Wednesday, January 26, 2011

FlashDevelop, Flash Builder 4, & SVN

Recently, I began work on a project that originated via an engineer utilizing FlashDevelop. I personally love FlashDevelop (open-source all the way!) but, since my move to Mac, I have been unwilling to use it in VM and instead have gone with Flash Builder 4.

FB4 does not recognize FlashDevelop projects which makes getting started a little challenging. So after I pulled the codebase from SVN, I was left with a bit of a conundrum. FB4 wouldn't recognize the file that I wanted to select as the default application. How do I compile?

I googled around and couldn't find any immediately relevant help articles. Here is what I did, hope it helps:

- Create a new ActionScript project in FlashBuilder and set name and location (workspace) to be identical to your repository checkout.

- Delete the code-generated default class file

- Open the .actionScriptProperties file

- Edit the applications node with:

<applications>
<application path="your-desired-class-file-name.as"/>
</applications>

- FB4 should now allow you to compile

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Sun Flares in AS3

Here's a little AS3 mimic of undulating sun flares using the drawing API. There are two different drawing styles, pointed or curved, which are modified via the ALT view btn. The slider controls the strength of the rays.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Chroma Key Experiment



I did this experiment about a year and a half ago. I wanted to see if I could set up a green screen, capture a human walk cycle, and implement it into a flash game.

[be sure to click on the game screen before attempting to move the avatar]

http://www.jasonleon.com/tests/chromakey/

The process I used to extract the background for my walk cycle is called Chroma key compositing. It's the same trick that the local news uses to show the weather (wo)man in front of a weekly forecast.

I made my green screen background with green felt. Just a tip, you'll need a ton of light sources. I had the equivalent of 4 flood lights which wasn't powerful enough to eliminate all of the shadows. Shadow was what caused the distortion that surrounds the edges of my avatar.

All in all, fun project. I never really had time to mess with it further but there are certainly some neat concepts that could come from it.

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I produce and engineer games and applications. | Portfolio | LinkedIn