Latest Extension

A few people asked me why I would do something like IDE Asteroids (see previous entry). What possible use could something like that be?
Well, first of all, I did it to see if I could. But then I was forced to justify its existence with something at least somewhat productive. Well, I’m always up to the challenge, so here you go: The Grid 3D Extension.
Again, this is a zipped mxp file, and you’ll need Flash MX 2004 and the latest version of the Extension Manager. It opens up as a custom panel and draws a fully customizable 3D grid on stage. A virtual trackball lets you rotate the grid in real time in 3D. When you have it how you want it, hit “Make it so” and the grid is drawn permanantly to the stage.
These last two extensions make use of the drawingLayer for temporary drawing functions. This drawingLayer was only intended for use in tools, so this is a pretty unorthadox use of it. As such, you can run into problems if you start swapping windows, choosing different tools or taking other actions while in the midst of previewing a grid. Mostly these consist of the grid disappearing, and occasionally some drawing artifacts. The reset button in the panel seems to take care of most of these anyway.
Another neat discovery is just how fast JSFL is, compared to AS, probably due to the fact that is being run by the IDE itself, rather than just the player. In the first version I did, I was doing all the 3D calculation in AS and just passing the drawing commands in to JSFL with MMExecute. In this version, entire functions are created as AS strings and passed to JSFL, and then the functions are called from AS, or sometimes from JSFL. The performance increase is incredible. A bit tedious formatting all those code strings, and of course it would have been easier to make an external JSFL file and call that from MMExecute, but I like the idea of packaging the whole thing up in one swf.