Another 3D example of the ParticleSun particle engine takes the shape of everyone’s favorite Windows 95 screensaver (with an added kick). Before watching, hold onto your desks and get ready to warp into lightspeed.

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Mr. Cloud has a tough job. He’s too small to keep all the flowers happy. It seems that when he rains on one flower, the others get sad. See for yourself.

I’ll make a few more demos, then get to work on an API. Get the ParticleSun code.

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I’ve started work on a 3D (or 2D) particle engine for Actionscript 3 that I’m calling “ParticleSun” (thanks Tim). It’s got a pretty diverse (and growing) list of things that it can do, so I’ll be putting out examples here and there to show its diversity. If you’re interested in helping with its development, or you’d like to grab the code (documentation is coming, but it’s fully commented in ASDoc), I’ve set up a Google Code repository for it.

This is an abnormal first example of its usage, but here are some bubbles. Notice the bubbles that are closer to the screen move faster than the bubbles farther away. This isn’t voodoo, my friends…it’s the third dimension.

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In my last post I mentioned that I was going to start working on a visual level builder for Citrus Engine. Well, over the past few weeks, I’ve started throwing something together in Adobe AIR that allows you to do just that. It’s called Architect. Once Architect becomes intuitive enough, the possibilities for it are quite exciting, although I don’t want to make any promises that I can’t follow up on.

For now, I’ve posted a video demo of Architect, where you can watch me visually build a small level, then play it. I’m hoping soon to put together a package where you can easily do the same; I just want to make sure that it’s usable enough that I’m not flooded with bug reports. There will be more videos, and possibly downloads to follow as I continue on this project.

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Sure, it’s got a new background, some new Characters, and a new powerup, but the real big stuff is in the back end on this update. There are some speed increases, as well as some more spawning and managing goodness. There’s also a new easy way to create Powerups. With that said, the new things that you’ll notice are:

• New Platform type - It’s called the floor platform, because it can only be a floor and not a ceiling. You can jump up through it, but not down through it.
• Camera Zones - As part of the level building process, you can create camera triggers, that control which axis to scroll the camera on: X, Y, or both. You can even ask the camera to follow something else, such as an enemy or a missile.
• Flying enemy - This enemy is quite diverse. You can ask him to fly in any direction, at any speed, for any distance. Then, after you jump on his head, you can make him lose his wings and walk around like a normal guy.
• Punching Powerup - Press D if you have the powerup, to turn into a fist and kill enemies from any angle. The fist is just one execution of the “punching powerup”.
• Invincibility - Invincibility can be used multipe ways. In this demo, it’s used if you get hurt but you have a powerup. You’ll lose your powerup, but become invincible for developer-determined amount of time. Invincibility is also executed when you turn into a fist.

The demo is at a pretty good spot to where I believe that I’m going to put its structure aside and start building a level builder. Then I can put the power of the Citrus Engine in your hands, and let you be a part of the next cool Flash game.

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Saw this comment on a news.com post, and thought it was right on:

We are only kidding ourselves if we think we can live in a world where our actions are not tracked. Information about personal activity is the grease that keeps our information economy humming. Knowing what you buy, where you shop, what you watch is the only way to keep our economy efficient and our prosperity growing. I am tracked every time I buy something — I use my credit card. I am tracked even as I write this sentence. If I weren’t tracked in this way, our information economy would collapse under its own inefficiency. Instead of pretending we can avoid being tracked, we should have a conversation about how to track activity in an open, ethical way that does not get in the way of free market competition.

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I’ve recently been experimenting with efficient methods of scrolling large display objects (such as sprites, movieclips, or bitmaps) in AS3 for certain projects. I think I’ve built a pretty solid (and easy to implement) solution that should save time on redraws.

Basically, the bitmapData object cuts the background up into stage-sized chunks, and tiles them. Then it uses the the holder sprite’s position to choose which tiles need to be shown. Using this method, I believe that redraw time should be significantly cut down for huge multi-thousand pixel backgrounds.

Let me know if my theory is incorrect.

You can download the source here.

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