First time I’ve ever seen anything like this, looks awesome!

Fluid Sculpture from Charlie Bucket on Vimeo.

While I was considering how I would go about storing images for an app I’m building, I thought “wonder what approach Flickr takes?”. A quick search, and I find this greatly insightful post, which just boggles my mind!

Till now, I didn’t know that Flickr is built on LAMP - what a testament if there ever was one?!

This is something I often have to do when setting up a new server, if you’re planning on using FLV video with the site:

1. Open properties and “HTTP Headers” tab
2. Select “File types”->”New type”
3. Enter .flv for extension and “video/x-flv” for content type

Pretty simple, but if you forget to do, could leave you scratching your head for some time, thinking “Now, why don’t my f#$@ing video player work?!”.

Just the other day, while I was building a Flash site, I noticed that the color transform that I was applying to my menu items did not work in FF (ver 3 in this case, not sure same across versions), but worked fine in IE and standalone Flash player.

I figured it would have to be caused by the embed code, and after playing around and changing params around, I found that it was due to the wmode param. If I set it to either “opaque” or “transparent” the transform failed to show. But worked fine when set to “window”, the default value. It seems strange that all other thing worked except for the transform?! What is it about it that would stop it working in the other wmodes…?

The winning code:

       <script type="text/javascript">
            // <![CDATA[
                var flashVars = {
                };
                var params = {
                      wmode: 'window'
                    , allowscriptaccess: "sameDomain"
                }
                 var attributes = {
                      id: 'flashcontent'
                };
                var expressInstall = false;
                swfobject.embedSWF( "main.swf", "flashcontent", "100%", "100%", "9.0.115", expressInstall, flashVars, params, attributes );
            // ]]>
        </script>

Real awesome visiual effects! Wonder how its done…? Projected on to a screen, maybe.

MAKE presents: The LED from make magazine on Vimeo.

These are some of the finding from my initial experience Papervision3D.

Tips:

• To render both sides of a Plane; MovieMaterrial.oneSide = false or BitmatMaterial.doubleSided = true, depending on the type of material being used.
• To apply alpha and filters, first you will need to set the primitives’ useOwnContainer property to true. Spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why my alpha value wasn’t being applied! So if you’re like me and dive in head first before reading the docs, this will save some time.
• In order to view your 3D objects at their actual ( 100% scale ) size, I found the following values to work:

   camera.zoom  = 10;
   camera.focus  = 200;
   camera.z  = -2000;

• When using BitmapMaterial, set the smooth property to true to apply smoothing to the loaded bitmap.
• To make an object interactive, set the object’s material interactive property to true

Resources:

• http://www.thetechlabs.com/3d/ - Well written, top quality bunch of tutorials. Although they are built with Away3D, it’s quite easy to transfer the techniques to Pv3D. These tutorials a very valuable for the 3D techniques that are tought, rather than the actual code.
• http://dev.papervision3d.org/ - Pv3D dev blog
• http://dev.papervision3d.org/2008/09/01/first-steps-in-papervision3d/ - First steps in Papervision3D is a great series of tutorials by Tartiflop. A must read!
• http://www.madvertices.com/search/label/Papervision%203D - Tutorials by Mad Vertices. Lots of great examples and inspiration.
• http://pv3d.org/ - Collection of very useful code samples on how to perform various functions.
• more links can be found at http://delicious.com/sprit3.
• http://papervision2.com/tutorial-list/

If you use FlashDevelop for AS3, these plugins are a must!

I have installed these with FDev V3 Beta 9.

fdbPlugin - AS3 Debugging

Installation:

1. Download plugin
2. Copy the two DLL files (FdbPlugin.dll, Aga.Controls.dll) to the ‘Plugins’ folder of FlashDevelop (commonly located at c:\Program Files\FlashDevelop\Plugins\).
3. Restart FDev so that it loads the new plugin, and your ready to go!
4. To set a break point; Shift + Left Mouse Click on the gray bar next to the line numbers.
5. Run your project normally (F5 or Play).

Trace - Help generate ‘trace’ statements.

Installation:

1. Download plugin
2. Copy the DLL file to the ‘Plugins’ folder of FDev.
3. Start/restart FDev.
4. Mouse over the variable you would like to trace and press one of the shortcut key combos (customise through Tools->Program settings