I made the mistake of looking over some of my past blogs. My god the code I unleashed from this FishEye Menu Example post, how sloppy was that??! Ah.. late nite coding.. gotta love it.
At the end of Jan, code hero Jack @ GreenSock released a hot new version of his TweenMax/Lite Tweening masterpiece. Employing a new ‘plugin’ system for some of the options, it has made things smaller, faster, and more efficient than before. It’s pretty slick and you should check it out.
So, in honor of his update (more to keep up with said update) I created a FishEye Menu Reusable Class that can be downloaded here @ Google Code. Keep in mind this is rather in its rough draft “beta” stage… as in, if it breaks your code and formats your harddrive and causes a separation with your significant other… well… thats “beta testing” for you! It’s pretty solid from the testing I’ve done, but I’m interested in getting feedback and definitely in hearing of any errors you might receive.
Thats the most exciting thing about releasing code for me; finding out all the ways someone is trying to use my code that I didn’t pre-plan for. So with that in mind, download the new FishEye Menu class, play around with it, and let me know how it works for you. There is a second file there with the FLA and a Main class file that calls the FishEyeMenu class.
I’ve also got another AS3 pair of Classes that I’ll be posting soon… a Waypoint & WaypointList Class for use in AS3 game development. Should be interesting.
Check out the Wiki for info on How to use the FishEyeMenu Class.
Tags: FishEye Menu, TweenLite, UI
It’s some sort of crazy nerdtastic Data Structure Deathmatch!
The Adobe Actionscript 3 Dictionary Class Vs Object Vs Array! Man it’s awesome to have a language to work in, just like a great RPG where everyone’s got their strengths and weaknesses and it all works together to make awesome flashlove all over the web.
“What is a Dictionary Class and Why Should I read this post?”
Here’s the results from my testing right up front and I feel like it’s a good rough estimate of where each excells.
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Tags: Actionscript 3, Benchmarking, Code Examples
So I’ve been working pretty hard on what started as a TowerDefense game for a tutorial here. It has since become more complex, less tutorialtastic, and awesome. … sort of. I’m happy with where it’s going. Now that I’ve stroked my ego, let me stroke a few more.
First off I have to say one of the single-most priceless pieces of code ever is TweenMax. I know I seem to mention them in every blogpost these days. When I buy programming books, or browse thru Adobe AS3 Live-Docs , I’m reading to solve a problem. My brains don’t encyclopedia-ize all of the things I come across. I don’t need to keep them in my memory, that’s why they’re written elsewhere… in APIs and documentation and stuff that I don’t care about. …Until I need something.
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Tags: pause tween, resume tween, TweenGroup, TweenLite, TweenMax
I’ve periodically run into issues playing around with EventListeners where I want to remove one EL, and add another in the same function, something similar to the following code below. First, a quick note on what’s going on in the code so we’re all on the same page. I have a movie clip “defensive structure,” say, a tower for a Tower Defense game. It has been added to the stage and I attached an EL to this movie clip of the tower when I added it to the stage, listening for a MOUSE_DOWN event on said tower.
Since then, I’ve added a few other movie clips INTO the tower Movie Clip. The first issue I ran into was that normally I’ll use “e.target” as the “hey what did I click” variable to trace out or find out just what exactly was clicked. e.target was pointing at a child of my tower movieclip, which gave me a number of errors like, “this function does not belong to this movie clip,” because functions belong to classes, and I’m targeting just a simple sprite or movie clip.
However, e.currentTarget returns the containing DisplayObjectContainer of e.target. Usually e.currentTarget would trace out to be [object Stage], but since I specifically added e.target as a child of my defense movie clip, e.currentTarget is returning the actual object I need, the Defense object.
So, let’s take a look:
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Tags: Actionscript 3, Event Handling, Event Listeners
