Scripting Finished

19th December, 2008

So as of Friday the scripting module will be over, done and finished. This is also the first ‘traditional’ hand-in I’ve had in a very long while, so I note now that the uni sends an email the very minute you hand your work in as a receipt.

Screenshot of the Piece

Finishing Scripting and Update

11th December, 2008

I haven’t posted in a few days because I have been busy rounding off the rough edges to my scripting coursework, most of which was completed a long while ago. I have solved a couple of the persistent issues, one of which was a depth problem where randomly half-way through a gallery the depths of the images after the one being displayed would reverse their order (a pretty unsightly effect).

Following this I’ve withdrawn some light reading for my dissertation… and of course I need to concentrate on dealing with C++ and DirectX.

Gallery Menu Image

Custom Flash Player Menus

7th December, 2008

I’ve posted a little tutorial here on making custom Flash context (right click) menus because when I learnt to do it (a long while back now though) there was very little out there describing how.

• First of all you need a function to take the menu action. It can do absolutely nothing, but it does need to exist for the menu item to work. For the example here though it will link to a website:
  function menuClick() {
getURL("http://www.srjm.co.uk", _blank);
}
• Next, declare the menu variable, it’s good practice (and incredibly helpful) to do it this way because then whenever you add to the menu you get the Code Hints.
  var menu:ContextMenu = new ContextMenu();
• Finally, hide the existing menu (unless you wish to keep the play/rewind and other options) and add your own options instead, and apply it to the root context menu:
  menu.hideBuiltInItems();
var menuItem1:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("http://www.srjm.co.uk/", menuClick);
var menuItem2:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("SRJM Design", menuClick, true, false);
menu.customItems.push(menuItem1);
menu.customItems.push(menuItem2);
_root.menu = menu;
  The second ContextMenuItem has additional parameters to give it a horizontal line above and also make it unclickable.

Flash Actionscript Image Reflections

7th November, 2008

While searching for ways to apply a gradient mask to an image I came across basically the best demonstration of how to create a decent reflection using actionscript:

http://pixelfumes.blogspot.com/2005/09/flash-8-bitmapdata-image-reflection.html

A Note on Actionscript Classes

31st October, 2008

After quite a lot of effort I managed to convert my old Gallery script into Actionscript Classes, and eventually figured out my mystery of how to link an onEnterFrame event as part of a class to a dynamically created movie clip.

My Scripting Project will be appearing in the top header section of my site:

Also in my search for ways to distort an image to give the impression of perspective I came across this site http://www.osflash.org/sandy, an open source 3D library with many many functions.

Scripting for Digital Media

25th October, 2008

I think I’ve finally decided on what to produce following Nigel’s criteria for the Scripting for Digital Media module. I’ve spent today writing some Actionscript functions that I know will be required, for example a number wrapping function so that I can use it in several instances to loop around something, most likely an Array.

My idea however is to finally fill in the actionscript space I’ve left aside at the top of my website, which was supposed to contain nice dynamic content.