Stage3D Model Matrix: Scale, Rotation, Translation
One essential to a Stage3D app is the ability to manipulate models in the 3D scene. Today’s article presents a class for making this really easy by avoiding all the manual work you’d to to save...
View ArticleHow To Cut Texture Memory Usage In Half
ATF textures are great at reducing texture memory usage but sometimes you can’t use them. If you’re dynamically generating the texture (e.g. from a snapshot of a DisplayObject) or you’re loading the...
View ArticleFlash vs. HTML5: Hardware-Accelerated Bitmap Rotation and Scaling
Flash (mostly) won the first bitmap test against HTML5 but was then defeated once rotation and scaling entered the mix. Can Flash make a comeback by leveraging hardware acceleration via Stage3D?...
View ArticleFlash vs. HTML5: Stage3D vs. WebGL
WebGL is not ready for prime time. It’s just not available on enough of the browsers people actually use for any mass-market game to seriously target it. But what if everybody used browsers that...
View ArticleStage3D vs. WebGL vs. AIR
Today’s article is in response to the many requests to include Adobe AIR in the “Flash vs. HTML5″ series of articles. While it’s not a browser-based competitor, it certainly is a competing platform on...
View ArticleVertex Shader Inputs Demystified
Stage3D is hugely powerful, but with that power comes a very new and very complicated requirement for many programmers: shaders. Shaders are tiny programs that run on the GPU and are hugely limited...
View ArticleFrom DisplayObject to Stage3D Texture
Flash makes it pretty easy to use any DisplayObject as a Stage3D texture. This is a great feature since you can use powerful, traditional classes like MovieClip, Sprite, TextField, and Shape to build a...
View ArticleEasily Get the Best Context3D
When you request a Context3D you’ll either get the requested profile or software rendering. But what if you’d rather fall back to a lesser hardware context? What if your app can make use of the...
View ArticleEasily Create Power-of-Two Textures
In almost all circumstances, Stage3D requires you to provide textures with power-of-two dimensions. This is often inconvenient as most images are not already sized that way. Today’s article provides a...
View ArticleWhen getSize() Lies
flash.sampler.getSize() is a handy tool for figuring out how much memory a class instance uses. However, it is often flat-out wrong. Today’s article tries it out on a variety of classes to find out...
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