Personal & Professional Blog of T. Scot Clausing // Adobe Flex Consultant in Nashville, TN
With a little luck, version 2 of Shotgun 3D will be available in the App Store. Here is a quick preview:
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Many thanks to all around the world who downloaded version 1. I would love to hear your feedback and feature requests for the updates to come!
Some new changes since the last blog post & video:
Here’s a preview of my first game built in Unity3D for the iPhone. This pretty much killed my weekend, but it was a ton of fun.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
I’ve always wanted to do something like this - it’s like a dream come true with Unity3D. Before this weekend I had about 10 hours of 3D experience, total. Now that’s tripled, but the real story here is how awesome Unity3D is and how quickly you can pick it up and be productive.
The game above uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to control the shotgun and touch api to control throwing & shooting the clay pigeons. Best scores are stored on the device as expected. Likewise, the user’s preference for easy or hard gameplay is stored and retrieved next time the app is opened.
I’m excited! There are more (complicated) games on my to-do list, so keep an eye on my twitter timeline for updates and new releases. If you’re interested in working together please drop me a line!
Blender: Free open source 3D content creation suite.
PhotoShop Extended: For painting 3D textures.
Unity 3D: Multiplatform game development tool.
Video Series: Unity 3D for Flash Developers
http://www.unitytutorials.com/channel/video/2/flash-development
The image above is a render of a clay pigeon. It’s not perfect, nor is it particularly good, but it only took about an hour to model in Blender, paint in PhotoShop, import into Unity 3D and begin launching them from a virtual trap house. This is the most fun I’ve had developing in a long time and I’m looking forward to (finally) getting into the App Store 
Unity’s browser plugin can communicate with JavaScript similar to the ExternalInterface class in Flex, so there’s a possible integration point. Maybe that sounds absurd … doing the 3D game programming in Unity and building the 2D UI in Flex, but it’s possible. I’ll have to try this out; there are of all sorts of cool possibilities.
Updated: I’m going ahead and making the rough original source available since I have less time to work on this than expected. Please let me know if this helps you on any project or at least gets you started
One of the more popular posts on this blog is “Warping Text in Flex“. People are frequently asking for the source code and I am frequently not giving it to them (unless they say please) because it’s really really dreadful. Truly. So I have brought the project back to life as something I’m not embarrassed of.
An open sourced as-is etc version of this component will be posted shortly (preview below). The component will use a three point Bézier curve for the text path. Currently, this version uses the geometry classes from http://www.algorithmist.net/ but the released version may or may not.
Here is an early preview of the soon-to-be released TextPath component (please leave suggestions below):
(Right click to view source)
Thank you for reading - Please leave comments, suggestions etc!
I’ve started a little pet project called SpinjAS (named after the super-cool toys). It’s a super-simple and fun way for your users to move objects around, size them and rotate them when you don’t need a more precise tool like object handles. Here’s a quick demo:
(Right click to view source)
It’s just an experiment and, yes, I know it’s not an original concept. But it is (as far as I know) an original Flex implementation. The limited current feature set is quite simple: radiusMax, radiusMin, scaleMax, scaleMin.
I would love to hear what you have to say … so far I’ve had about 30% positive feedback and 70% say “ok, cool, but when would I ever use that?” What about you? Does the concept have potential with some specific added features?
To learn more about the mysimplemp3 project, click the <my:SimpleMP3 /> tab at the top of this website. The project is hosted here on Google Code where you can download the latest swc or check out the source.
Currently the only demo is my proof of concept found here. I’m looking forward to seeing the components and projects you end create with mysimplemp3. Please keep me posted - and let me know about feature requests and potential bugs! Thanks.
What's this? It looks easy!
OK. I really don't like building MP3 player components in AS3 for Flex. It's doable, sure, but tedious. In fact, I don't like it enough that I've done something about it. Now it can be fun to make an MP3 player in Flex! (not available yet, but there's a demo below).
Now, just treat it like you'd expect!
Yes, there's more: scrubbing, streaming, buffering, panning left to right, auto load, auto play, auto rewind, repeat and most importantly ... states! Read more and play with a quick demo after the jump.
Continue reading 'Almost introducing <my:SimpleMP3 />'
Update: New updated example in "Text on a curved path in Flex - Resurrected" - please see instead of this entry.
There was some discussion in the 615Flex Google group earlier about how to warp text in a Flex application. (If you have any valuable input or resources please leave them in the comments). I thought it would be fun to mess around with the idea, so I put together this really weak example of a text warp component.
Read on to see a little example ...
I am working on a tri-fold brochure for All Stretched Out Limousine Service. They have recently entered into a cross-promotional relationship with David's Bridal. This is pre-first draft, but I thought it worth sharing. Any comments are appreciated!
Hi. I'm Scot, an enterprise RIA architect specializing in Flex and AIR, ActionScript, and Java. I work as a consultant and designer in Nashville, TN and contribute to the Nashville Flex User Group, 615 Flex. To get in touch with me, please email tsclausing[at]gmail[dot]com.
