ActionScript.org Flash, Flex and ActionScript Resources - Articles -

Acoustic recording and playing back in Flash (Brazilian Pagode)

no@spam.com (Alex Nino) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 12:00:00 CST

Here we are once again speaking about midi files and how to use them in flash through actionscript. In my previous article�"from fruityloops to actionscript"�where I am explaining deeply my approach of loading midi files and play them with a certain predefined samples set, I did mention that dealing with acoustics instruments could be a waste of time due to the complexity of waveforms and how we link them making transitions smoothly. What I meant is that all samples of an acoustic instrument recording rely each other and they have to be played in the same sequence order otherwise it sounds just broken. Well, that's true but it is not too�bad at all and there are some things we can do with it.

From Fruity Loops to Actionscript

no@spam.com (Alex Nino) — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 17:30:00 CST

About 3 years ago, when actionscript 3 was born, Andre Michelle came with the idea of injecting audio data into a ByteArray (binary SWF structure) for generating dynamic audio, I did have a go with this approach for creating my own music dynamically (on the fly) based on pulses previously stored in a MIDI file, which it worked fine but it wasn't too good in terms of performance and synchronization, especially creating long sequences by linking audio files where easily all of them get out of synch in slow machines. So I forgot about all this till Adobe has introduced into the flash player platform (FP10) the very famous SampleDataEvent.SAMPLE_DATA, giving us lots of ways for generating dynamic audio. I did some experiments exporting music from FruityLoops to Actionscript.

The word is 'interpolation'

no@spam.com (Alex Nino) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:30:00 CDT

Before showing some examples about interpolation, I would like to explain a little bit what it does mean and why it is so important. Interpolation is a mathematic magic process; it consists in construct new data points within a range of known data points. There are some mathematic patterns (algorithms) for generating missing data between points; I've learned some of them when I was working in an application which required scaling, resize bitmaps. I don't know if you have notice that when you resize an image through Action Script It doesn't look as good as it looks when you do the same in Photoshop

The fastest poker hands evaluator ever

no@spam.com (Alex Nino) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:30:00 CDT

Few months ago I've been working in a project where I had to validate poker hands (based on 5 cards) and also calculate what the chance is for all possible hands depending on their rank from highest card to straight flush and then show percentages for each possible future hand type.

Well, it looked to me a bit simple before starting but once I took a quick look on the web and I started building up the logic of it, I just realized that it is something really, really complicated. A poker hand of 5 cards can have lots of different combinations which mean that it might need lots of validations and conditions depending on each hand rank (I'm not speaking about few, it may be more than hundreds).

The mystery of parallel lines

no@spam.com (Alex Nino) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 05:30:00 CDT

This is an algorithm I did for detecting the distance between parallel lines, no matters their positions or rotation. This is a quite simple and light algorithm that can be implemented on any programming language, in my example it was done in Action Script 3 (FP10)

Elastic Collisions Inspiration...

no@spam.com (Alex Nino) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:30:00 CDT

Last weekend I had some spare time for writing an article I got in mind from long time ago, this is about Elastic Collisions, pretty much simple concept but apparently there are some people implementing it in the wrong way (I heard about some crazy exceptions, many bugs and problems people have) and in most of these cases it is because of they are detecting collisions in a wrong workflow. When we speak about elastic collisions we are speaking about the response of it after the collision happens and not when it actually happens (its detection), you must be careful in the way how you detect when the collisions occur, one think is detecting when the collision happens and other completely different is what happen after it.

Verlet integration (actionscript 3), in 9 minutes.

no@spam.com (Alex Nino) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:00:00 CDT

The first time I heard about Verlets was about 10 years ago I think, when I was working on a C++ program building a dynamic animated bridge, at that time all documents and resources I found about Verlets were really confusing and at the end I gave up on it (sometimes people explain things in the most complicated way). Last year 2009 in flash on the beach (Brighton, UK) when I was attending the session of Keith Peters, he came with some really good ideas about how to implement the “Verlet Integration” in flash using actionscript 3 in a very, very easy way that makes my imagination fly.

Predicting the landing position

no@spam.com (Alex Nino) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:00:00 CST

In most of the cases when we are working in client/server architectures absolutely everything is processed (in terms of records, operations and results) in the server side and the front-end (client application) is not more than a slave user visual interface, which means that if in some scenario the server operations depend on a client request parameterized your application could be easily hacked in some way, that's why sometimes a algorithm like this could be really usefull.

Balloon movement in actionscript 3

no@spam.com (Alex Nino) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:30:00 CST

This Balloon was an experiment I did playing a bit with Verlet physics (if I can catalogue the Verlet concept as part of physics). Using Verlet can be quite powerful but at the same time is a bit limited due to the simplicity of how physics are applied, we don't have much control of it and for adjusting stiffness between dots we need to do quite much, there are some people out there working a lot with it and making amazing things like this physics engine for action script 3.

Mr Grass (Action Script 3)

no@spam.com (Alex Nino) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:30:00 CST

Well, it was always tricky for everybody making things looking natural, especially animations based on nature themes, they are hard to achieve, so it was a kind of a challenge for me working on this grass. Here I've learned a bit more about drawing in a canvas (bitmap area) and the eternal fighting against performance. Drawing on flash using .graphics is powerful but it is a bit slow and could affect badly your flash application specially when using gradients, filters and complex shapes with curves simultaneously.