Flashmech.net

There are a few reasons why I will use the Gaia Framework whenever I can; it is fast to development with, versatile enough for a vast variety of tasks, well supported by both the community and the author, and it is constantly updated with new features. Today however, I want to share with you regarding the speed factor of developing with the Gaia Framework.

When I first started out my previous project, Royal Salute Eastern & Oriental Duty Free Promo, I spent less than a day to set up the core structure of the site. By the end of the second day, all the pages were nicely integrated, completed with transitions. Form validations were set up by the third day with the PHP backend, and by the fourth day, URL validation.

You might be wondering what is URL validation at this time, so I’ll just do a quick explanation. Gaia Framework integrates deeplinking, so each section of your website has a nice URL by itself. Trouble comes when the site requires validation, of age or requires logging in, before the user is allowed access into the site. I’ve seen examples of sites that a developer would choose to forsake deeplinking because there might be such a requirement. So yeah, all I want to say at this point is that it is not difficult to implement, especially so with the Gaia Framework.

I have to say that development time was so speedy because the site itself was not complicated; you can take a spin around. However, I can still safely vouch that Gaia Framework will still aid a Flash developer big time even in larger, more complicated projects.

Here are some other screen shots from the website:

Alin Dogar from jumpeyecomponents.com just dropped me an email yesterday regarding the launch of their FlashEff Pattern Creation Contest.

I have been very keen to try out FlashEff since it first launched—the things I see are really amazing. Now this contest gives me the perfect reason to steal time out from my schedule to play around with it. Watch this space in the upcoming month for some tutorials on getting started with the FlashEff SDK.

In the meanwhile, they are having a *50%* discount for September! You might just wanna get yourself a license now.

Right, so yesterday I did a presentation at the local Flex Usergroup about Gaia, titled “What’s Gaia?” It’s kinda a last-minute-decision title, but I guess since the majority of the attendees are Flex programmers, they may not know the existence of the powerful Gaia Framework for Adobe Flash.

What was really cool was that Steven Sacks, the creator of the framework, joined us in the presentation via our channel in ustream.tv as well. He even helped to answer some questions from the floor that stumped me. Thanks Steven! *w00t~*

As promised, you can take a look at the slides, and download them to view or play with them. Remember I mentioned that site.xml is _the XML that rules them all_? Have fun!

The session was also recorded (embedded below), but you have to forward to approximately the 24th minute to skip the announcements.

Biggest turnout at FUG yet!

Ma look! Me presenting!

I should have really blogged about this earlier but work have to always come first. Better late than never I always say.

Come August 13th, I have the pleasure to be sharing with the Flex UG about Gaia! *w00t~!*

Are you thinking that it’s strange that I’m sharing something non-Flex in a Flex UG? *loL~* Well, the great part about our UG is that we get speakers to touch on a diversity of topics on the Flash Platform, though usually with more focus on Flex. This allows us to not just learn about Flex, but also what’s happening platform wide, which I think is really a great style to run the UG.

I’m really excited to be speaking about Gaia, as it is really a time saver framework. At the moment I’ve already drafted the outline (which hopefully will _wow_ the crowd), and planning to create some real world examples where Gaia is able to step in and save your ass in a tight deadline. After the session I’ll be releasing the slides and examples over here and annouce over at FUG Forum, so stay peeled!

What’s making me excited is that Steven Sacks, the creator of Gaia, will also be attending the session via our live broadcast. So for all those who are interested to attend but yet are not residing in Singapore or temporary out of the country, do remember you can catch us live too.

This is the part where I feel I should have blogged earlier. If you’re keen to come down to the Flex UG session this month, please RSVP as seats are very limited (only 3 more seats as at this writing). This coming month’s turnout might be the biggest yet!

For more information, you can check out the official blog post.
See you on August 13th!

Objective

• Learn how to make your Papervision3D object interactive.

Prerequisite

• Skin A PV3D Plane Using BitmapFileMaterial

Files Required

• PV3D 2.0 Alpha: Great White Framework (learn how to get it)
• Tutorial Files (see folder structure)

Let’s Get Started!

From the last tutorial where I loaded an external image using BitmapFileMaterial, you should have guessed that this tutorial is next to come. *lol~* The purpose of breaking them up into 2 separate tutorials is to modularise them, just like programming.

First off, we have to edit our viewport instance in the init3D function.

viewport = new Viewport3D( 0, 0, true, true );

The fourth parameter, “interactive”, determines whether the viewport should listen for Mouse events. Since we want to make things interactive, we pass in true for it.

[UPDATE]: With thanks to Marco for pointing this out, to show the hand cursor when rolling over interactive objects, you can add the following line after you create the viewport instance.

viewport.containerSprite.buttonMode = true;

Next up, in our createPlane function, we have to change the interactive property of the material that we created for the plane to be true as well.

material.interactive = true;

To listen for the events, we will add the event listener in the addEventListeners function:

plane.addEventListener( InteractiveScene3DEvent.OBJECT_CLICK, __onPlaneClick );

(Note: Don’t forget to import the InteractiveScene3DEvent!)

To wrap things up, we have to create the new listener function __onPlaneClick, which for the purpose of this tutorial, navigates to my blog’s RSS feed.

private function __onPlaneClick ( e:InteractiveScene3DEvent ):void 
{
	navigateToURL( new URLRequest("http://feeds.feedburner.com/flashmech"), "_blank" );
}

Final Note

At this point of writing, it seems that there’s no easy way to make use of useHandCursor. From my research online, probably the best way to do that is from Papervision 2’s tutorial of Advanced Interactivity 2.

Hope the guys over at Papervision3D will add this functionality into the engine soon.