Flash Speaks Actionscript

Don’t you hate when a transparent format like PNG isn’t so transparent to Flash. Finally, there is a way to ignore transparent parts of a PNG within MovieClips during mouse interactions. It is called InteractivePNG.

What is InteractivePNG?

InteractivePNG is a very handy little utility class that allows you to disable the hit area of a PNG if the pixels are transparent.

Currently, when you save out a PNG that has transparency, rolling over the transparent part of the PNG will still register as roll over because Flash still reads it as part of the image. However, with this class, that is no longer the case.

This may seem to be an easy trick or is it? Check out this class for yourself!

Other Resources Available:

Demo of InteractivePNG
Product Source
Documentation

Recreate your favorite playing card game with this slick ActionScript 3.0 playing card engine called AS3cards. The AS3cards project provides a skinnable ActionScript 3.0 card engine for creating playing card games, with an example implementation of Klondike Solitaire. Everything needed can be found at Google Code.

Source: Google Code
Creator: Darron Schall
Demo: Klondike

Mark Barcinski & Adrien Jeanjean from barcinski-jeanjean.com have released VectorVision, a very cool extension to draw crisp vector SVG graphics and vector fonts directly from PV3D, with minimum pixelation. Check out an example created with this new tool.

Download the source code and witness it for yourself!

A Highly Rated Flash Particle System Just Got Better

This set of flash particles has an impressive variation of particle effects. Flash particle effects include snow,fireworks, sparklers, fire, smoke, and much more.  Flint is an open-source project to create a versatile particle system in Actionscript 3.0.  Flint is developed by Big Room ventures Ltd. and is released under the MIT open source licence.

The source and example script can be downloaded at flintparticles.org. Documentation is also available. Check it out and enjoy!

Here are a few examples of Flint 1.0 at work:

A logo as a firework

Sparkler

Mutual gravity

Playing with gravity wells

Fire and smoke

Setting a logo on fire

Have you been looking for a reliable open-source ActionScript 3.0 Physics Engine? Good news! I came across a list of four popular ActionScript 3.0 Physics Engines provided by Henry Jones. The four engines listed are The Fisix Engine, ActionScript Physics Engine, FOAM, and Box2DFlashAS3.

Each ActionScript 3.0 Physics Engine listed has its pros and cons, but one thing for sure is that the use of Actionscript 3.0 provides an increase in performance versus Actionscript 2.0. Whether your heavy into creating flash games and looking for the believable physics or simply looking for a new thing to get into, this is a great list to keep in mind.