AS3 onReleaseOutside

It seems to be that the ReleaseOutside we all know from Actionscript 2 is no more in AS3. Why? I don’t know. I noticed allot of people having problems with this lack of feature. The work around has been published all over the web, another reference here will help spread the word. The idea of an onReleaseOutside MouseEvent is that you detect if the mouse is not over the object when it is up. So what you simply need to do is relocate the MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP from the object you want to detect to the stage. So what does this look like? 

// constructor
public function MyClass()
{
	//we use this event to obtain the stage object 
	addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, onAdded); 
} 
 
// stage object is now available
private function onAdded(e:Event):void
{
	addChild(_yourbutton);
	_yourbutton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, onMouseDown);	
}
 
private function onMouseDown(me:MouseEvent):void
{
 	trace("mouse down");
	stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, onMouseUp)
}
 
private function onMouseUp(me:MouseEvent):void
{
	trace("mouse up"); 
	stage.removeEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, onMouseUp)
}

I hope you find this useful.

Tutorial: Scripted Scene Selection - DVD Studio Pro 4

In this tutorial I describe how you can make a scene selection in DVD Studio Pro (DVDSP) without having to make all the connections by hand. The big advantage of doing this is that you can modify the behavior of all the buttons in one script and you won’t accidently set a wrong link.

Dowload Tutorial [<1.0 mb](current version is Dutch, english coming up)
Download DVDSP Project [1.0 mb]. 

Virtual Soundscape with DDR input

A friend of me called me this week that he had a problem with a assignment for school. He wanted to make an original concept for this circus poster assignment, and chose to make a poster for the blind. Earlier that week (he was also over for an assignment) he saw my DDR Dance Mat (that I bought earlier to experiment with) and proposed the concept of making an interactive poster with relief that can be pushed on different sculpted sections of the poster. After messing around with a piece of foam, trying to sculpt it in recognizable shapes we realized that that wasn’t going to work. We dumped the foam and started to think of an other concept, we ended up with a virtual soundscape that is lets the user roam through the circus environment.

Here we see the visual representation of the virtual environment (click the image to see the demo). The black dot is the user and is controlled by a DDR Dance Mat. The red dots are sound source, around the red dot you can see the range of the audio that is connected to its volume. For the Dance Mat input we used a app called ControllerMate, this is a small application for the mac that can recognize USB devices and port these trough to all kinds of output.

If you would like to see how it is done, click the following link to download the source files (Actionscript Project made in Flex)Source.zip [11.34 mb] 

LocalConnection and ExternalInterface

For my Flashden portfolio I made an example of the different ways of communicating between different SWF’s and the browser. It demonstrates the bi-directional usage of LocalConnection and ExternalInterface.

 click image for demonstration

It is written in AS3 together with a little piece of javascript and needs to be run in a webserver environment to avoid sandbox violations.