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AS3 provides a built-in data structure that you can use for dynamic programming to supplement your application’s functionality. This structure is the prototype chain.

What’s the prototype chain?

To answer that, let’s start by forgetting about user-defined Classes for the moment, and looking at some older mechanisms that have been common to ActionScript and JavaScript since AS1.

Functions . . . → Read More: Dynamic Programming in AS3

Adding color to the previous example, we obtain tinted Perlin Clouds; allowing the color values to overflow past 1 gives us Perlin Plasma. A shift in coordinates reveals that the Frocessing implementation of Perlin noise is symmetric about all three axes (not necessarily implying that it’s incorrect if you stay in one octant…), producing Perlin . . . → Read More: Perlin Color

Here are two instances of the same demo, modeled after the one Seb Lee-Delisle showed last fall, built with two different Flash implementations of 3D Perlin noise. The one on the right uses Ron Valstar’s Perlin class (as does Seb’s demo), which appears to be a faithful port of Ken Perlin’s Improved Noise reference implementation . . . → Read More: Perlin Clouds and Frocessing (with an F)

In ActionScript 3, classes (and functions as well) are objects that can be manipulated like any other object. The language provides us with some constructs to facilitate this, and they are an important part of the programmer’s toolkit.

We need to be able to traverse the connections among the Class, an instance of the Class, and the name of the Class. . . . → Read More: Upon Reflection

With the recent advances in Flash 3D and panoramas, and the fact that Flash 10, now out in beta, has intrinsic support for arbitrary warping of triangles, we can look forward to a future of increased performance and the complete disappearance of those wavy lines in panos. All of that fancy 3D stuff is based . . . → Read More: Behind the Beyond, or Beyond the Behind

Can anybody show me a use case for the following?

(Flex language manual, Object.constructor)

Advanced users may choose to use the function keyword instead of the class keyword to define a Function object that can be used as a template for creating objects. Such a function is called a constructor function because you can use it in conjunction . . . → Read More: Advanced Users May Choose

The past few days have seen the release of version 1.1 of Thomas Pfeiffer’s AS2 (and soon to be AS3) 3D library Sandy – check out the great kitty demo! — and of Andre Michelle’s AS3 CubicVR immersive panorama application (requires Flash 9 of course).  (For a bit of technical background, check out Andre’s post AS3 Perspective Texturemapping.)

Wow, and wow!  Both . . . → Read More: Two Exciting Developments in Flash 3D

In a post entitled Testing the Flash Gradient Fill Method, and Some Personal Thoughts, Kinglong’s Blog (zh) presents a neat little swf reminiscent of the test swf in Psyark’s DisplacementMapFilter Tutorial. This one demonstrates the effects of various parameters of the beginGradientFill() method in Flash. (But not all the parameters. I’d like . . . → Read More: REAL Live Docs: Gradient Fills, Transitions, Tweens, and Flex CSS Explored

In my Flash 8 bit-twiddling adventures I’ve found it useful to be able to check the colors of individual pixels in a running swf. If you need that too, I offer you the PixelTip class, a variant of my ToolTip class that simply displays the coordinates and value of the pixel under the cursor. . . . → Read More: PixelTip

I’ve posted a cubic panorama example in the Sandy forum. If you haven’t seen the announcement yet, this awesome ActionScript 2.0 3D package has just released version 0.2. It’s early days yet for Sandy but already things are very impressive. Check out the features, the source, and the forum at Sandy’s Blog.

A . . . → Read More: The Sandy AS2 3D API and a Flash Cubic Panorama Tutorial