Working on the Translations
May 26th, 2007This project is rather cool, IMHO of course. It is a character generator for the Hypercomics web site. Select a character, tweak the appendages and save a PNG as your avatar, a piece of artwork for your comic or both. Doing it with Flash 8 required the PNG to be created on the server and so I was eagerly anticipating Flash 9 and the additional power of ByteArray. We could then generate the PNG using the end user’s computer and save server resources.
Moving from AS2 to AS3 is not as difficult as I thought it would be. Aside from a few changes in methods and getting use to strict typing of variables, it only took me about a week to move a PNG generating SWF file over to AS3. While I am sure that I am not getting all of the benefits of OOP or AS3, it is nice to see a moderately easy path.
I should point out that the experience that I gained while playing with Flex was a great head start with Flash 9 AS3. But the differences are interesting. As an example, while Flex 2 has ArrayCollection, Flash 9 doesn’t. That means that the most of the ActionScript examples in the “Training form the Source” and other Flex books don’t directly translate into Flash 9. You would think AS3 is AS3 but it depends on the program compiling it.