Create incredible particle effects with Partigen 2

Do you remember Partigen?

Andrew Fitzgerald from Desuade released the new version, of his amazing particle effects engine: Partigen 2.

Featuring over 120 exclusive preset effects, Partigen 2 is the first and only extension for Flash that let’s you to create complex particle effects in just a click.

The list of features is huge, so I am listing the ones I found most interesting:

• Full Package XML-Serialization
• Fully documented AS3 API
• Emitters can be created with either the IDE component or via ActionScript
• Particles can be any display object that inherits the Particle class
• Renderers can be shared across multiple Emitters
• Pools can handle the internal creation and storage of Particle objects in memory

You can read the full list of features here

The documentation is awesome, the best I’ve seen so far in a product like this one. You can access the full API documentation, and from this link you can access a 42 minutes long video covering the entire Partigen 2 component, and you can create beautiful effects using the component in less than a minute.

Anyway, we’re not here to talk about the component, but to test the AS3 API. Read more

PixelBlitz AS3 game framework

PixelBlitz Engine is an old game framework for Actionscript3 created by Richard Davey from Photon Storm.

As said, it’s not that new, there isn’t any documentation or tutorial or even a feature list.

So, you may wonder why should I write about it, considering it’s a bitmap-based framework just like Flixel, which has a better documentation.

Well, the main reason is the blog is mine :) … the second reason is PixelBlitz supports the Flash IDE, and this means you can use the library with Flash, while Flixel only supports Adobe Flex Builder or FlashDevelop.

In the downloadable package you can find at Google Code you can find some examples but they are incomplete… you will only find the .as files, without the .fla.

So I took the most promising example (in my opinion) and created a complete project, with the .fla file and all needed objects (well, just one object, but it’s everything you need to make it work).

This is the script, let the comments guide you through the entire process. Read more

Box2D tutorial for the absolute beginners – revamped

About a year ago I published a Box2D tutorial for the absolute beginners.

With 2.1 release, a lot of things changed, so it’s time to publish another tutorial for the absolute beginners.

In this tutorial we’ll cover needed libraries to import, world creation, debug draw and the creation of static and dynamic boxes and circles. And obviously the simulation itself

This is the movie we are going to make:

And this is the script used to do it: Read more

Box2DFlash 2.1a released – what changed

Some days ago Boris the Brave released the new version of the popular physics library.

There are some critical changes that won’t make old projects run in the new environment.

The most important ones are:

• It is now not necessary to specify a size for your world, it’ll always be large enough.
• Improved collisions system
• You must specify if a body is dynamic, no matter if its mass is greater than zero
• Fixtures now determine material properties of shapes, such as density, friction and so on

But I think an example will be more explicative than a thousand words, so I created a simple vehicle you can control with left and right arrow keys. It uses revolute joints and motors.

This is the code you would need in the old Box2D version Read more

Get detailed statistics about your Flash game with SWFStats

Are you looking for a fresh and complete tool to track how your game is performing?

Then SWFStats may be the API you need.

SWFStats is a Flash analytics software with a lot of features, some of them absolutely unique for this kind of software. Let’s see them:

• Easy integration
• Track views, playtime
• Tracks views and plays seperately – unique
• Public reports
• Detailed source/country reports – unique
• Distibution reports – unique
• Custom metrics / events
• Level metrics
• Unlimited data

The overall look and feel is very similar to Google Analytics, but we are talking about Flash games statistics, not website reports.

SWFStats provides clean, complete, fast and professional reports, as you can see from this video:

SWFStats also provides a completely transparent leaderboard service with no branding.

It can be integrated directly into your Facebook application, can be used to show global or site-specific scores, and you can easily delete and block cheaters.

SWFStats is currently in beta and during the beta is completely free. Once it will be officially released, you will be credited with an extra game you can use, after which you will have to decide if you wish to continue using the service for new games.

At the moment there isn’t any pricing plan, but the service looks very promising and I think you shouldn’t miss a try.

Games that Challenge the World Come2Play contest – $8,000 in prizes

Do you want to make something interesting out of the Come2Play multiplayer API tutorial?

Here it is your chance to win up to $5,000!!

Come2Play – Creators of the first white-label social gaming platform and multiplayer game API – are holding a contest, in conjunction with the LinkedIn Flash Game Developers group, for the development of turn based multiplayer games with prizes totaling $8,000.

In a gaming world where new games are launched and disappear just as quickly, multiplayer games with a social infrastructure are a huge hit amongst users; developing a loyal fan base that come back daily to play against each other and their friends.

