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Allen Chou is an electrical engineering major in Taiwan. His primary interest is in ActionScript visual effects for games and interactive applications.
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Thinking in Commands: Part 1 of 2

Thinking in Commands: Part 1 of 2

Allen Chou on Jul 18th 2011 with 47 comments
This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Allen Chou's Command Pattern Tutorials

Twice a month, we revisit some of our readers’ favorite posts from throughout the history of Activetuts+. This tutorial was first published in March, 2010, and is the first part of a series.

Simple, maintainable code is beautiful. However, when we have a sequences of actions that need to trigger each other, our code can get messy, making it impossible to change later. The Command Pattern keeps things clean.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a minimalist AS3 Command framework, capable of performing actions in sequence, in parallel, or with a delay. You’ll lean how to use this framework to create a complex effect with simple and clean code.

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Manipulating Particle Motion with Stardust Particle Engine – Part 2

Manipulating Particle Motion with Stardust Particle Engine – Part 2

Allen Chou on Jul 26th 2010 with 7 comments
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Stardust Particle Engine

This is the second part of this tutorial. I’m going to show you how to manipulate particle motion with deflectors.

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Manipulating Particle Motion with Stardust Particle Engine – Part 1

Manipulating Particle Motion with Stardust Particle Engine – Part 1

Allen Chou on Jul 19th 2010 with 3 comments
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Stardust Particle Engine

Stardust Particle Engine provides two major approaches to freely manipulate particle motion, namely gravitational fields and deflectors. Gravitational fields are vector fields that affect a particle’s acceleration, and deflectors manipulate both a particle’s position and velocity.

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Managing Sounds with Commands

Managing Sounds with Commands

Allen Chou on Jun 15th 2010 with 8 comments
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Allen Chou's Command Pattern Tutorials

Sound management is very important for many types of Flash applications, such as interactive websites and games. As long as you want to deliver a rich interactive experience, you might want to consider making use of sound effects and background music. In this tutorial, I’ll present a minimalistic sound management framework that manages sounds into sound tracks. And I’ll show how to integrate the sound framework with the command framework from my previous tutorials.

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Loading Data with Commands

Loading Data with Commands

Allen Chou on May 7th 2010 with 12 comments
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Allen Chou's Command Pattern Tutorials

It’s very common to load external data (such as SWF files) during runtime, but only when the data is completely loaded can we read or manipulate its content. Usually we have to listen to the complete event dispatched by a Loader or URLLoader object that loads the data for completion handling. Oftentimes, we write code that loads the data in one function, and write code that handles the completion of the loading in another function, but this can be improved by grouping the whole loading process together..

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Thinking in Commands: Part 2 of 2

Thinking in Commands: Part 2 of 2

Allen Chou on Mar 29th 2010 with 25 comments
This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Allen Chou's Command Pattern Tutorials

During this tutorial we’ll further extend the command framework from the first part. We’ll create a scene management framework, with easily understandable and maintainable code.

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Create 3D Effects With the Stardust Particle Engine

Create 3D Effects With the Stardust Particle Engine

Allen Chou on Mar 5th 2010 with 6 comments
This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Stardust Particle Engine

In my previous tutorial Shoot Out Stars with the Stardust Particle Engine, I explained the basic workflow of Stardust. This time, we’ll take things further and examine a couple of techniques for creating true 3D particle effects!

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Shoot Out Stars with the Stardust Particle Engine

Shoot Out Stars with the Stardust Particle Engine

Allen Chou on Jan 25th 2010 with 20 comments
This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Stardust Particle Engine

In this tutorial I will introduce to you the Stardust Particle Engine. First I’m going to show you how to set up Stardust, and then I’ll cover the basic Stardust class responsibilities and how they collaborate together to make Stardust work as a whole.

Next, we will look at a Stardust’s general workflow and get down to creating a particle effect with stars shooting out from the mouse cursor; the stars will slow down gradually, grow larger after birth, and shrink when dying.

Finally, I’ll demonstrate the flexibility of Stardust by creating several variations from the already complete example, including using animated movie clips as particles, variable particle simulation timescale, and shooting out display objects of different classes from a single emitter.

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