I was doing some tests a few days ago, prompted by Darren Richardson and we discovered to our horror that the an instance of the AS 3.0 Loader class can only be used to load one display object. It just seems so wrong. The test was to have one instance of the Loader load its contents into the two Image instances - horror of horrors it only loaded into one Image. Its sort of tantamount to saying that an object can only provide its data for 1 designated class. Surely the fact that the Loader class is a separate object should make its data accessible to any classes requesting its service. Apparently this had been made so because a single DisplayObject may not be added to more than one parent. To achieve success multiple instances of the Loader had to be used.
Here is the code:
package {
import flash.display.Loader;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.*;
import flash.net.URLRequest;
public class testLoader extends Sprite
{
private var imageArray:Array = new Array("image1.jpg","image1.jpg","image1.jpg","image1.jpg");
private var loader:Loader = new Loader();
private var loader1:Loader = new Loader();
private var imgCnt:int = 0;
public function testLoader()
{
trace ("Loader")
loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, completeHandler);
loader1.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, completeHandler);
var mov1:Sprite = new Sprite()
var mov2:Sprite = new Sprite()
mov1.addChild(loader);
mov2.addChild(loader);
mov2.y = 200
addChild(mov1);
addChild(mov2);
loader.load(new URLRequest(imageArray[imgCnt]));
}
public function completeHandler(evt:Event):void
{
if (imgCnt <>
{
trace("loaded", evt, imgCnt);
loader.load(new URLRequest(imageArray[imgCnt]));
loader1.load(new URLRequest(imageArray[imgCnt]));
imgCnt++
}
}
}
}
Yesterday I spent a little over 10 hours on the train. Huh? I hear you say. Yes 10 hours plus. The only positives were the sketches I did of people on the train and about 2 chapters of some Actionscript tome. Other than that I was tired, fed up, frustrated and very unhappy. It all began with a plan to watch a show Master Sken had in Manchester. The doors would open at 1pm. Having some idea of how these things work I planned to leave London at 11 thus with a 3.30 travelling time I would be there at about 3 ish. Nice plan, not opening the show but, fashionably late enough to see, yet not get tired. In execution I left London at midday and arrived in Manchester at 5.55pm. Thanks to track repairs and a 30-50minute wait for a broken train. On the train the hot water system broke so they could not serve hot beverages so, no tea, no coffee. "We're sorry for the inconvenience they said". Unfortunately this really was my fault since this Virgin service had served up this experience to moi before. You should never take this train for any trip of some import, except you travel the previous day and love the feel of being in a cattletruck. To end this tale, having got to Manchester so late I estimated that a trip to the venue no longer made any sense considering the time, I had probably missed all the fights anyway so I reversed and did another 4 + hours on the train back to London.
That whole "train take the strain" stuff is absolute Bollocks, I should have driven.
uDin: Attraction I, is the first public view of a series of experiments I have been carrying out with animated texture mapping to Papervision 3d Planes. The goals were 2fold, first was experimentation with various recursive and iterative animation techniques, next to see how the 3D objects would be have when rendered with these textures. As you can imagine, I'm just at the beginning of the journey and there will be ten or maybe hundreds of iterations of these experiments. This particular piece was done by generating a couple of particles getting them to edraw theie motion tracks of a bitmap and using the bitmap as a texture for a simple 3d plane.
On uDin, she was a beautiful maiden, who was caught in a war of attrition between 2 vassal states of the Bini Empire. It eventually led to a great slaughter between these 2 states. I have fond memories of sitting goggle-eyed with my Mother, as she told me these tales. This version shows Okosun trailing uDin, as you can imagine a fiery affair. Far from complete, no sound and the background visuals are still in Painter IX, still I could not longer keep it local.
The source code will be available when Attraction I is complete.
Over the last couple of months my interest in the development of 3d systems has grown. I have messed about with 3D over the last 8years but have always found the systems clunky, Papervision3D changed that. In my own comfort zone of Actionscript Flash and Flex I now have a system that will allow me expedite all my visions in as many various iterations as I like. Thus the idea of a chat cube, not very practical but, in the words of Mike Chambers (FOTB 2007), "it nice to know it can be done".
The idea was to have a cube primitive which rendered each camera that logged into the system unto each facet of the cube. The system is not finished or polished but, it does do what was promised. You can talk too - sorry about the echo (if you hate the sound of your voice- it will be fixed). The image shows live feeds from my camera desk share driver streamed live from a Flash Media server. The code for the various API's will be posted later.
My thanks go to John Grden who worked with me to make sure the damn thing worked.
A good friend of mine Nkwo, has just won the Kulture2Couture Phoenix prize. Nkwo is a pretty, headstrong but, amazingly creative clothes designer. If clothes are your thing - quirky wearable things well, here's a rising star you should check out before she gets too expensive.
