StomperNet now has a site map. Only it’s much bigger than just a site map, we’re calling it Stomper Universe! It contains all the pieces parts that make up StomperNet. It links to different sites, video series, tools, and more by giving a 3D interactive space to inspect the thumbnails and click through to the sites! It will help visitors navigate easily to all areas of StomperNet, whether they are new to them or old favorites.

So go check out the StomperNet Universe now!

Overview

Having things drift around or move randomly has always interested me. Having an animation that is never going to be the exact same thing is very exciting. The focus turns from key-ing exact animations to programming a feel and letting the animations take car of themselves! One type of seemingly random motion is Brownian motion. This gives the movement a random walk wandering look, it will just drift around with no real direction.

Steps

Step by step this process is very simple. In every random motion you create the random number, and apply it to the property. If you want constant random action (motion) rather than just random placement, you repeat that over and over.

1. Make a random number (random velocity)
2. Apply the random number (apply velocity to property)
3. Repeat (if needed)

To create a random number in actionscript, use Math.random(), which creates a random number between 0 and 1. Usually you’ll want to scale it to a range you want to use. If you want a number between 50 and 100, you’d do Math.random() * 50 + 50. *50 to scale it to 0-50, and + 50 to bring it up to 50 – 100. Also if we want to get a 100 range around 0 (-50 – 50) we would do Math.random() * 100 – 50. In the code below I’ve abstracted this to Math.random() * this.randomRange – this.randomRange/2.

Example

Here I’ve got dots created and placed randomly, with randomly set scale and alpha. On every frame each dot has a random velocity applied to it’s x and y coordinates.
The yellow dot is the simple example (code below) and the rest are included in the complex example below.

Actionscript

Simple Example:

Complex example:

Download

randomMotion.fla

Overview

In flash you can have text areas that are rendered as html. You can also apply formatting styles to this html. This will show a simple example on how to apply css to html text in flash. I’ll do a simple anchor tag style to show you the ropes. We’ll style a link to be underlined and then when you hover or mouse over it, we’ll change the color. It’s a design style that is widely used online in html, but flash doesn’t natively do it. As a matter of fact, flash doesn’t even natively underline links.

Steps

1. Import TextField.StyleSheet
2. create a style sheet object: var myCSS:StyleSheet = new StyleSheet();
3. Specify your styles: myCSS.setStyle(“a:link”, {color:’#0000CC’,textDecoration:’underline’});
4. Ensure that the text box is html enabled: myHTML.htmlText = myHTMLText;
5. Apply the style sheet object to your html text box: myHTML.styleSheet = myCSS;

Example

Actionscript

Download

open source flashhtmlcss.zip

Add this to the list of things I should have already known!

Story

I’ve got an html enabled text box and was trying to devise a way that I could have a hyperlink anchor tag not link to a webpage but actually do something flash. It didn’t seem possible, and I looked through all the different html css combinations I could think of. I finally resorted to trying to use some component like Deng or FlashML. FlashML had a smaller footprint and seemed to do more what I wanted, so I started investigating it. To my dismay, the support for it was few and far between. I found an older version that came with an example file and then a newer one with some documentation but no example and I found no examples any where else. So Lee, if you ever read this, some new examples could be nice. In the documentation I was reading about a functino called AddASFunction and the example html line was very interesting:

I started looking through the rest of the documentation to find this asfunction use. But all it had was:
The href attribute can include the asfunction string which allows the link provided by the anchor to call a function in Flash. More of this can be found within the addASFunction definition in this help document.
I knew I was on to something, asfunction. So a quick google search and I found the official doc! I was shocked that I had the tool to do this the whole time! Well, shocked and feeling like an idiot for never having heard of it before. I knew it could be done somehow, but had no idea that it was already a feature of htmlText in flash! So now that you know my embarrassing story, I’ll let you in on the secret.

Overview

In flash, you can allow html text within a text area. You either set the text html property as true with actionscript (my_txt.html = true;) or click the ‘Render text as HTML’ button in the properties window of the text area. You cannot enable html text on static text areas however. You can have links and various html elements (but not full html). Usually links have a url in the href attribut of the anchor tag, but flash will read a special value of ‘asfunction’ which specifies that an actionscript function is to be called rather than a url. The correct syntax is asfunction followed by a colon and then the name of the actionscript function to be called, optionally followed by a comma and a possible single argument to be passed to the specified function (href=”asfunction:functionName,argument”).

Steps

1. Enable html in the text box.
2. Have your function (ex: functionName) ready to be called from the html link.
3. Give the href attribute of the anchor tag a property “asfunction:functionName,argument” Notice that the official documentation calls for spaces after punctuation, but any space you put after the colon (:) or comma (,) will be sent to the function in the argument, or will expect a space in the function name and give you a headache.

Example

In this example I’ve got an html enabled text box with 4 links. The first is a standard link (I hope you know what that does). The next link calls an actionscript function with asfunction. The third link sends a single argument to another function. And the last link sends multiple arguments to yet another function. Wait! Multiple arguments? I thought I said only one was supported, well this example shows how to send multiple arguments disguised as a single param and parse them. It’s pretty simple actually.

Actionscript

HTML

Download Source

asfunction.zip

I’ve had a couple special requests to explain flashvars and how to use it and show it in action.

Overview

The property “FlashVars” can be used to import root level variables to the flash movie or swf. The flashvars propery is used in codes for embedding flash in the html page. The string of variables passed in as flashvars, will be imported into the top level of the movie when it is first instantiated. Variables are created before the first frame of the SWF is played. The format of the string is a set of name=value combinations separated by ampersand (&) symbols.

Steps

1. Include the flashvars property in your embed codes and voila! You have these variables to use in your swf.
2. That’s the one step

Code

HTML Embed Codes

Actionscript using flashvars

Example

Page 1 (var1=val1&var2=val2&var3=val3)
Page 2 (var1=here&var2=are&var3=my&var4=flashvars)

Source

Download the html files and the fla and swf in this flashvars.zip