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RockOnFlash m/ :: John Grden

Everything from Flash, Flex, AIR, Papervision3D, Red5, Xray

Xray update: FLEX CHANGES - please readNovember 5

Thanks to Andy needing some help on a project, I was able to spend some quality time on Xray to fix a bug and enhance it to work with rawChildren containers in flex.  Above is a picture of the contents of rawChildren object in flex and a Papervision3D BasicView object highlighted.  I’m able to go from that point into the BasicView and see all the Papervision3D goodness

I had to rework a few things to accomodate rawChildren types of objects, but in doing so, I made it more modular so to speak, in terms of the underlying code.  It’s been a struggle to not have to create copies of code that do nearly the same thing with slight tweaks for Flex.  So far so good.

NOTE:  I’ve finally changed the package and name of Flex2Xray.  I’ve basically dropped the “2″ in the folder name and the class.

So now we have:

com.blitzagency.xray.inspector.flex.FlexXray;
var xray:FlexXray = new FlexXray();

again, with the flex version, you don’t have to add it to stage since it has access to the Application object.

      

Setting focus on TextFields not on stage - Papervision3DNovember 5

Well, I finally came up with a fix for this issue and thought to archive it.  Basically, the issue is that when you have textfields in a Sprite that you use for a material source for Papervision3D, you want to be able to set focus to those text fields.  Without them being on stage, however, it doesn’t work to say “stage.focus = myTextField”.

So, very simply, all you have to do is add the textfield to the stage, then use stage.focus = myTextField, then re-add back to your Sprite.  Bingo, you have focus in your TextField.  Now, I should say, that i’ve seen it work with just using stage.focus = myTextField, but in this particular situation, adding it to the stage first, then setting focus, then adding it back worked.  So give it a whirl either way.

example:

stage.addChild(myTextField);
stage.focus = myTextField;
this.addChild(myTextField);

Bam! done.  As long as you’re redrawing your material so that you can see what you’re typing ( bitmapMaterial.drawBitmap()), it’ll work just fine.

Tabbing is controlled easily with:

protected function handleKeyUp(e:KeyboardEvent):void
{
if( e.keyCode == 9 ) // tab
{
if( currentField == username )
changeToPassword();
else if( currentField == password )
changeToUse

Online Papervision3D training - Nov 8th. Optimization TechniquesNovember 4

We’re doing one more of these before the year’s end and won’t likely do it again until February 2009.  We weren’t going to do it at all, but we’d had a great response to do one more, so we’re squeezing this one in before the holidays really kick in.

I’m taking a break from traveling for a while, so RMI has set me up with some on-line course time and this weekend (SATURDAY), I’m going to pouring over the Winterwonder Land application and talking about optimization techniques for Papervision and the flash Player in general.

In the course files, I’m including nearly all the demo’s I used for the classes I taught in person as well as the source for Winterwonder Land’s animation engine etc.

If you’re interested, you can sign up over at RMI’s site:

http://www.richmediainstitute.com/node/277

Hope to see you there!

      

Papervision3D + Xray Introspection = FINALLYOctober 28

Man, after nearly 2 years of working with Papervision3D I FINALLY sat down and made it work with Papervision3D (and alot of other things).  Turns out it wasn’t that hard, I just needed to flip a switch to let other objects besides pure Objects and Array’s pass through to the interface.  It’s been digging through all of Papervision’s stuff all this time now, and I just needed to turn the key ;)  Well, there was a bit more with fixing a bug to support Dictionary’s now in Xray, but that’s all fixed now.

video: http://www.rockonflash.com/video/XrayPapervision3D.mov

You can see in this picture that I’m looking at a DisplayObject3D which is actually a child object of the loaded DAE.  You can change any of the properties you see there at runtime.  This makes it an extremely useful tool for debugging, but also for learning someone else’s application as well as optimization.  You can go through and change nearly any property at runtime to see who’s causin’ the problems.

The image below shows you the fix for Dictionarys.  DisplayObject3D’s children object is a Dictionary, and so now you can see all of it’s children and continue to click your way through to the end.  This is the group of panels in the QuadTree demo an

It is time. To rock that is.October 28

I’ve been researching guitars and tones from some of my favorite players and bands and one theme kept coming up: a Les Paul was involved.

So, meet the new member of the RockOn family:

The difference in sound between 2 guitars can be staggering.  I sat and played this guitar and others at guitar center tonight for 2 hours.  Hands down, the Les Paul had the best tone at any range.  I was really taken back by it.  I couldn’t imagine it could sound that good.  So I bought it.

Good things to come.  Rock on.