Jamie Macdonald

A Flash Family Tree

It’s almost certain you’ve faced the problem at some point. You want to draw up your family tree, but you can’t quite get it right. Then you regret starting the whole thing in permanent pen.

3D with the drawing API

I remember when I was but a small lad and my parents took me to the movies to see the latest attempt at 3D film. It was absolutely awful in retrospect, but to my adolescent mind it was an extraordinary experience. I walked out of that cinema in awe and said to my parents, entirely in earnest, “I wish the real world was 3D, too!”

Planning Site Stickiness

We’ve had a look at a few methods of creating inspiring sites and interfaces, but “inspiring” can really only go so far in keeping your visitors interested. How do we go beyond that? One of the most desirable tricks in web design is how to make people come back to a site on a regular basis. In this chapter we’re going to look at creating a feature that is responsive to each individual user.

Dynamic Flash: PHP

The world is absolutely chock-full of acronyms, isn’t it? I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that though, as you only need to look as far as Macromedia and their recent decision to move away from version numbers with the launch of the mysterious sounding Flash MX. There’s also HTML, XML, HTTP, and a whole cacophony of other acronyms we’re bombarded by on a daily basis.

Introduction to Events and Handlers

One of the most important changes in Flash MX is the new event handler model. This totally changes the way we are able to code animation and interaction with the keyboard and mouse. You already learned a bit about this earlier in the book, but now we are going to get into them in a bit more depth.

A PHP Powered Site

One of the greatest problems with web sites today is the lack of consistency in navigation. When we arrive at a site, there’s no guarantee that we’re going to know how to navigate around it. That’s okay if you’re willing to explore, but we have users out there who will run away screaming if they don’t immediately, intuitively understand how to operate our site.

Taking Things Further

In this chapter we’re going to build upon what we’ve looked at so far. The central example here will be another image—viewing interface. We’re going to work on a number of things that will improve what we’ve already built. We’ll look at loading images dynamically and also keep the list of images external to the Flash movie so we can modify the site without reopening the FLA.

Animation and Interactivity with the Drawing API

In the past, using Flash to create graphics at run-time required at least some form of using predefined symbols and manipulating them with code. Sure, you could take a single pixel image in your Library and do some interesting things with it, but you were rather limited in your ability to create useful, dynamic, graphics if you hadn’t drawn them manually beforehand. As an example, one of the first experiments many Flash-users attempt is a drawing program, but all quickly learn that only so much can be accomplished with a 100×100 pixel hairline and duplicated movie clips.

Case Study: SphereCage

In the last two chapters we’ve been learning about using the drawing API to help create run-time 2D and 3D content for our Flash movies. It’s now time we used that knowledge and these new features to actually create some content. In our case, this will be a complete 3D game made exclusively using the drawing API, our ActionScript, and a healthy dose of imagination. Well, I said ‘exclusively’, but that’s only 99% true. One of the terrific advantages of Macromedia Flash MX is that it allows you to quickly and seamlessly bring together your pre-built graphics and code in a user-friendly environment.

Advanced Collision Detection

In the last chapter, we looked at the possible ways in which the user can interact with the objects on the screen. Now we’re going to look at how objects can react to each other through collision detection. A whole chapter on collision detection? Well, we are going to cover a lot of peripheral issues that will enable you to become a collision expert.