Box2DFlash v2.0.0 was finally released on the 17th of this month (April). Box2DFlash is the Flash AS3 port of Erin Catto’s C++ physics engine Box2D. Erin Catto is a physics programmer at Blizzard Entertainment (WarCraaaft!). I’ve been looking forward to this release since I found out about it while making a tutorial for the previous release (v1.4.3) about a month ago.
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Music Credits:
Title: The Best Day Ever
Artist: SpongBob
Album: The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: Music From the Movie and More

Creating an MP3 Player in ActionScript 3.0 is fairly straight forward. The complexity varies greatly depending on what kind of features you want your player to have. I don’t plan on getting into ID3 tags here, but otherwise (as you can see) I will be going over the full functionality of a normal MP3 Player.
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I’m going to walk through the steps of making a preloader for your animation, game, or application and provide easily implemented source files that you can copy and change to fit your own project. Making a preloader in ActionScript 3 is more difficult to figure out then it was in ActionScript 2, but the code itself is not any harder.
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In celebration of our little vector contest I thought I would unofficially submit my own entry.

I made this animation using our Spring Time vector pack. It’s about 360Kbs, but once it’s loaded click Play to get it started, then you can press the Left or Right arrows to control the little bunny.

I’ll walk you through the process I went through to create this here game/animation.

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I wanted to try something fun with Flash this week, so I did a quick search for “Flash Physics Engine.” Lo and behold, I struck gold. Box2DFlashAS3 is an open source ActionScript 3.0 conversion of the C++ Physics Engine Box2D. I’m very impressed with its well coded structure and easily implemented nature. I learned a few new things that will change how I code forever just by reading through their example files.

Still, they have limited resources right now as far as help documentation goes (”Please refer to the source code from the examples provided to get an idea of how to use Box2DFlash in your projects.” — that’s the ReadMe.txt that comes with it… not very helpful,huh). I thought I might give you an example of my own and walk through it step by step.
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I am going to talk about how to animate using Tween objects in ActionScript. Tween objects are enormously useful. They can change any numeric property of any object over time.

For example one of the most common uses of Tween objects in ActionScript is to fade an image out as another fades in. The advantage of using a Tween object to do this instead of any of your other options is

• 1.) it is easy to understand
• 2.) it is the easiest to code
• 3.) it generally looks the best.

It’s fairly easy to write a bit of code that will change the X position of a movieClip by 2 every frame, but that will be very linear and boring. Also when does it stop? and how? You would have to create a lot of if() statements that just take forever to think through and would make your code harder to read. (VQ: lots of nested if statements are usually a thing to avoid)

With a Tween object you can use Easing methods. In the example that follows I used the Easing method Regular.easeInOut to start the motion with a little acceleration and then bring it to a stop in the same way.

If the motion of the dot gets annoying you can stop or start it again at any time by clicking on the Flash movie. (more…)