Spriter is a tool for creating sprite animations out of multiple images. By moving, rotating, and scaling them over a timeline you can create much more efficient 2D animations than traditional full-frame animation. While Flash animation has worked similarly for years, it’s largely incompatible with the Stage3D API that is quickly becoming mandatory to achieve adequate performance. Today’s article will show you how to use Spriter in your Stage3D-powered Flash app via a Starling and some custom classes I’ve created.
Posts Tagged stage3d
Context loss with Stage3D is real and will instantly take down your 3D scene. It’s an unavoidable problem, but one that many programmers still don’t handle gracefully. How does it occur? Why does it matter? How can you handle it so your app continues to function well? Today’s article explores the topic of Stage3D context loss so you can keep your 3D scene alive and well.
I’ve mentioned the concept of VRAM (video memory) in a few articles, but I still find constant confusion among readers of this site as well as coworkers and colleagues in day-to-day work with Stage3D. Today’s article will hopefully clear up the differences, dispel some myths, and help you make the best use of both of them.
Using Adobe’s new compressed texture format should be as simple as replacing some PNG and JPEG images with ATFs their tools created, but it’s not. If you don’t know what you’re doing, the process can be pretty confusing. Today’s article walks you through the steps to upgrade a Stage3D-using app to make use of ATF textures.
ATF textures already contain a lot of compression: DXT, ETC, or PVRTC texture compression plus JPEG-XR and LZMA for good measure. What more can we do? As it turns out, we can drastically reduce the file size by simply applying Zlib or LZMA compression to the files. Read on for some samples with file size breakdowns.
Adobe’s newly-released ATF tools have introduced an all-new image file format: ATF, the Adobe Texture Format. It’s not every day we get a new image format. After all, PNG was introduced in 1996 and JPEG in 1992. For various reasons I discussed last week, you probably have good reasons to use this new image format. So let’s dive into it a bit and see what kinds of images it produces.
Adobe has recently released tools to allow us to use compressed textures with the Stage3D API via their ATF tools. What are these compressed textures? Why would we want to use them? How do they work? Today’s article is an overview of compressed textures covering these questions and more.
If you’ve ever used Instagram, you know about post-processing: full-screen effects applied just before the final image is shown to the user. With Stage3D, we can do similar effects in real time with our 3D or 2D scenes! Today’s article will introduce you to the basic concepts behind post-processing effects and show the code for a few simple post-filters. Read on!
Textures are usually simple bitmaps, but what if you wanted to use something more dynamic? How about a SWF you’ve created in Flash Professional? How about a Sprite or MovieClip you’ve created in code? Today’s article will show you how to do just that.
Today’s article presents a collection of procedurally-generated 3D shapes for Stage3D. In addition to spheres and cylinders, I’ve added circles, pyramids, cubes, and quads to the mix and refactored them all to inherit from a new Shape3D class. Read on for the full source code for all of these as well as a demo app.