Memory usage is an aspect of development that you really have to be careful about, or it might end up slowing down your app, taking up a lot of memory or even crashing everything. This tutorial will help you to avoid those bad potential outcomes!
(Continue)
In today’s (Very) Quick Tip, you’ll learn how to solve the common problem of flickering or tearing. This is a horrible effect in Flash where bitmaps flicker as they are updated, or appear to tear into two images (as in the thumbnail).
(Continue)
Premium members: here’s this week’s tutorial. Simple harmonic motion is a type of movement commonly used to describe pendulums and springs. In this tutorial, you’ll learn the concepts behind this type of motion, and understand the many different ways you can apply this in your games: from an animated health warning, to the motion of attacking enemy ships.
(Continue)
Inspired by Prof. Wildberger in his lecture series on linear algebra, I intend to implement his mathematical ideas with Flash. We shall not delve into the mathematical manipulation of matrices through linear algebra: just through vectors. This understanding, although diluting the elegance of linear algebra, is enough to launch us into some interesting possibilities of 2×2 matrix manipulation. In particular, we’ll use it to apply various shearing, skewing, flipping, and scaling effects to images at runtime.
(Continue)
Game development often requires being able to detect more information than just, “two objects are overlapping”. We need to know how much they are overlapping, where they are overlapping, and what types of objects they are. We need to process this quickly, for games where hundreds of objects could be overlapping at any given point. And we need to calculate how the objects should respond to this overlap: should they bounce, slide, or explode?
In this tutorial you’ll build an extreme particle system whilst learning how to squeeze more efficient goodness out of the Flash Player than you ever thought possible!
(Continue)
Up until now, our collision detection methods have been mathematically based. Although this is helpful, there are cases where the mathematical approach is just not worth it, such as with an irregular, organic shape – the computations required are too complex and expensive to justify. Instead, we can check each individual pixel of the shapes. This is also an expensive approach, but it can at least be optimised.
(Continue)
Ever see crazy binary numbers and wonder what they meant? Ever see numbers with letters mixed in and wonder what is going on? You’ll find out all of this and more in this article. Hexadecimal doesn’t have to be scary.
(Continue)
It’s time for another Premium tutorial! This week, James Tyner will walk you through the process of building an HTML5 MP3 player, step by step, with the SoundManager 2 library, jQuery, and a little help from Flash (for extra audio functionality).
(Continue)
Having one object orbit another is a movement mechanic that’s been used since the early gaming era, and it remains handy to this very day! In this Quick Tip we will explore the mathematical function for orbiting, see how to modify it, and look at practical uses in actual game design.
(Continue)
Have something to teach the world? Want to earn money doing it? Tutorials, screencasts, and articles published here on Activetuts+ are largely contributed by readers just like you! We'll pay you great money for good content. Find Out More
Follow Activetuts+ and Tuts+ on Twitter