Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

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Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby ImaginaryZ » Fri May 08, 2009 4:51 pm

So, thanks to the idea from the code competition thread, I investigated flash.

Turns out they have 'Flash CS4' Flash Professional out now, but, after reading into it in detail, it seems that, well, they didn't fix a whole lot. (Surprise! You just wasted 700 USD!) However, they did add some 3D mathematics into the engine, so it can do manual 3D (doing the matrices for modelview and projection yourself using their Matrix and Vector classes). Not sure how useful that'll be, since it is flash and therefore slow. Also, they did add a interesting DrawTriangles, which should let me add in models and stuff, but the speed is highly in question as is matrixPalette or other deformation techniques.

Also, it seems, that from Flash 4, more than 10 years later, onto Flash 10, THEY STILL HAVEN'T FIXED SHAPE TWEENING!!! Gawd.

So if you use flash and want to make decent looking swallowing animations, rather than being able to control the bezier control points and such to make a decent animation (as you would in 3D) you have to:
For example, if you are tweening a drawing of a face as it changes expression, you can use a shape hint to mark each eye. Then, instead of the face becoming an amorphous tangle while the shape change takes place, each eye remains recognizable and changes separately during the shift. ...You can use up to 26 shape hints. ...Shape hints work best if you place them in counterclockwise order beginning at the top-left corner of the shape.


I struggled with this problem for years (no pun intended) and ultimately, it became way too much of a workload for the benefit. It can be done on complex shapes, but the insane amount of shape hints required makes the idea of using flash for this purpose extremely unattractive.

If you have found any tricks to make flash behave like a normal vector editing program, post em here. Or hell, post all your new flash tricks here.

I'm very interested to test out this triangles function to see just what it can do. I did the same with GameMaker a while back, and hated it a lot. So we'll see what flash does.

Peace ya'll.
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby Quantium » Fri May 08, 2009 6:04 pm

Anime Studio Pro is way better than Flash, it's way easier to make and animate characters in and you work very fast in it (it has a very powerful bone system which Flash don't have).
Flash is more for web animations, Anime Studio Pro is more for movie animations (like characters), that's why some cartoons on TV uses that program.

Also Anime Studio Pro have fully support for 3D, and is vector based.
And it just cost 150 dollars, pretty cheap.
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby Modeseven » Fri May 08, 2009 7:04 pm

Or you could stop being lazy and just draw the frames ROTOSCOPE style.
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby Aleph-Null » Fri May 08, 2009 7:21 pm

I assumed from the first line that he at least in part intends to use flash to render a game.
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby The Requester » Fri May 08, 2009 7:28 pm

I say anime studio Pro is one of the best for making quick or semi long flash movies which is what u wana do
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby SinowZoa » Fri May 08, 2009 9:05 pm

AS2 doesnt mess tweens, AS3 does. Can be fixed on AS3 by using seperate layers for every tween. Also, it was possible to make '3D' structures in flash which were just mathmatical calculations to make something look 3D I miss my ASer though I havnt tried CS4.
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby ArtSavage » Fri May 08, 2009 9:50 pm

Shape tweens are not and never will be a magical fix-it tool for animation.
I believe there is some "drawLine" code that can let you directly control the bezier handles... For just plain shape tweening, I've gotten pretty good results by making sure I have an angular shape connected to the curve I want to wriggle, so that part of the total shape doesn't move, plus a shape hint or two.

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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby delet359hs56h2 » Fri May 08, 2009 11:20 pm

From my experience it seems that the best way to go about shape tweening is to have multiple layers for each individual piece you want to tween. Having multiple pieces or "graphics" if you will all on the same layer of the stage will cause the tweening to f up. Simplify it to layers and that should help you.
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby ImaginaryZ » Sat May 09, 2009 2:26 am

Aleph-Null:

Absolutely, I'm going to use flash to make yet another flash (platforming/fighting) game, and I would like to see if advanced features can help me here.

Nitro_Titan:

LMAO, did you ever see 'A Scanner Darkly'? awesome.

SinowZoa:

AS means ActionScript; And what do you mean AS3 messes with tweens? Does it not allow curve control point setting, or what's the deal? And yes, AS4 is still just math structures that do the 3D matrix math that your 3D graphics card normally does (perspective transformation), but now it's been standardized to be faster internally. 'by using separate layers for every tween', so, that means 1 shape for each neck, body, and so on? Or what do you mean here? Do you have an example or can point me to something that already does this? (I think I had to do this in barbftr some)

Snookums:

Alright, excellent advice, thank you!

