And yes, it runs perfectly fine. I’ve run it at 60+ FPS with 7,000 particles, but that actually isn’t the limitation (unless your particles are crunching heavy math for eg movement). Rather it’s the size and number of sprites that we’re colliding with the particles. Click the image below to pop a lightbox with the demo:

To squeeze all the juice out of Flash I employed a couple tricks. The first was the particles themselves–they’re blitted to a single bitmap which is used as the source image for grabbing collision data from. The particles are also drawn with the raster engine in Flash (multiple setPixel32() ops to give the illusion of a line… a choppy one anyway) instead of the vector renderer (lineTo()). The second trick was to only grab a Vector of pixels from the regions we cared about (within sprite boundaries) every so often, then to loop through the Vector and test it against our desired conditions. Also, since the particle bitmap is more sparse than our sprites as far as opaque pixels go, we test the particle bitmap first, resulting in a lot fewer passes on the first round of conditional statements.

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What I wanted was a fast, seamless way to transition from clickable thumbnail on a zui canvas while dynamically loading the content of whatever the thumbnail represented. I just loved the idea of loading content while zooming into a thumbnail without loading a higher-res image to take its place, then having the pixelated thumbnail disintegrate to reveal the actual content that got loaded during the transition. Anyway, it was the best idea that I could come up with for my application, so here we are.

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A new section is up on the projects page where I put classes I’ve written that I think might be useful to others. People seemed to like my post on bitmap text so I released the class I use to do the boring work for me.

Usage:

// Optional format
var format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
format.font = "Verdana";
format.size = 10;
var bmt:BitmapText = new BitmapText(300, 500, true, format, 12, 100); // only width and height are required
bmt.addText("This is html text, which can't be mixed with regular text.", true); // set last param to false for regular text
this.addChild(bmt.render());

More instructions/explanations are in the class itself.

I’ve been messing around with particles, particularly the blitted, traily kind I guess. Click on the image below to pop and watch it. Grab the source at the bottom and let me know if you do something cool with it.

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Recently I’ve had the need to scale a dynamic text field which was fed by XML. Readability after scaling was not important, but it did have to look good (it’s for a full Flash site). However, scaling the MovieClip that the text field was in would cause some pretty chaotic behavior with the text — the text would try to scale with its parent but in doing so would shift around spastically until the parent MC settled into a new scale. This was unacceptable.

A quick google didn’t yield anything relevant, so I was left to my own devices. I remembered being able to draw pixels to a BitmapData object while writing my game in order to improve performance, so I figured I’d see if I could just copy the pixels from the text field and “bake” it into a bitmap.

Turns out you can. In fact, Adobe had already done this in the help files and it’s actually extremely easy. Check it out:

var tf:TextField = new TextField();
tf.text = "bitmap text";
var myBitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(80, 20);
myBitmapData.draw(tf);
var bmp:Bitmap = new Bitmap(myBitmapData);
this.addChild(bmp);

No sweat right? Anyway, since I didn’t find any help on this anywhere else (granted, I didn’t look very hard), I thought I’d share this little adventure of mine. Hope it’s helpful.