Tom’s Graphic Design Journal

I stumbled upon a really cool plugin for WordPress that I think deserves a special notation. I found it listed on wordpress.org along with many other plugins to highlight code, but I found this one very easy to install and use. We'll see how it works for various languages, but it looks great. It doesn't seem to have basic HTML language support (perhaps I can write an xml definition file for that), but it does have support for ActionScript (2 not 3, but that should be ok), JavaScript, PHP, and Perl which I'll probably never use.

The other nice thing is it will allow you to copy and paste code. Expect more code snippets from me (which I've been meaning to get to). You can download the plugin yourself by visiting the Flash Text Formatter web site.

So I'm going to try and post to my blog more often. I research non-stop and really need to write down a lot of it for my own reference now moreso than ever. However, don't forget that I also put interesting sites into my custom Google search engine for design.

So what did I find this time? Fisix and APE. Two physics engines for ActionScript3 / Flash 9. Wonderful libraries that make the tasks of gravity, bounce, velocity, collision, springs, and more very easy! Essentially you can just stick in a nice easy line of code and voila you have a ball/wheel that can bounce around and interact with things in your "world." Same goes for creating lines/planes/vectors/etc. that can have different properties applied to them to modify such objects.

All in all my taste of physics engines in AS3 ranged from easy to advanced...there is quite a bit of math involved when you get down to it and it really started bringing back memories of my high school physics class and all the spring formulas, etc.

So what can you do with a physics engine? Well, you probably will want to be making animations, simulations, or games with it. I suppose you could have an informative web site that has windows that bounce around with info in them, or perhaps a slick navigation, but that's probably a seldom thing.

The Fisix Engine is available for use in Flex projects and APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) is available for use in Flex and Flash CS3 projects.