// author archive

Zack Jordan

Zack Jordan has written 41 posts for { P I X E L W E L D E R S }

Barebones! - AS3 Skeletal Animation System

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on a fighting game for a client. It’s pretty standard Street Fighter fare, only much simplified due to time and budget restrictions. However, it made me start thinking about the limitations of the old 2D fighters and what a more powerful processor, faster graphics, […]

Flash/Flex Integration: SWFLibrary v1.5

Usually I like to post glamorous stuff, like 3D swirly things and experiments. Occasionally, however, I feel the need to release a little code in the interest of helping a few people out. This code is a review of sorts, since I already posted a similar utility back in June. However, since […]

Presenting: Tutorio.us!

After a couple of months working on this project, I am ready to release my labor of love. Presenting: Tutorio.us!

FIVe3D Custom Primitive: VectorCube Class

After a long Papervision-induced hiatus, I’ve come back to FIVe3D- mainly because I still think it’s a great library. Since it’s still relatively new, however, there’s not a lot of example code out there. Thus, here’s another chunk from your friends here at Pixelwelders.

Pokervision3D

I just spent the last three weeks a little bit out of the action, wandering Europe in a motorcoach. On said motorcoach, there were only two things to do: play with my laptop, and play poker with the other passengers. By the end of the trip, I ended up winning about thirty Euros […]

Speed Tests: Objects vs. Arrays vs. Dictionaries

I’ve been taking buses around Europe for a couple weeks now, and sometimes those trips get extremely long. Yesterday I took a bus from Venice to Seefeld (Austria), a trip that would have taken about five hours if not for the hurricane-like downpour they were having in Italy. Seriously, it was ridiculous- all traffic was on the side of the highway, and all the motorcyclists were huddled under the overpasses. But on the bright side, it did give me a lot of time to try out some things that I normally wouldn’t take the time to do, such as this experiment.

Flash + Google = ?

Although we’ve all heard for years that Google does index SWFs in some mysterious way, no one has really understood exactly what that meant. All we knew was that it was pretty much useless. But, if my sources are correct, things may be changing.

AS3 Broadcaster Class

This is something simple enough that I hesitate to post it, but maybe someone else can benefit. Plus, I always try to have something new on Mondays. Anyway, this a technique I once used back in the dark ages of ActionScript development (meaning AS2). Last week, however, I suddenly had need of it again.

Custom Shapes in FIVe3D: The Arc

The beauty of FIVe3D (other than its size, ease of use, and a few other things) is how easily extendable it is. For a previous experiment, I needed a way to draw an arc in 3D space. This isn’t something that FIVe3D provides, and in fact it was a little challenging to find the math I needed. However! Once I found it, I was able to easily use FIVe3D’s drawing API to put it into action.

Runtime Libraries in Flex ActionScript Projects

When working with Flash, there is really only one vector format worth worrying about, and that is SWF. And furthermore, it turns out that there is a kinda slick way to import all the assets contained in a SWF into a Flex ActionScript project. In the following class, I’ve just smoothed the process a little bit.

Twitterpated