How to create infinitely varied animation with your Unity characters.
A very powerful feature in the Unity Editor is the Blend Tree. This is an extension to an Animation Controller, which allows you to ‘blend’ the joint movements of multiple animations and control the ratio of blending with one or more parameters.
Continue reading Unity – Animation Blend Trees
I knocked up a quick demo to show how you might create a Unity game, which uses either keyboard input, or the accelerometer of a mobile device, without having to change any code, include any third party libraries, or use conditional compilation. Continue reading Unity – automatically choosing key or accelerometer input
A common oversight in Flash projects, when using a Bitmap with loaded content is that Flash will revert a Bitmap’s smoothing parameter to false when you replace its bitmapData. That is, when the data loads into the Bitmap, anti-aliasing will get turned off. This is simple enough to fix, but since you may not know if someone is going to replace the bitmapData of a Bitmap you have created – then it’s much better to code defensively for it.
This little SmoothBitmap class is for just such an occasion. Instantiate it like a regular Bitmap and, no matter what another developer does with it, smooth, anti aliased pixels when scaling/rotating will be ensured. Enjoy 🙂
I had a conversation yesterday with a friend and colleague about how his company should standardise their development environment for all Flashers – be they contract or perm, junior to senior.
You need to use some kind of Dependency Injection (DI for short) to provision some System Under Test (SUT for short) in tests you’re writing, but can’t or don’t want to use a DI framework to do so.
Alternative titles for this post include:
The problemYou want to embed an entire SWF, full of assets, into a class and retrieve individual symbols from it – but you don’t want to have to embed each asset individually.
SWFAsset – a couple of lines of code and you’re away.
The problem:
You’re using Flash 10’s native 3-D API and notice the projection goes a little skewiff when resizing the window.
The solution:
You need to reset the stage’s projection centre on stage resize, like so…
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var centre:Point = new Point(stage.stageWidth/2, stage.stageHeight/2); root.transform.perspectiveProjection.projectionCenter = centre; |
In moving to compiling projects with the new Flex SDK 4, I noticed a couple of gotchas to do with the EMBED metatag that I thought I’d share:
Runtime Shared Libraries
If you wish to embed assets in your SWF with the EMBED metatag, so you can manage and update things easily, there’s an extra compiler parameter you must add, in order for your project to compile properly:
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--static-link-runtime-shared-libraries=true |
This is already added as a new default parameter in FlashDevelop projects. But if you’re planning to build projects from outside a similar IDE, you must add this to your compiler string. Otherwise, the compiler will think you have uninitialised constants and warn you so.
Embedding Fonts
Using the EMBED metatag, or even better runtime loading, for fonts is the sensible way forward. The amount of projects I’ve seen where you need to build from an FLA file full of fonts, which you need to hunt down and install is crazy. With Flex SDK 4, you’ll need to add an extra attribute to your embed tag for fonts, called ’embedAsCFF’:
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[Embed(source='myfont.ttf', fontName='MY_FONT', fontWeight='regular', unicodeRange='U+0020-U+0040,U+0041-U+005A', mimeType='application/x-font', embedAsCFF='false')] public static const MY_FONT :Class; |
Happy compiling!
