Developers who have been using Google Analytics for any time can appreciate the flexibility and power behind some of the graphing software it offers. I recently found myself wondering just how they get the incredibly usable effect they have, so I began tinkering with some Actionscript and soon found myself with a very workable base [...]

Anyone who has had the experience of trying to time events for web via client side scripting before can readily appreciate the power and ease of using the robust Timer class in Actionscript 3. Similar to the idea of using JavaScript’s setTimout and/or setInterval methods, we can use this class to set a timer for [...]

One of the most common questions I am asked is also one of the biggest problems I see in code as I read it: lack of optimization. I often have people asking questions about how they can consolidate the generic actions they want multiple objects to have access to perform without duplicating the code. In [...]

One of my biggest gripes in Flash games to date is that of simulated motion that is by no means realistic. True, this may be acceptable for some games, but as a whole, there is something that just doesn’t feel right when your side scrolling shooter plane moves up one unit when you press UP, [...]

Continuing my personal studies on simulating true gravitational acceleration in Actionscript, a couple days ago I arrived at one of the more conceptually challenging tasks I have tackled to date: the pendulum. I say conceptually challenging, because I tried to create a realistic pendulum in Flash a year or so ago and gave up after [...]

So, I may have bitten off a bit more than I could chew in this post, but it is something that has been an intriguing thought to me for some time: how can I simulate the effect, or pull, of gravitational forces between different objects on my stage? Obviously, if you read my previous post, [...]

Once again, the OOP support in AS3 makes for simplifying some previously complicated effects down to a simple implementation. In this post, I want to give an overview of something that nearly anyone who ever deals in manual animation will need to figure out: circular rotation and/or orbiting around another object. To assist in this, [...]

Many of you have been waiting patiently for this post, and let me say that I have worked many hours to get this where it is today. I wanted to get my code to the point where it was solid enough that I would actually publish something with it, and I believe it is there. [...]

I decided to take a slightly different approach to Phase III of this series than I had initially intended, since there was a little restructuring that needed to be done in order to support a cleaner and more efficient system. The intent was to have this post cover the basic solution to the towers themselves, [...]

A couple days ago, I decided I wanted to teach myself a few movement algorithms withing Flash using Actionscript 3. I started with simple Event.ENTER_FRAME event trapping to move an object across the screen, and then I decided to make it a bit more interesting. What I ended up with is this small target practice [...]