Richard Lord » Physics

If I had more time

Richard — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:28:28 +0000

One of the frustrations of being busy with client work is the lack of time to investigate, experiment and play with interesting stuff. One day I’ll have time to try all this stuff but until then, here’s a simple list of the flash/flex tools I’d like to play with. Maybe you’ll find something interesting here.

Flash Player 10 beta

Lots of cool new stuff in the Flash Player 10 beta, if only I had time to try it out.

3D engines

I still haven’t had time to do much with 3D in Flash (although I need to know to get Flint working in the 3D engines). I want time to experiment with the 3D engines and discover their strengths and weaknesses.

Physics engines

I also want time to try out the 2D and 3D physics engines.

Flex tools

There’s a number of Flex tools/libraries that I want to investigate. Top of the list are

What I’m doing now

Meanwhile, I only have a little spare time, which I’m using to develop the next version of Flint. I have some other personal projects I want to work on but they are all on hold for now.

Physics for Flash Games: Slides

Richard — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 13:30:05 +0000

It was great to see so many people at my presentation yesterday at LFPUG. The presentation seemed to go down very well and I had a great evening. Here’s the slides from my presentation. If you weren’t there, they may not make a lot of sense without my talking over the top of them, but I suspect lots of people who were there want to look at the code again.

The presentation is driven entirely from the keyboard arrow keys – left and right to move through the slides and up and down to scroll the text in the code displays.

Click here for the slides (flash required)

Physics for Flash Games

Richard — Tue, 29 May 2007 07:29:17 +0000

On Thursday this week, I’m doing a presentation on Physics for Flash Games at the London Flash Platform User Group. It’s a tricky presentation to plan because there’s such a wide range of knowledge and ability among the audience but I think I’ve come up with a presentation that has something for everyone. Hope to see lots of London Flash users there. There’s no membership requirement so if you’re interested just turn up. Or better still sign up on the web page because then you have a chance to win one of the prizes in the raffle.

The slides from this talk are now online here.

Simple example of acceleration

Richard — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:02:05 +0000

While teaching my Actionscript Fundamentals course a couple of days ago one of the trainees asked me how to do a simple example of using acceleration and deceleration within an animation. Here it is. Roll over the centre of the propeller below.

Flash required: You need version 10 or later of the free Flash player from Adobe to use this content. To download and install the free player from Adobe's web site click here.

The code looks like this.

var rate:Number = 0;
var acceleration:Number = 0.5;

prop_mc.centre_mc.onRollOver = function()
{
    prop_mc.onEnterFrame = function()
    {
        rate += acceleration;
        rate = Math.min( rate, 15 );
        prop_mc._rotation += rate;
    }
};

prop_mc.centre_mc.onRollOut = function()
{
    prop_mc.onEnterFrame = function()
    {
        rate -= acceleration;
        rate = Math.max( rate, 0 );
        prop_mc._rotation += rate;
    }
};

prop_mc.centre_mc.onDragOver = prop_mc.centre_mc.onRollOver;
prop_mc.centre_mc.onDragOut = prop_mc.centre_mc.onRollOut;

For a brief explaination, rate is the speed of rotation of the propeller. When the mouse is over the propeller, the rate increases each frame by the acceleration and is capped at a maximum rate of 15. When the mouse is not over the propeller, the rate decreases each frame by the acceleration and is capped at zero. The result is what you see.

The source file can be downloaded here.