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Pixel Art Drawing Application (v2)

As promised, a new update of the pixel art drawing application is posted up here. It now has a color picker, a grid to toggle on and off, a scalable drawing area, and a clear all button. You can create some pretty nice pixel art and pixel fonts. I still plan to develop this a lot further. Please comment on any suggestions you might have and I would love to see anything you create using this. Please feel free to mess around with it below, take a screenshot of what you made, and send it to my email (please email me first through my website).

Pixel Art Drawing Application

Another experiment; pretty simple and basic at this stage, but I plan to implement many more features to create a kind of pixel art drawing application. I think it could be really fun, so come back some time to see more versions/updates on this!

Flash Tip: Casting

Casting can be very useful and in some cases, necessary. AS3 has a system of strict datatyping, much like AS2, but now even more strict. Using casting, you can transform one datatype into another, so to speak. For example, if you are receiving a string in Flash, say “item07″ and you need to use the number from that string, you can extract that using String methods and then cast the string into a uint datatype or Number datatype. Here is a working example of why you would do this, in AS3 code:

var str:String = "item07";
str = str.substr(4);
str += 3;
trace(str); // this will give the result of str being 073

var str:String = "item07";
str = str.substr(4);
var res:uint = uint(str) + 3;
trace(res); // this will give the result of res being 10

The uint(str) is where casting is used. The way you cast a datatype is you wrap it in a different datatype. For example, you can use MovieClip(value), Number(value), String(value), etc. Also, sometimes in situations, I have to use casting to refer to a movie clip in the parent clip, …MovieClip(parent).myMovieClip…
I hope you found this useful, thanks.

Old mouse fun!

This is also an old one, done in AS2. There’s nothing that special about it, except maybe the curveTo method of getting the mouse wire to follow with the mouse like that. But like I said, not that special, I just find it really creative and amusing.

Old colorful lineTo experiment

Now this is an old one - done way back in the day of AS2. What is it and why did I do it? I think every great flasher has spent some time, or should!, on John’s (of RED Interactive) Self Titled portfolio site. It’s incredible and I kept wondering how that circular menu was possible.. So I started to mess around in Flash with circles, trigonometry, lineTo, etc. So here’s the little copycat version of the grand master’s design.

Image blur / focus

Just a little experiment; pretty random and small. I guess it could be used for a cool menu of sorts. It is made with only a couple lines of code. It is created with the original image being blurred, then on top of that layer the same image but without the blur filter, which is masked by a rectangular movie clip, which follows the mouse with a delay effect; very simple. Obviously, this could be taken much further, made to be dynamic, introduce other elements, etc.

5 Flash Tips

FPS

It is good to have a FPS (frames per second) value that is not too slow, but not too fast. The default value is 12, which is too slow. It’s too slow, because when you create animations on the timeline, it will look slow and blocky. I know many expert flashers keep it at 24 fps, which is a good speed. It is fast enough so that the animations will look smooth, but slow enough so that the user’s computer won’t lag. For example, if there are a ton of animations playing at once, the flash player might lag because it takes a lot of CPU to play. Further more if the animations are frame based and the fps value is jacked up to something like 40 or 50, it will lag a lot more. However, the great people over at Adobe are constantly working at performance, among other things, and are setting impressive milestones of increasing Flash’s performance and CPU usage. There was a major bump in performance from Flash 8 and AS2 to Flash CS3 and AS3. When using AS3, the Flash Player uses a entire new virtual engine to process the file and code, which is much better than the old versions and engine because it is much more strict and streamlined. But I always keep my FPS value at 30. As long as you keep the processing usage in mind, I advise just finding a value that you are comfortable with.

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5 Freelance Tips

Branding and self-promotion / marketing

When you work for yourself you really need to sell yourself!  As wrong as this may sound, it is true. Word of mouth and reputation is probably the best way of getting your name and your services around, earning you new clients.  There’s tons of things you can do to get out there: a great portfolio, a blog, keeping your clients happy, network through people with relevant connections, a memorable logo, job board posts, etc.  The good news is once you get a good client base, it will be more cost effective work rather than surfing the web for jobs (or elsewhere).  Also keep in mind that branding can be a big factor for the spread for word of mouth.  Of course, branding includes your portfolio, logo, business cards; the look and feel of you!

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The Tweener Class

Introduction

Simple enough, Tweener is a class for creating tweens in Flash.  Tweener surpasses and replaces, at least for me, the standard Flash Tween class.  I have this opinion not only because I just like it and its easy to use, but for two main reasons: frame animation and garbage collection, which I will go into more detail later on.

How do I get Tweener and how do I use it?

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I’m rebranding!

I’m rebranding myself and I have finally come up with the new logo!  How do you like it?  ChristianKragh.com is now in the progress of getting revamped with a new design and new content.  If you have any feedback, it would be cool if you post any comments on it here.  I don’t know when the new site will launch, since I actually have quite a bit of work coming in and am very busy.  I’m going to try to work on the site (and blog!) whenever I can.    Thanks.