I’ve discovered a few interesting quirks of text fields while I’ve been working with Flash lately and want to share one with you (I’ll share the other in a later post). While working with TextField objects, I noticed that a carriage return is appended to any value that is entered into a text field in the Flash IDE. However, this is not so when the text property of the TextField object is modified with ActionScript. Essentially, this adds an unexpected character to text fields created in Flash’s IDE that have not been modified with ActionScript, which can cause confusion if you are using ActionScript to work with text fields that have been placed on the stage.
Continue reading ‘Flash text fields have extra newlines/carriage returns (”\n” and “\r”)’ »
Something I discovered a while ago has popped up in one of my old projects and I decided to share what I found. My Virtual Cube application, which renders interactive virtual Rubik’s cubes, uses timer to keep track of how long it takes a user to solve a scrambled cube. While using it, I noticed the timer running slower while using the 5×5x5 cube and faster with the 2×2x2 cube. What would be three seconds while using the small cube would be six or seven seconds for the large cube.
What was happening was the frame rate was slowing down because the Sandy 3D engine (an ActionScript 3D engine I use to render the cube) was taking longer to render the larger, and more complex, cube and all of its “cubies” that rotate. But what makes it rather odd was that this slowdown in frame rate was affecting the timer the user saw in the application. Because flash had to work harder (and longer) to display the more complex cube, it would take that much longer for my TimerEvent.TIMER event to dispatch and update my timer in the user interface.
Continue reading ‘ActionScript Timer class seem offset/innaccurate/way off? It is!’ »
Flash Help Book Creator is a tool to create a Flash extension for an ActionScript library that adds a help book to Flash Help and adds syntax highlighting and code hints to the editor. It started out as something solely for the Sandy 3D engine, but I decided to make it public since it’s a helpful application that others may find useful. If you have an ActionScript library that you support, this is what will integrate your code into the Flash IDE. So be sure to give it a try.
I decided to make WebDevPage public. It is something I’ve used for a while for determining information about users’ browsers and installed plugins. To make it more useful to the public, I added a listing of links that I have found as useful web development resources. Let me know if there are any problems with it.
Virtual cube is something I finished a little while ago and have been revisiting every now and then, but I think it’s time to finally post it.
The application is a virtual cube (basically a Rubik’s cube). It displays a cube that the user can manipulate by rotating both the cube itself and its different levels. I have included support for different cube sizes and a few different scramble methods.
Currently the “solver,” it’s fake 
. It simply retraces the rotations of the user (as well as the scrambler) to return the cube to its solved state. I know someone who is making a solver that will solve any size cube (NxNxN) in Java, which I will port to ActionScript and incorporate in this application. This will also allow me to make a feature where the user can “paint” the cube by individually placing the stickers on the cube since the solver will then be able to solve a cube without needing to know the rotations it takes to get to that permutation.
It almost took a year, but here I am, alive and posting. School is out now, so I will be cleaning up my portfolio and posting some of the things I’ve been working on. Some of them are already up and running online, let me know if there are problems. 
Tetris is one of those games that I just had to make…because I can…and I did! I tried putting in a few different game modes and will probably add some more in the future as well as more challenges.