Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!

Description

This book is the 2nd edition of Keith Peters' best-selling ActionScript animation book, updated to ActionScript 3.0—all of the code has been updated, and some new techniques have been added to take advantage of ActionScript 3.0's new features, including the display list and new event architecture. The code can be used with the Flash IDE, Flex Builder 2, or the free Flex 2 SDK.

Flash has long been one of the most approachable, user-friendly tools for creating web-based animation. This has contributed to making it one of the most ubiquitous forms of web animation, and there are some very powerful animation scripting capabilities at your disposal—if you are still relying on key frames and tweens for the bulk of your Flash animation, you are missing out on some very exciting stuff!

This book will teach you how to use Flash ActionScript to move the objects in your movie, rather than letting Flash's tween engine do it for you. The benefit of this is smaller, more realistic, more dynamic, interactive movies that almost literally seem to come alive on your screen.

Although the text covers many advanced math and physics concepts, making for very realistic motion, there's no need to worry even if you are a relative newcomer to programming and the last math class you took was in high school (and even if you barely remember that!) The book starts with the all the basics you need to get started: principles of animation, and the basics of ActionScript, trigonometry and Flash rendering methods. It works its way slowly up from using code to move a single object across the screen, to the creation of complex systems that really push Flash's capabilities. Once you'll get to grips with it all, you'll find yourself creating all manner of exciting animations and games!