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I’ve been pootlin’ about with Flash a little behind the scenes of late, just making the occasional graphical trinket, and it struck me that I hadn’t made a starfield yet in ActionScript – so I knocked together a quick and dirty one in about 20 minutes…

The “star” itself is just a really small, white circle – so small that it turns into a single-pixel block with filtering on it – you can change out the symbol to anything you like, or just draw actual points if you wanted to – I’m happy enough that the guts of it work and will leave it alone and re-use the code when I want the effect sometime…

Source code after the jump if that’s your thing…

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More ActionScript… This time we’re attracting the particles towards the mouse cursor when the distance between them is low enough… Looks alright, just a kinda fun effect & dead simple to code.

Source code and flash files on the flipside…

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I’ve basically spent the day trying to get this one right, and it’s not too bad, although it’s pretty heavy on the CPU. Really, you want about 150 particles and a slower fade out, or 150 particles and add two per frame instead of just one, but on my rig it’s getting jerky with that many particles, so in the animation below we’ve got 80 particles as a compromise =( Also, because we’ve only got 80 particles I’ve deliberately ramped up the alpha decay (i.e. how quickly the particles fade out) and upped the vertical speed to get them off the stage before the particle is forced to vanish by our particle limit. If you put the mouse cursor right down near the bottom of the stage and look at the particles at the top you’ll just catch them vanishing instead of fading out fully, but these are the compromises we make for a smoother framerate

If it’s running poorly on your machine, try right clicking on the stage and lowering the quality, or just grab the files from after the jump and mess around in Flash CS4 (free trials available) with all the different variables (especially the ones that start with min or max!!).

I’ve set the window-mode to use GPU acceleration on this one, so if nothing displays and you’ve got an older graphics card (and you want to see it), just view the source code for this page, grab the object section and change wmode=”gpu” to wmode=”direct”.

Credits: LearnFlash.com’s particle systems vids for the how-to, kaioa.com for the FPSCounter Class, and me for coding it up and running with it!

EnJoY!

Update: I’ve modified the above example to use the RateController Class I wrote yesterday. Aside from adding a RateController object, the only other modification was adding a listener to toggle the animation on a MOUSE_LEAVE event (cursor leaving the stage), and then changing the toggleAnimation function to wait for a click (and not MOUSE_MOVE i.e. cursor returns to stage) before adding particles again. Too easy…

Update 2: Many thanks to Joel for pointing out that in my zeal to optimise things I’d actually added some null pointer errors as well as some extra fps, and for correctly suggesting that using Sprites instead of MovieClips would result in a small speed boost, too. The swf file above and code & zip file below have received suitably stern words, and everything now works (relatively) swiftly and error free.

As usual, source code and flash files after the hop skip jump…

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Yet more ActionScript 3.0 again! This time it’s a kind of 2D particle fountain. New in this iteration is code so we can pause and resume the animation instead of just start/stopping it, and each bubble’s colour gets subtley modified via colorTransforms.

Last one for the day methinks – I’m knackered. Happy, but knackered

As usual, source code and flash files after the jump for those of a particularly masochistic bent…

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Even more ActionScript, this time we’re taking particle depth into account and adding a blur to the stage (apparently it’s quicker to blur everything than the individual objects).

Source code and flash files after the jump if you’re into that kind of thing…

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