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23 Mar 2009

How to use fullscreen in AS3 | Stage Display State Tutorial

Author: Evan Mullins | Filed under: tutorial

fullscreen_tut png
One of the best features of the flash player if you’re doing video is the fullscreen functionality. It has been a question I’ve heard repeatedly. There are limits to what you can do in fullscreen. Such as minimal keyboard support while in fullscreen. But it is perfect for a video player! Who doesn’t want to see a video expanded to full screen mode?

There are a couple things to consider when coding fullscreen into your flash. Remember the hard coded “Press Esc to exit full screen mode.” that Adobe has placed into the flash player. This is untouchable by developers, and the function returns to normal stage display state. So we call the function to go fullscreen, but the exit fullscreen has already been written for us. This can pose a problem though, when we need the player to do something when we exit fullscreen, that is when we want it to do something more than the generic black box function adobe includes.

Steps

  1. specify stage properties
  2. full screen button and listeners
  3. stage fullscreenEvent listener
  4. (functions for each)
  5. allowfullscreen = true

Example

Get Adobe Flash player

1. Stage properties exist that allow us to specify what type of fullscreen we want.  We can have the swf scale to fit the fullscreen area (StageScaleMode.SHOW_ALL), not scale at all (StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE), skew to fit fullscreen (StageScaleMode.EXACT_FIT), and scale to fill fullscreen area (Stage.ScaleMode.NO_BORDER).  We may also edit the alignment of the stage in the fullscreen area; in this example I’m using TOP, but refer to documentation for more options

2. Adobe has placed restrictions on when a swf can enter fullscreen, and has deemed that it must result from a user interaction, a mouse click or keystroke. So create your buttons (or keyListeners). I prefer to have one button to enter fullscreen and another to exit, and have them both call the same function to toggle fullscreen. It gives a clearer communication to the user. I then control the visibility of these buttons depending on the current display state of the stage.

3. Another listener to watch the stage dispaly state. stage.addEventListener(FullScreenEvent.FULL_SCREEN, onFullscreenChange); This will fire every time the stage display state changes. We need this because as I mentioned earlier, when entering fullscreen we use our own function, but the ‘hit esc to exit fullscreen’ functionality is built into the flash player, we can’t update our stage layout or button visibility without watching to catch when the display state is changed. Using this method we can update our stage layout any and every time.

4. Of course flesh out the fullscreenToggle function to include anything else you need.

5. Lastly, for a SWF file embedded in an HTML page, the HTML code to embed Flash Player must include a ‘param’ tag and ‘embed’ attribute with the name ‘allowFullScreen’ and value ‘true’, like this:

<object>
    ...
    <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
    <embed ... allowfullscreen="true" />
</object>

The allowFullScreen tag enables full-screen mode in the player. If you do everything else right and don’t include this in your embed codes, fullscreen will not work. The default value is false if this attribute is omitted. Note the viewer must at least have Flash Player version 9,0,28,0 installed to use full-screen mode. Also note that  the simple (ctrl + enter) testing your movie in flash will not allow fullscreen either, you must use the debug tester (ctrl + shift + enter) … or go open the published swf in flash player.

Actionscript

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stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.SHOW_ALL;
stage.align = StageAlign.TOP;

var stageDisplayAdjustCounter:uint = 0;

fsb.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, fullscreenToggle);
ssb.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, fullscreenToggle);
stage.addEventListener(FullScreenEvent.FULL_SCREEN, onFullscreenChange);

fsb.buttonMode = true;
ssb.buttonMode = true;

//fullscreen buttons need this to adjust the stage display state.
//pressing escape to exit fullscreen bypasses this function
function fullscreenToggle(e:MouseEvent = null):void {
status.appendText(stageDisplayAdjustCounter+". fullscreenToggle from "+stage.displayState+"\n");
//normal mode, enter fullscreen mode
if (stage.displayState == StageDisplayState.NORMAL){
//set stage display state
stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN;
}
//fullscreen mode, enter normal mode
else if (stage.displayState == StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN){
//set stage display state
stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.NORMAL;
}
//here we subtract 1 from the counter because it has already incremented (in onFullscreenChange) when we set the display state above

status.appendText((stageDisplayAdjustCounter-1)+". fullscreenToggle to "+stage.displayState+"\n");
status.scrollV = status.maxScrollV;

}

//this function is called every and anytime the stage display state is adjusted
//either by pressing our buttons or
function onFullscreenChange(e:FullScreenEvent = null):void {
status.appendText(stageDisplayAdjustCounter+". onFullscreenChange\n");
status.scrollV = status.maxScrollV;
if (stage.displayState == StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN) {
fsb.visible = false;
ssb.visible = true;
}
else {
fsb.visible = true;
ssb.visible = false;
}

stageDisplayAdjustCounter++;
}

onFullscreenChange();

