r3dux.org

Week 6 of the ActionScript intro carries on with the theme of coding rather than just talking about coding and as such again comes as a word document instead of slides. This week is where we start to have some fun with classes and dynamic creation of symbol instances. We start off by binding a bubble image to a simple class, and then tie it into the mouse cursor position, add in some colour transforms to liven things up and and stop our instances from giving you eye cancer by making them fade in and out through some manipulation of the each instance’s alpha property.

In this bundle I’ve combined both Week 6 Lessons 1 and 2 into a single document and provided the full source code to the exercises, but I highly recommend that you either start from scratch using the document as a guide or work from the 1st example source code and only peek at the completed source code if you get stuck because if you’re reading this then you want to learn to code, and you’re not going accomplish that by copying and pasting alone.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to build this:

Not a bad starting point for moving onto some way cooler stuff, eh?

Download link: An Introduction to ActionScript 3.0 – Week 6 (both lessons combined)
Audience: Beginners who know a little about variables, functions, objects and how to perform some basic programming math.
Format: PDF
Content License: This material is released under a creative commons non-commercial attribution share-alike 3.0 license by me (r3dux) and comes with no guarantee of correctness, fitness for purpose or anything of the sort.

Comments/feedback always welcome.

Bonus: You can find the code for the above animation with the start/stop on click code here.

Week 5 of the ActionScript intro is a practical exercise-writin’ affair with lots of assistance provided. When I first delivered this material last year I wanted to stop talking about programming and get the students actually using ActionScript and getting the hang of writing and debugging their code, so I switched from slides to A4 hand-outs with exercises. Unfortunately, many of them hadn’t had enough practice or paid enough attention in class, so for the second class I wrote a document explaining where many students were going wrong when attempting the exercises in class – how to correctly use brackets, functions with/without parameters and return types, pushing and popping data to/from arrays etc.

In this bundle, I’ve reversed the order so that Lesson 1 is the “where-did-I-go-wrong” part, and Lesson 2 is the exercises to try out your ActionScript skills – feel free to take on the exercises first if you’re feeling confident.

Download link: An Introduction to ActionScript 3.0 – Week 5 (both lessons combined)
Audience: Beginners who know a little about variables, functions, objects and how to perform some basic programming math.
Format: PDF
Content License: This material is released under a creative commons non-commercial attribution share-alike 3.0 license by me (r3dux) and come with no guarantee of correctness, fitness for purpose or anything of the sort.

Feedback, as always, is very welcome.

Learning actionscript? Want to know the gist of object creation and extending classes to do neat things? Then you’ve come to the right place…

Download slides link: An Introduction to ActionScript 3.0 – Week 4, Lesson 2
Audience: Beginners who know a little about variables and how to perform some basic programming math.
Format: Powerpoint 2003 (so they can be opened in LibreOffice/OpenOffice, MS Office 2K3/2K7/2K10 etc.)
Template: OOo2 by Chih-Hao Tsai
Content License: These slides are released under a creative commons non-commercial attribution share-alike 3.0 license by me (r3dux) and come with no guarantee of correctness, fitness for purpose or anything of the sort.

EnJoY!

I stopped organising the slides for web publication after week 3 lesson 2 (back in March 2010!) because I just wasn’t seeing any demand, and if no-one’s using them, there was no point in me working on ‘em. Apparently at least one person has found the slides useful and asked about any further sets, so I’m happy to put ‘em together if they’ll be used.

As you might have worked out from the title slide above, we’re covering variables, constants, arrays and loops and some push/pop stuff – all good, solid first steps to getting fun stuff done w/ AS3 =D

Download slides link: An Introduction to ActionScript 3.0 – Week 4, Lesson 1
Audience: Beginners who know a little about variables and how to perform some basic programming math.
Format: Powerpoint 2003 (so they can be opened in LibreOffice/OpenOffice, MS Office 2K3/2K7/2K10 etc.)
Template: OOo2 by Chih-Hao Tsai
Content License: These slides are released under a creative commons non-commercial attribution share-alike 3.0 license by me (r3dux), which means that you are encouraged to copy, distribute and modify the work, but must attribute the original author. Further, you may not use the work for commercial purposes, and any derivative works must be released under the same license. These slides come with no guarantee of correctness, fitness for purpose or anything of the sort. They are correct to the best of my knowledge, nothing more – nothing less. The work and any comments therein contain my own personal opinions and not those of my employer or anyone related to education in Australia in any way, shape or form. Issues, comments? Put something in the contact form in the top right or leave a comment on this article. Cheers!

I should really have been studying GLSL shaders today, but I thought I’d put together a quick ActionScript animation for Christmas Day – it’s only ActionScript – should take me an hour or two, tops… Six hours later I finished this. I really am dreadful at estimating durations =P

Anyways, I just wanted to say Merry Christmas to my Mum & Dad and everyone in my family, my beautiful wife and the wonderful kids I get to share time with, my friends in the UK and the AU, and everyone who’s been a part of my life and helped to make me the person I am today.

My love to you all & best wishes for the future,
r3dux

Source code, for those who want it, can be found: here

Credits:
- I took the snowflake shapes from here: http://www.wallawalla.edu/academics/libraries/curriculum-library/die-cut-ideas/snowflakes/ and cut them out & lightly processed them with the GIMP, and
- I took the background from here: http://snow-village-3d-screensaver.smartcode.com/screenshot.html.