Last night I decided to break out the AIF toolkit again and work some mathy expressions into a filter. Up to this point most of the filters that I’ve seen are along the lines of what you will find in Photoshop’s menus. Those filters certainly aren’t bad, but I’ve always been more interested in how an image can be sampled and reconstructed in a manner not unlike what’s found in the 90’s DJ scene. So with that introduction I’d like to demonstrate my latest filter.

Just like in Flash, you can think of the canvas as a 2D coordinate plane. For this filter I used a few trigonometric and polynomial expressions in combination. Most of the polynomial coefficients are also parameters that you can manipulate which is where all the fun is. More to come, stay tuned.

Download the filter.

GAE SWF

• Tweener
• TweenLite (and flavours)
• Boostworthy Animation System
• FuseKit
• Go
• and KitchenSync 1.1

Note: After some helpful feedback from readers (THANK YOU!) I added TweenLite to the list of libraries I reviewed. I should add here that these are fairly superficial observations about how things work and don’t go into incredible detail. If I steal any features, I’ll look closer ;-D

Keep the comments coming!

Tween Engine Comparisons (updated)

i’m dispatching an event from a sprite after it fades in completely
dispatchEvent(new Event(Main.ENTER_SCREEN_COMPLETE));

i’m trying to listen for to this event but for some reason it doesn’t get picked up when the capturing parameter is set to false.. that is for bubbling and the target phase.

This works
container.addEventListener(Main.ENTER_SCREEN_COMPLETE, screenTweenComplete, true, 0, true);

This does NOT work
container.addEventListener(Main.ENTER_SCREEN_COMPLETE, screenTweenComplete, false, 0, true);

Where container, is an ancestor to everything on the screen. Essentially its the the stage.

Any clues why this is happening?

Answer after the jump.
(more…)

Changes in 1.1:

• ADDED jumpToTime() method to Tween (this may be moved to AbstractSynchronizedAction in a later release)
• ADDED getTimestampFromFrames() and getTimestampFromMilliseconds() to TimestampUtil
• ADDED Timecode to TimeStringParser. Now “:ss”, “mm:ss;ff”, and “dd:hh:mm:ss;ff” are supported.
• ADDED ActionDefaults class for storing default initialization values.
• ADDED easeOutIn() to most of the easing functions (buggy. seems to overshoot target in some cases)
• ADDED version check in Synchronizer.initialize()
• CHANGED type of Numbers within Timestamp to int.
• REFACTORED all actions to contain super() in the constructor.
• REMOVED errors that are thrown when pause() and start() are called at the wrong times.

Feliz Día Del Amor, Niños,
Why not try out an oldie but a goodie! Kid Cupid is a game I worked on a few years back while I was working with Domani Studios. The idea is that you’re the ‘real’ cupid who’s fending off the incoming impostor cupids. The motivation for the art style was that you’re playing the fantasy of a 3rd grade kid who was flicking candy hearts over his valentine cards on his desk at school.

Surprisingly, Kid Cupid is still fun 3 years later.

Hey KS Fans,

KitchenSync version 1.0.1 was released last week. This version is just a patch that fixes a few minor issues. Here’s the change log for this version.

===== v1.0.1 (2008.02.04) ======
Fixed Cubic.easeOut bug.
Made getters for Tween's toValue and fromValue.
Added source code to main download.
Added metadata for events.
Updated docs and added summaries to all wiki pages.

I received some feedback from people who were having trouble setting up KitchenSync for use with Flash CS3. I didn’t know this before but you cannot use .swc files compiled with the Flex SDK in a .fla file (WTF, Adobe!) Also, some people were confused by having to use SVN to get the source. To help solve these problems, I’ve added the latest source code as its own download.

I’ve also written EVEN MORE documentation including help for downloading and setting up the source code.

Finally, if you’re using KS, drop me a line or post to the mailing list. I’d love to hear any feedback you may have!

KitchenSync is more than an animation library

KitchenSync is more than an animation library. Tweens are a major part of KitchenSync but that is not the end. It also allows you to sequence sounds, functions, and event dispatches among other actions. The framework is open-ended allowing you to come up with new ways to work with the virtual timeline.

KitchenSync was designed with developers in mind

KitchenSync was designed for developers who want a smart way to handle animation or other time-based functionality with code. Written from the ground up in ActionScript 3.0, KitchenSync relies on smart object-oriented architecture rather than complicated shorthand. It includes a number of features and shortcuts, such as the clone() method, that save effort for developers. KitchenSync makes extensive use of events and informative runtime errors and is quite flexible when it comes to extending the functionality.

KitchenSync aims to…

• offer a well-architected, extensible framework for working with time-based animations and events.
• take advantage of the power of ActionScript 3.0 while using OOP best practices and design patterns and without requiring the Flex framework.
• respond to the needs of developers with a rich set of features.
• be a full-featured library for animation and timeline based actions.

Links

• Getting started
• Types of synchronized actions
• Units of time, parsing time strings, and sync mode
• API Reference