Come2Play has developed this infrastructure and are inviting game developers to take advantage of it.

Come2Play is revitalizing the formula by allowing for correspondence challenges. With correspondence challenges, a player makes the first move in a game and then sends it to all their friends through email or their favorite social network. Each individual friend can then send back their next move. Each friend who responds starts a new game with the creator of the game. This gaming form provides a huge viral opportunity to game developers looking to expand the reach of their games.

In light of this initiative, Come2Play is launching their latest contest – The Games That Challenge the World Competition. Read more

Way of an Idea Box2D prototype – Step 3

Welcome to the 3rd part. In part 2 we allowed the player to draw the chalk track in a “paused” Box2D environment and then run the simulation.

Now it’s time to delete our chalk track.

A bit of theory: although the simulation is paused, the chalk bodies are already placed in the Box2D world. So we can easily select them with our old friend GetBodyAtMouse function.

Then we need to know whether the selected body is a chalk or not… we don’t want to delete other level assets or even the ball!!

So we must check if the userData of the selected body (that is the attached sprite) is a chalk. If true, we can remove the sprite from the stage and destroy the body.

This is the code: Read more

Flave, a new open source AS3 Verlet physics engine

Do you remember Luis Fernando Silva?

He released a Box2D platform engine some months ago, and now I am publishing his last work, a Verlet physics engine.

If you need more information about Verlet integration, check this post.

This is what Luis says:

« So, I was developing a small physics engine for a game of mine (Flash Physics Engine v2), and the thing started to get bigger and take shape of a real physics engine, or atleast with enough features to run a ragdoll simulation.

I’ve received feedback from some guys at FGL and so I decided it was time to release it as open source! After commenting each line of code as much as I could, after 2 weeks of bug-testing to remove some instability and after an afternoon coding some samples, I have here packed for you guys at the blog the v0.6b version!

As you can guess, it’s a verlet engine so it isn’t as stable as rigid-body engines like Box2D or Motor Engine, and the only real solid there is the particle primitive. Which is a small circle (how exciting!). But since your blog gets so many hits from all kinds of coders, I tought maybe (like with my other samples posted on your blog), some more skilled coder could improve it into something better! » Read more

Come2Play multiplayer API tutorial

Today I want to introduce you a Come2Play multiplayer API tutorial written by Emanuele Ornella from Mind the Move.

Emanuele is a Flash game developer and a board game designer too.

« After the development of my first two games Tokyo Train and Haunted house I am interested in development of a multiplayer game. For this reason I started to study the Come2Play API.

Links to the project: http://www.come2play.com/developer.asp

The goal of the tutorial is to show how to build a Tic Tac Toe game using these API.

The project can be downloaded from
www.mindthemove.com/blog/projects/TicTacToeC2P.zip

These API are basically used to have a communication between one or more clients (in Flash AS3) and the Come2Play server to allow a multiplayer game.

There are 2 type of functions: operations and callbacks.

I am going to use two classes.

- MainTTTC2P that extends ClientGameAPI. This is the main class the acts as controller

- TTTC2PViewer that is the viewer class. In some way, because the game is simple and it is for tutorial purpose, this will work as model as well.

I am not using an event driven approach as in the tutorials from come2play project because I found this confusing the main focus that is to learn how to use the basic API by come2play. Read more

Create amazing particle effects with Stardust Particle Engine

Time to learn something about particle systems… the term particle system refers to a computer graphics technique to simulate certain fuzzy phenomena, which are otherwise very hard to reproduce with conventional rendering techniques. Examples of such phenomena which are commonly replicated using particle systems include fire, explosions, smoke, moving water, sparks, falling leaves, clouds, fog, snow, dust, meteor tails, hair, fur, grass, or abstract visual effects like glowing trails, magic spells, etc.

If you want more information about particle systems, refer to official Wikipedia page.

Today I want to introduce you Allen Chou’s Stardust Particle Engine.

The main Stardust features are:

* Supports 2D and 3D.

* Easy to extend for custom initializers, actions, fields, deflectors, clocks, and 2D/3D renderers.

* Includes 3D extensions for ZedBox, Papervision3D, and ND3D.

* Includes a native 3D renderer.

* Supports masking (particles can be masked out for actions).

* Supports gravity and deflector simulation.

* Supports action triggers (for creating complex particle behaviors).

* Supports XML serialization.

On the official page you can find a lot of examples, and this is a quick example I made following the basic tutorial Read more

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