Source

Download fullscreen_tut.fla file

To view the full fullscreen tutorial go here: How to use fullscreen in AS3 | Stage Display State Tutorial

fullscreen_keyboard_bug_thumbnail
Sucks when you seem to have a bug in your code somewhere so you dissect your code over and over and are convinced that according to your code, everything should be fine, so you come back later thinking fresher eyes will see it, and still can’t find the cause, and then resort to debugging with various trace statements…

I’ve been developing a custom flash player in as3. Fullscreen and all those bells and whistles… I could test locally and eveything was beautiful… but then upload and test in the browser and when I would go into fullscreen mode, the video would pause. Pretty annoying bug! So I’d go through my code and examine anywhere a call to pause the video (there are only two): pressing the play/pause button and pressing the spacebar (keyboard shortcut). I couldn’t find any correalation. I was thinking adobe must be doing some crazy security things when going into fullscreen… but no, no other video player I’ve seen does this!
After commenting out my keyboard events, the bug is fixed! But I still can’t use the spacebar to pause/play. I love this functionality for usability. Isn’t that pretty standard for video? space to pause, it’s like second nature to me.

Does entering fullscreen really trigger a keyboard event equivalent to pressing my spacebar!? Sure enough. how much sense does that make, but it gets better! I had a friend test this swf and it worked fine for him. No pause on fullscreen! Wha!? Using good ole IE7… So yes, it’s a browser specific actionscript bug, firefox even! That was one of the things I liked about flash initially, not too much to mess with as far as cross browser issues once you get the swf embedded in the html, or so I thought.

So after playing with booleans to try to control when the keyboard events will be working.

Has anyone experienced this or another issue that just left you baffled, even after you figured out the bug?!

Well, I’ve done the right thing, I’ve posted about it to hopefully help anyone else having this issue. I created a test case file to rule out anything else in my code and make sure I’m not crazy.

Get Adobe Flash player

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stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;

fsb.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, fullscreenToggle);
ssb.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, fullscreenToggle);
stage.addEventListener(FullScreenEvent.FULL_SCREEN, onFullscreenChange);
fsb.buttonMode = true;
ssb.buttonMode = true;
onFullscreenChange();

function fullscreenToggle(e:MouseEvent = null):void {
    //normal mode, enter fullscreen mode
    if (stage.displayState == StageDisplayState.NORMAL){
        //set stage display state
        stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN;
    }
    //fullscreen mode, enter normal mode
    else if (stage.displayState == StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN){
        //set stage display state
        stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.NORMAL;
    }
    onFullscreenChange();
}
function onFullscreenChange(e:FullScreenEvent = null):void {
    if (stage.displayState == StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN) {
        tracer("full screen");
        fsb.visible = false;
        ssb.visible = true;
    }
    else {
        tracer("small screen");
        fsb.visible = true;
        ssb.visible = false;
    }
    tracer("toggle to "+stage.displayState);
}
stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN,keyDownListener);

function keyDownListener(e:KeyboardEvent) {
    tracer("keyboard: keyCode: "+ e.keyCode.toString());
}
var tracerwindow:TextField;
function tracer( ...args){
        if (tracerwindow == null){
            tracerwindow = new TextField();
            tracerwindow.width = stage.stageWidth/2;
            tracerwindow.height = stage.stageHeight;
            tracerwindow.multiline = true;
            addChild(tracerwindow);
        }
       
        for (var i:uint = 0; i < args.length; i++) {
            tracerwindow.appendText(args[i].toString() + " ");
        }
        tracerwindow.appendText("\n");
        trace(args);
}

other places that I’ve found this mentioned that helped me understand what was going on:

http://dreamweaverforum.info/actionscript-3/123202-keyboard-event-full-screen.html

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-814

19 Mar 2009

Celebration – And then there were TWO

Author: Evan Mullins | Filed under: personal

ultrasound 8 weeks

Great news, Happy to share that Krista and I are expecting the newest addition to the family!

October 29th 2009! Is the day, it will be an exciting Halloween to say the least!

Thanks everyone for your support and happy thoughts. Here’s the picture proof that there aren’t eight in there. Just one.

Any advice for transitioning from 1 to 2 kids? What to expect?

27 Feb 2009

#tweetcoding

Author: Evan Mullins | Filed under: portfolio

If you didn’t know, Grant Skinner has introduced an interesting competition called tweetcoding!

Mixing as3 with the 140 character limit of tweeting he calls for the community to tweet visually interesting source code.

