Ahhh! ActionScript! The savior of the boring intro! If the movement and interactivity that Flash brought to the web was what made it fun to go online again, then the increased ability of ActionScript in the later releases were what made Flash worth keeping as something more than just a gimmick.

I remember when I saw the first really well done ActionScript pages at sites like Yugo Nakamura's and Joshua Davis' praystation and I knew that there was hope yet for the web as a truly interactive space for art. I delved as deep as I could and when sites like FlashKit started popping up where you could grab bits of ActionScript in tutorial form I really began to develop my coding skills treble-fold.

I was soon quite familiar with how to create tracking elements and interactive 3d buttons. One of my favourite little tricks was creating VR type flash element a-la quicktimeVR360 using mouse detection and static images (a variant on this theme can be seen in the EUFCC logo file below). I even tried my hand at creating a game with collision detection and mouse tracking.

Here is a selection of some of the more advanced elements I have created. As with most things though, the best items have been lost or are unfinished.

EUFCC (enter page)

View the HTML for this site

Here I provide an example of what can be done with a little ActionScript, and a lot of ingenious use of plain old mouseOver elements (obviously the ingenious part is nothing to do with me!). In this file you will see some very boring text effects relating to the nature of the company, but once you get past that you find a 3D rendered logo spins while you have your mouse on the stage to reveal an enter button to the site. This is the real interesting element here.

I started by creating the logo in swift3D because it could easily be rendered and exported to flash. Then I rendered a full set of incremental "shots" in 360°. Each shot represents an angle in the spinning logo, each angle is a frame, each frame move on to the next so long as you have the mouse over an invisible button, but moves backwards if you don't. Simple.

EUFCC (sensitive selector)

View the real I T website

Again, from the same site as the 3D logo, this menu item performs two relevant functions to this portfolio. First, it is a sensitive selector of the kind made famous by Yugo. Move the mouse towards the side and the menu scrolls underneath. Secondly, there is a neat aspect of each button if you look closely. This is a great example of extreme effort put into minor detail. As the mouse gets close to the center of the roll over, a semi-transparent target reticule closes around the button before it un-shades and reveals its label.

To do this last bit I used a few lines of ActionScript and many concentric circles of invisible elements. The actionScript fools the player into thinking that the many buttons are all one button and as you pass over each a new rollover image is displayed one step closer. Of course with later versions of Flash with updated actionscript, this can be done with an entirely scripted array a bit like a sprite in Director.

Chris Addison Game

View the Garden Art website

Chris Addison was a presenter of a TV show here in the UK with Gail Porter called dotcomedy which specifically looked at the fun side of the internet. It could be argued that the popularity of Flash was what drove the interest in the show in the first place since most of the sites they visited were really just flash games or funny flash animations. Invariably they had people make games for the shows own website, to which I intended to contribute my own. The concept was simple. A side scrolling button pusher in which Chris would jump over many comedy obstacles and throw pies of death at an unusually muscular Gail Porter (if you expand the player window you will see Gail waiting off stage).

Unfortunately (or fortunately), they cancelled the show before I even got properly started on this little tid bit. So, it is in a total state of disassembly (for example the frame rate is way to high), but what survives is a good example of some basic action scripting in conjunction with animated input responses (move the mouse back and forth to control Chris, press "Z" to jump, "space" and to throw a pie).

Chris Addison Game (preloader)

View the Country Life website

As an added bonus to the Chris Addison game, in the preloader for the game I added a mini game/boredom destroyer to play with while you waited for the bulk of the game to load. There was no object to it what so ever other than to make the disembodied head of Chris Addison contort into several funny faces (there were sounds to be added later) while bouncing it round the screen.

In respect of this portfolio however, this is a perfect example of collision detection and gravity calculation determined exclusively through the use of ActionScript. I actually wrote this one entirely on my own rather than reverse engineering snippets form open source files as would normally do with something I didn't quite understand yet (a great way to learn by the way). Creating this loading game was the result of reading up on mathematical arrays in ActionScript. I read the first four chapters about gravity calculation, collision detection, boarder definition, and mouse tracking and stopped reading!

BSU interactive tutorial

Demo available soon

By far the most ambitious bit of ActionScript I've done, this was a part of my time at Bath Spa. A partner and I constructed an interactive tutorial in flash that made use of some complex action scripting to draw upon a basic data stucture embedded in the script. The result was a tutorial that allowed the student to experience an accurate simulation of how a real world physical process might feel.