In this tutorial I will be going over some of the basic elements to making a game in Flash. This being the first in a short series of tutorials on the subject, I will cover the main game loop and keyboard controls.
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I have another simple but neat, little tutorial here on Flash CS3 filters. This time I’m not using Tweens at all. Our effect is going to use the MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE event to create the illusion of a light source coming from our cursor.

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Above is a little example menu I made for a fake game called “Top Secret.” Don’t expect a game to start when you click on the Play button. Instead, when you click a button you will get a little menu to change the rollover effects of said button.

What I’m going to be talking about for the next… however long you read this, is how to recreate these cool effects for your own projects. Hopefully you will come up with some better ideas for using filters then just rollover effects.
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For any dynamic Flash project, XML will be a powerful tool. One of the most common examples (and one of the simplest) is a picture gallery like the one I have here:

Images came from http://www.stockvault.net/

I will be talking about how to use Flash and XML to make a simple, yet superfly, gallery.
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I’ve talked about the basics of Box2DFlash v1.4.3 in my Introductory tutorial. I showed how to create your world and how to introduce simple bodies into that world. With the release of Box2DFlash v2.0.0 the basics remain mostly the same, there are a few details changed. I need to go over these small changes before I move on to the next step of adding joints and forces to the bodies.

The first and biggest change (although really a small thing) is that we no longer work in pixels! We now work in units that by default equal 30 pixels to 1 unit (think of it as meters; 30px : 1m). With this change our normal gravity is no longer (0, 300) but instead (1, 10). This makes more sense to me at least because gravity in reality is 9.81 m/s/s. This is going to effect almost everything you do, from applying forces to setting the width and height of a box.

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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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