I’ve played a bit with it and tweeted my first #tweetcoding entry! See more tweetcoding here

1
g.clear(),o[++i]={x:mouseX,y:mouseY,c:r()*0xFFFFFF};for each(k in o)k.c*=.9,g.beginFill(k.c),ls(i,k.c),g.drawCircle(k.x,k.y,1),g.endFill();

Want to see my entry? Here it is!

tweetcode_circlecube_a png

10 Feb 2009

Random Movement | Brownian revisited for as3

Author: Evan Mullins | Filed under: tutorial

I have had feedback that certain random movements I program are a bit “jumpy”. Such as my old brownian movement tutorial and I really noticed it in my last tutorial, the parallax 3d depth effect tutorial. I’ve been thinking about it and looking around at some code and now have this updated brownian movement example! Updated for as3 as well as making it less jumpy.

as3brownian thumb pngFirst I’ll explain what I’ve found to be the reason of the jumpiness. And then explain and show what can be done to make this movement be more smooth.

So to examine the old jumpy code. Jump back to the first version post here. I think my technique was well thought out here, but the application was poor. It was recalculating the velocities every single frame and then incrementing the coordinate positions by the newly calculated velocities… This is where the jumpiness comes in. Even though the random value was named velocity, it didn’t actually affect the dot’s velocity, it was just a variable that stored the random value used to move the current x/y coordinates.
To help the animation be more smooth, the velocity needs to be more smooth. The velocity, rather than calculating it fresh each frame, should be randomly modified each frame. And then the new velocity will calculate the new ‘random’ position. Another addition is to introduce another force to dampen the velocity over time, so things don’t get too crazy…

Steps:

  1. Modify velocity randomly
  2. With velocity and current position, calculate a new position
  3. Dampen the velocity

Example:

Here I have a velocity for the x coordinate as well as the y. I’m also experimenting with a z velocity. This adjusts the alpha and scale for depth perception. It doesn’t actually edit the depth or layer the dot shows up on the stage however… keyword here: experimenting. :)

Get Adobe Flash player

Actionscript:

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//number of balls
var numBalls:uint = 50;
var defaultBallSize:uint = 30;

//init
makeDots();

function makeDots():void {
    //create desired number of balls
    for (var ballNum:uint=0; ballNum<numBalls; ballNum++){
        var c1:Number = randomColor();
        var c2:Number = randomColor();
       
        //create ball
        var thisBall:MovieClip = new MovieClip();
        thisBall.graphics.beginFill(c1, .9);
        thisBall.graphics.lineStyle(defaultBallSize/3, c2, .9);
        thisBall.graphics.drawCircle(defaultBallSize, defaultBallSize, defaultBallSize);
        thisBall.graphics.endFill();
       
        addChild(thisBall);
       
        //coordinates
        thisBall.x = Math.random() * stage.stageWidth;
        thisBall.y = Math.random() * stage.stageHeight;
        //percieved depth
        thisBall.ballNum = ballNum;
        thisBall.depth = ballNum/numBalls;
        thisBall.scaleY = thisBall.scaleX = thisBall.alpha = ballNum/numBalls;
        //velocity
        thisBall.vx = 0;
        thisBall.vy = 0;
        thisBall.vz = 0;
       
        //ball animation
        thisBall.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, animateBall);
    }
}

var dampen:Number = 0.95;
var maxScale:Number = 1.3;
var minScale:Number = .3;
var maxAlpha:Number = 1.3;
var minAlpha:Number = .3;
function animateBall(e:Event):void{
    var thisBall:Object = e.target;
    //apply randomness to velocity
    thisBall.vx += Math.random() * 0.2 - 0.1;
    thisBall.vy += Math.random() * 0.2 - 0.1;
    thisBall.vz += Math.random() * 0.002 - 0.001;
   
    thisBall.x += thisBall.vx;
    thisBall.y += thisBall.vy;
    thisBall.scaleX = thisBall.scaleY += thisBall.vz;
    thisBall.alpha += thisBall.vz;
    thisBall.vx *= dampen;
    thisBall.vy *= dampen;
    thisBall.vz *= dampen;
   
    if(thisBall.x > stage.stageWidth) {
        thisBall.x = 0 - thisBall.width;
    }
    else if(thisBall.x < 0 - thisBall.width) {
        thisBall.x = stage.stageWidth;
    }
    if(thisBall.y > stage.stageHeight) {
        thisBall.y = 0 - thisBall.height;
    }
    else if(thisBall.y < 0 - thisBall.height) {
        thisBall.y = stage.stageHeight;
    }
   
    if (thisBall.scaleX > maxScale){
        thisBall.scaleX = thisBall.scaleY = maxScale;
    }
    else if (thisBall.scaleX < minScale){
        thisBall.scaleX = thisBall.scaleY = minScale;
    }
    if (thisBall.alpha > maxAlpha){
        thisBall.alpha = maxAlpha;
    }
    else if (thisBall.alpha < minAlpha){
        thisBall.alpha = minAlpha;
    }
}

function randomColor():Number{
    return Math.floor(Math.random() * 16777215);
}

Source:

as3random_brownian_movement.fla