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No Postcards: Away3D rants

No Postcards: Away3D rants

Been busy lately working on a card game. The display relies heavily on postcards-in-space 2.5D effect, so early on I had to make a choice of what libraries to use. Starling is my go-to framework, but it did not have any 3D display classes (only a few weeks ago 1.6 was released with a some 3D support) so I decided to use a layered Starling + Away3D display.

I ended up with 2D display list in…

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Closing 2014: ANE's and beyond

Closing 2014: ANE’s and beyond

No, this is not a post to recap the year.

Being a professional developer, I tend to measure technologies by their usefulness.

For cross-platform app development this year, I mostly used Adobe AIR and Air Native extensions (ANEs) with moderate success. For almost  every problem there is an ANE. The fact is that ANEs are now plentiful and easy to find, with repositories like ASGameGears and Distriqt

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Sharing Textures between Starling and Away3D

Sharing Textures between Starling and Away3D

In a previous post Recipe for a Mixed App with Starling and Away3D I discussed how to get started with creating a mixed app with both 2D and 3D layers. Here I will talk about how manage and share resources in the mixed app.

Sharing Resources and Textures

So now we have code that places display object on both 3D and 2D layers. As commonly done is a starling app, there is a resource manager that…

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Recipe for a Mixed App with Starling and Away3D

Recipe for a Mixed App with Starling and Away3D

In my first attempt to add 3D to my Starling app I struggled with many problems that seemed trivial. I used Starling for a few good years and consider it one of the most powerful 2D frameworks in the industry. Coupled with the Feathers UI library its a winning stack, and it has a vibrant community that provides excellent support.

However, it’s limited to 2D.

So following one of the tutorials in…

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Spotlight effect in Starling

Spotlight effect in Starling

How to create the ‘spotlight’ effect in Starling for an entire container, without using up huge amounts of memory.

The problem: in your Starling app, you need to display your main screen as usual, but with a circular spotlight over it, while the rest of the screen is darkened. This is usually done to highlight an element and direct the user to tap it.

There are many ways to achieve that, but…

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AnimSprite for Starling: a better MovieClip alternative

About a year ago I posted here about character animation with sprite sheets, including sample code that included the AnimSprite class. Lately all of my projects are using Starling.

As a new framework, I half expected Starling to drop legacy classes that…

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Tip: How To Take a Screenshot in Starling

Developers that are used to Flash take it for granted that bitmaps can be accessed since a Bitmap display objects has a bitmapData readily available. In Starling, however, that is not the case. Starling images are using textures to hold the pixel data,…

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Practical use of Starling + ANE in a mobile game Project

I Recently completed and deployed Magic Slots, a mobile game for iOS and Android…

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Tile Shaker is now Free

A year ago I made a mobile picture puzzle game with AIR, written entirely in AS3 . Back then I…

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