The most common question is why aren’t the parentheses used when assigning a function as an event handler?…

Posted on 16 July 2008 | 3 comments | continue reading

Actionscript 3 tetris source code

This will certainly be useful to anyone wanting to make a tetris game. It’s probably also useful to anyone learning Actionscript 3, particularly if they want to make games. The source code is on the Flash Game Code web site. It’s in two parts – an engine, which does the game part, and a sample game that uses the engine. Have fun.

Posted on 13 December 2007 | 6 comments | continue reading

Using uint as a loop iterator

It took me some time to track down this bug in some code recently. I post it here to help others avoid the error. It’s obvious once you see it…

Posted on 21 November 2007 | 2 comments | continue reading

Radial Perlin Noise

I was messing around with perlin noise, creating a radial effect for a game I’m working on. The result is a RadialPerlin class for creating radial perlin noise bitmaps. The code is licenced under the MIT license. Have fun, and if you make something interesting with it let me know.

Posted on 29 October 2007 | 3 comments | continue reading