Check out CDK in action below!

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This is to be used when there’s an explosion in the game. The class allows you to create explosion effect based on number of particles, size of distance and alpha. All you need is to instantiate it and pass in the variables needed. See sample below.

Download the source here, when you use make sure you have to use the movie-clip from the library folder as well.

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Every wonder that, there’s something to display your run-time variables smoothly without using the laggy trace. Not to say trace command is useless, but at times is much less cpu intensive to debug values especially on enterFrame run time to an on screen textbox instead of using trace.

But, lately I stumbled upon a good console interface like debugger called Flash Console in a form of as3 class package!

Aside from the being able to watch your values real time , it also came with various handy feature such as.

• Command line
• Display info/properties checker (known as Roller)
• RunTime Measurement Ruler

All you need to do is to import the class into your main.as and attach C (the singleton class) method startOnStage.

import com.atticmedia.console.C;
C.startOnStage(this, "");
 
// To debug a value
C.info(variableName);

If you are interested click here to get it .

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This helps to identify which of my methods I wrote is taxing the CPU or not. Simply import package to your main.as and add it into the stage

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// To use the class simply create a instance of it and add it to the stage.
// var MyFPSMemCounter : FPSMemCounter  = new FPSMemCounter ();
// addChild( fpsCounter );
package {
	import flash.display.Stage;
	import flash.system.System;
	import flash.events. *;
	import flash.text.TextField;
	import flash.text.TextFieldAutoSize;
	import flash.utils.getTimer;
 
	public class FPSMemCounter extends TextField
	{
		private var fontSize : Number; //the font size for the field
		private var lastUpdate : Number; // the results of getTimer() from the last update
		private var frameCount : Number; //stores the count of frames passed this second
		private var currentTime : Number;
		private static const UPDATE_INTERVAL : Number = 1000; //the interval at which the frame count will be be posted
 
		public function FPSMemCounter (textColor : Number = 0xFFFFFF, fontSize : Number = 25) : void
		{
			this.textColor = textColor;
			this.fontSize = 12;
 
			//set the field to autosize from the left
			autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.LEFT;
 
			//make the text unselecteable and disable mouse events
			selectable = false;
			mouseEnabled = false;
 
			addEventListener (Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, setFPSUpdate);
			addEventListener (Event.REMOVED_FROM_STAGE, clearFPSUpdate);
		}
 
		//called when the instance is added to a Display Object
		private function setFPSUpdate (event : Event) : void
		{
			addEventListener (Event.ENTER_FRAME, updateFPS);
			frameCount = 0;
			updateText (frameCount);
			lastUpdate = getTimer ();
		}
		//called when the instance is removed from a Display Object
		private function clearFPSUpdate (event : Event) : void
		{
			removeEventListener (Event.ENTER_FRAME, updateFPS);
		}
 
		//update the frame counter
		private function updateFPS (event : Event) : void
		{
			//get the current time and increment the frame counter
			currentTime = getTimer ();
			frameCount ++;
 
			//post the frame count if more then a second has passed
			if (currentTime >= lastUpdate + UPDATE_INTERVAL)
			{
				lastUpdate = currentTime;
				updateText (frameCount);
				frameCount = 0;
			}
		}
 
		//update the display text
		private function updateText (frameNum : Number) : void 
		{
			var mem:String = Number( System.totalMemory / 1024 / 1024 ).toFixed( 2 ) + 'Mb';
			htmlText = "<font size='" + fontSize + "'><b>FPS : </b>" + frameNum + " fps</b><b> Memory : </b>"+ mem +"</font>";
		}
 
	}
}

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• The Index – using the index effectively.
• Assets Management – some example, on how to hook up an xml and graphical asset.

The Index

For me, index is best used for :-

1. Positioning a generic background for all your flash pages because, index appears the lowest depth. All you need to do is to just place the asset on stage. Be it image or just as color background. Just remember to remove Scalffold code inside the indexPage.as
2. Index is useful for global asset which you think, may be reused in all other pages. An example, will be a global xml for language. If you have decided to go multilingual site, placing your xml here is a good choice.
3. In order to access assets shared in Index, simply use the GAIA api method below :-

//Where globalxml is my xml asset, text1 is the first child tag.
//Picture1 is the picture asset which retrieves the src.
var textData = Gaia.api.getPage("index").assets.globalxml.xml.text1;
var imageData = Gaia.api.getPage("index").assets.picture1;

Asset Management

Asset Management is one of GAIA’s greatest strength in this framework. You can set your asset to preload with the page or use load on demand – based on the site.xml. See example code below, it shows how asset is set preload=false to use load on demand. Once, you have enable load on demand, you can either load yourself the asset using a loader class. Pass in the URLRequest which is the assets.picture1.src, addChild to a MovieClip Container once loaded and you are done.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<site title="Gaia Framework Site: %PAGE%" menu="true" assetPath="assets/">
    <page id="index" src="index.swf">
	<asset id="globalxml" src="global.xml"/>
        <page id="nav" src="nav.swf" depth="top">
            <page id="home" title="Home" src="home.swf" menu="true">
                   <asset id="picture1" src="forest/forest.jpg" preload="false"/>
             </page>
        </page>
    </page>
</site>

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