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.

Game Development

23rd November, 2008

Here is a little screenshot of what I’ve been developing for our Games Module game. Basically it’s been world generation and character control, and lots of difficulty getting a decent collision system going.

I started off with using a hitTest function on all the surrounding cells only (9 in total for the sake of using hardly any CPU), but this led to issues where the character would get permanently stuck a little-way into one of the walls. Not good…

Instead I’ve implemented my own system where I have a function that tests whether the target location, ie. where the player wants to go, is solid or not, and returns true or false as to whether they can move there or not.

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.

Playing with 3D in Flash

16th September, 2008

So for a few days I’ve been experimenting with various bits of code, using a Kirupa tutorial as a starting grounds, in order to create the effect of rendering 3D objects in Flash. It has been a bit hard trying to figure out how to do things but eventually I wrote a few functions that basically put a cube of cubes (the basis for my flash game idea) onto the screen and could be rotated in three dimensions.

This was all well and good but now I have been stumped by figuring out how to sort the z-order and making the drawing more efficient by ignoring parts that are hidden behind other parts.

Flash, Twitter and crossdomain.xml

22nd April, 2008

As part of the latest FRED website update, I’ve been asked to include a twitter feed integrated into the flash file itself. Not knowing much about twitter itself apart from the basics, like knowing I’d have to take data from a feed and have to make some actionscript that parses the XML, I started the necessary research to see what people had done before me.

It is fortunate then, that I stumbled across this post, Twitter Issues, which describes a scenario that is not unfamiliar to me. It also provides a solution which will ultimately save me time later on! Basically, since some major security updates in Flash quite a long while ago, it hasn’t been able to access data on any server different to the one it is hosted on without express permission from the other server in the form of a special file called crossdomain.xml. I had the same issue when developing the original FRED Roles database stored on one site and accessed via flash from the other. Now Twitter themselves could have solved the issue by simply using a * (star) in their file to allow access from anyone, but for whatever reason they chose not to.

Portal Flash Game

13th March, 2008

As a follower of the Half Life 2 series, naturally I have tried Portal and was kept amused by it for a little while, solving a series of puzzles with the portal gun set by a mad AI computer obsessed with cake.

However in my search for ideas for something I could make in Flash for my final year autumn term module Scripting for Digital Media (IDAT311) – (I am thinking I may as well get a long headstart on as much as I can now) – I found an amazing recreation of the portal game in a 2D Flash form. It can be found at http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/ – Portal: The Flash Version