If you know me, you know I like to stay on top of Flash news. And this, my friends is Flash news. Flash Player 11.3 beta has just been released from Adobe Labs with a plethora (oh I love that word) of features! Of course, the first thing I checked was to see if the loadPCMFromByteArray bug (around for a few versions now) has been fixed and… No! It’s still broken! Boo! However, there’s a something we’ve all been waiting for… FULL SCREEN KEYBOARD INPUT!!! Yes, that’s right, you can now use WASD around fullscreen in your Stage3D games!
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Introduction
Last year, I wrote a demo for Stage3D demonstrating the new powerful hardware acceleration capabilities of Flash Player 11. One of these demos showed how you could augment your existing Flash games with new graphics capabilities such as shadowing. I called it the Flash Stage3D/Molehill 2D lighting demo. A thing to note about it is that there are multiple light sources, and each light needs 2 draw calls to render. One to stencil out the areas that need light, and a second pass to actually render the light. After that, the light buffer is then multiplied on top of the scene. It’s important to know that (as far as I know) this technique will only work in 2D.
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Mar 232012
Get excited, I have been tirelessly writing example code for AIR 3.2 prerelease and I can’t wait to show you all what is possible when you combine Stage3D and mobile devices.
Stay tuned…
Jan 282012
Flash 11.2 is now available from Adobe labs, and introduces a bunch of new features, some of which finally allow a first-person shooter to be properly made with Stage3D.
- Middle and right click listeners
- Mouse lock and relative mouse coordinates
- Relaxed driver gating to 2008 (from 2009)
That last point is exciting to me because this will allow many more people to enjoy hardware-accelerated games in Flash.
The last few days, I have been trying to get a normal map shader working in Stage3D.
Video after the break
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I have uploaded a copy of my new 2D lighting demo that I’ve been working on for the past week. You’ll need Flash 11 to try it, though.
Video after the break:
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Sep 072011
It looks like the release of Flash 11 is coming ever nearer. It is now out of beta and now in release candidate, with a version of 11.0.r1.129, meaning that if this release is found to not have any breaking bugs, it could be the release version. Of course, Adobe has not committed to a date yet, but this news is hinting that they’re almost ready.
I was just casually browsing com.adobe.utils when I came across AGALMacroAssembler. I’ve found it allows you to write much nicer looking code, faster. I’ve made a few macros for you based on Ben Whiting’s AGAL Helper.
macro lerp(x, y, a){
out = y - x;
out *= a;
out += x;
}
macro length(x){
dp3 out, x, x;
sqt x, x;
}
macro reflect(i, n){
dp3 out.w, i.xyz, n.xyz;
out.w += out.w;
out.xyz = i.xyz * n.xyz;
out.xyz = i.xyz - out.xyz;
out.xyz = -out.xyz;
}
There’s also a few other things this release brings to AGAL. One of my favourites is aliases. You can now alias registers, making your code that much more readable. Example:
alias va0, position;
alias va1, normal;
alias v0, texcoord;
One other thing I really like is the new tex<>() function.
color = tex<2d,linear,mipnone>(texcoord, texture);
There’s several other new features, but it’s up to you to figure them out. So what are you waiting for? Give AGALMacroAssembler a try!
Sep 042011
I have been working on a new game demo using Molehill/Stage3D entirely for graphics. I want to try to use some new shader effects to bring new graphical effects to 2D games. Why not 3D, you ask? Well, mostly cause I’m inexperienced in the area thus far. I’ve used Pixel Bender in the past to make some cool graphical effects, but couldn’t do much because it was so slow. However, Stage3D has changed all that, bringing superpowered GPU effects to the Flash realm. It’ll take some time to catch on, but when the next framework using Stage3D catches on, you’re going to see some serious shit.
Anyways, some screenshots from my new demo:
Aug 282011
I noticed recently that none of my demos were working due to the lack of a viewPort property in newer builds of Flash Player, so I went through and updated them.
Now you can go and play with Molehill Demo and Bloom Demo. Hooray! Uninhibited 3D!
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