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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!

Ha! I’ve cracked it! This really shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to get working, but now I can have pegs and balls of any size I fancy, and the collision detection works flawlessly. No more cheaky bodges to avoid double collisions, proper trig. offsets all the way… In fact, the only bodge left is adding a slight horizontal speed jitter to a ball if it ends up with a horizontal velocity of < 0.01 after a collision, because if it's bang over over the centre of the peg it'll stay there happily bouncing away until it comes to rest otherwise - which I think is fair enough.

So after all the additional hours, does it look any better? Nope… If anything it looks worse – but she’s my baby, and I’ve finally got ‘er working properly, so I don’t care!

Update: And by flawlessly, I mean that I’ve just noticed a very small ball going fast will go through a very small peg, because they never intersect… Drats! Guess I’ll have to check for ranged collisions (or increase the minimal ball/peg size, or limit the movement speed). Nothing’s ever easy, is it?