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Presenting: Mrs. Emily

Zack Jordan — Fri, 07 May 2010 15:11:38 +0000

There comes a time in every blogger’s life when he has to decide whether to use his/her platform for questionable (read: non-development-related) purposes. Everyone has their price. Baby announcements, for instance, often show up on development blogs (though not this one yet, thankfully). Marriage, definitely. Pet deaths, occasionally. And, of course, family members starting their own businesses.

My NYC-based sister, as it turns out, is just catapulting into the world of fashion design with the launch of her first line of clothing. This event coincided with a recent obsession of mine with Flash-Wordpress integration, which lead me to offer to develop a mini-site for her to showcase her wares. A discussion of the techniques I used in combining the Wordpress platform and some light Flash development would actually be on-topic here, but I feel that the disclaimer above has absolved me from any real dev talk in this article.

So, all you PXW readers who like to dress pretty (or, more likely, have relations and ladyfriends who do), allow me to present the inaugural summer collection of Mrs. Emily.

Barebones! - AS3 Skeletal Animation System

Zack Jordan — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:18:04 +0000

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, and a WYSIWYG animation editor could do for them. I went to my lab immediately.

The first thing I wanted to know was, is there a way to make an animation that can be shared among characters in a game? And could characters be “skinned,” so the same character could change appearances, add/remove body parts or attachments, etc. and retain the same animations? I see it all the time in big-budget 3D games; each character has a skeleton, to which animations may be applied. Each animation can be applied to any character, and each character can use any 3D character model (each of which can of course be “skinned”). So you have three components in the system:

Skeleton
Animation
Skin

Never having been involved with a big-budget game, I can’t tell you the best way to design a system like that. However, as a Flash developer, I can find a good way to do it in 2D, in your browser.

This is a quick example of the system (v0.1) in action. This looks like a timeline animation, but it’s actually done with code. To prove it, click the stage to toggle the animation speed. Notice that it slows down to “bullet time,” but totally smoothly, without the jerkiness of a frame-based animation going down to 3 fps. Also, because of how the system is designed, it can be combined with a physics engine (Box2D, for example) for ragdoll falls from any point in the animation. Think of the possibilities!

Anyway, just wanted to put that out there. I’ve got a couple projects in line first, but I’d like to explore this further to see what kind of gameplay could come of it.

Presenting: Tutorio.us!

Zack Jordan — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:20:18 +0000

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

To explain what this is, and instead of writing something new, I’ll just quote directly directly from the website:

The Scenario

So you want to learn Flash. Great! A noble endeavor. And you want to do it on your own, harnessing the vast resources of the internet. Also a good idea, with only one problem: which resources?

The Internet is a vast place. According to some estimates, it contains nearly two ounces of information (which is more than you think when you’re counting electrons). If that doesn’t awe you, consider this article, which tells us that if a byte is a grain of rice, Google processes enough rice daily for every person on earth to have sixteen bowls full. Daily.

The Problem

The main point is this: there is a lot of information out there. There is more than enough to teach you everything you want to know about Flash. If you’ve spent any time searching, you’ve probably seen hundreds of tutorials already- maybe dozens today alone. However, the problem is this: a lot of them kinda suck. You’ve probably noticed this too. Incorrect information, bad (even crippling) practices, ancient Flash versions… the list goes on.

The second problem is this: If you’re new to ActionScript, what do you learn first? XML? Text formatting? Class structure? And where do you go after that? What are the pre-requisites of each tutorial? All this knowledge is out there (somewhere in that two ounces of electrons) but the majority of it is alone, without context, floating in the void.

The Solution

So here’s our solution. Tutorio.us is our attempt to index the best Flash instruction on the Internet, in a context that makes sense. We are dedicated to finding the clearest, best-written content for the most cutting-edge technology and putting it together in ways that everyone can understand.

So there you have it. Go take a look and let me know what you think!