In General:

Thanks for the feedback; What I intend to do is this:
1. Make model in blender that is flat and textured (I already did this in GameMaker before, worked too slow there cause of GM's lack of speed; check my blog)
2. Export it in a custom/readable format (GRF or ARF or BRF or OBM format or a new one)
3. Write flash app that can read and display this model
4. Embed information into the model so that the game basically can act like VFighter.swf, and use the imported data to run a game.

This means that you can make a multi-layered texture switching model that is just flat, and then add in collision and attack boxes, then write some action script(?) to make it a fighting character / enemy / boss. This is the same concept VFighter had, but VFighter required Flash 8 .swf files to be made externally, and not many people had that tool. Blender is free, and legally free, so there's no more excuses. Plus, something like this heavily relies on 2D traditional art, of which I have little skill yet many people around here are excellent at. However, the animations can instead be realtime, and have distortions, and can switch textures. (Think Odin Sphere)

The first thing to test is speed. We'll see just how tough flash is from a texture triangle standpoint first.
Next is animation speed. We'll see if it can handle multiple character updates (I did some looking, this seems totally possible so far)
And then, we'll have information to work off and I'll post the test just in case anyone else want's to pick up the torch.

Thanks for the feedback ya'll! Hopefully this will generate some interesting results. I'd like to see a platforming + fighting game made with this, similar to MegaManX 5. So far as vore in it goes, well, if I make it, that's a given. Probably just another method of 'grapple' attack for anything and everything. ;)

If there are other things about Flash CS4 you want to know/see tested, post em' and we'll see what we can do.

Thanks again, I will report after I get the test complete! And, if you still have flash tricks, let us know!

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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby SinowZoa » Sat May 09, 2009 10:12 am

ImaginaryZ wrote:SinowZoa:

AS means ActionScript; And what do you mean AS3 messes with tweens? Does it not allow curve control point setting, or what's the deal? And yes, AS4 is still just math structures that do the 3D matrix math that your 3D graphics card normally does (perspective transformation), but now it's been standardized to be faster internally. 'by using separate layers for every tween', so, that means 1 shape for each neck, body, and so on? Or what do you mean here? Do you have an example or can point me to something that already does this? (I think I had to do this in barbftr some)
ion speed. We'll see if it can handle multiple character updates (I did some looking, this seems totally possible so far)
And then, we'll have information to work off and I'll post the test just in case anyone else want's to pick up the torch.


I know it should only change the AS type, but when creating multiple tweens on a single layer, MClip or not, the tweens glitch and swap themselves for others, this only occurs in an AS3 file, on nearly every goup of tweens you make, even if all tweens and containing objects are renamed .This doesnt occur when all tweens are on different layers (easilly autoapllied with , but on a large document with fewer scenes, it can lead to a huge number of unnecassary layers. I did a lot of meesing when I was trying to make a tween animated movie a while back, so I may have a few files...This was a while back and I havn't used it scince then again I wouldnt be surprised if this is something only I got from something silly like a bad download
This doesnt happen on AS2 documents, I use CS3, updated from Adobe 8 which also worked fine.
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10 Update

Postby ImaginaryZ » Sat May 09, 2009 4:25 pm

Update;

Flash CS4 has a bone animation tool. It allows you to create any shape, and then draw a skeleton/armature on it, and then bind specific verticies/control points to each bone with weighting. This means you get all the benefits of a skeletal animation system, PLUS it makes shape tweens unessential. This is the current solution to the shape tween problem, but it makes for some really radical skeletons (Having to add many bones for extra bulgy-ness on swallowing animations) and as per usual, the Adobe tools are really dumb and hard to use, and improperly designed (Where is @#$!(& macro record?!? why ca't I multi-select? Non-uniformity ARGH!)

But, it also eliminates a HUGE amount of work on the designer, which is awesome. I'm yet to determine if I can code control armatures or whatnot, but, I just got Flash CS4, so:

If any of you want Flash CS4 to play with, IM/PM me and I'll hook you up.

Today I hope to get the drawTriangles test tested. I'm kinda excited about this, using armatures should cut down the time per character (in barbftr, it was ~8 hours per character) to maybe 2 or less. Which is about the same as in blender.

Let's hope this works out, cause I already have the game drawn out in my head and on paper.

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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby Liz » Sat May 09, 2009 8:51 pm

ImaginaryZ Good luck with you game.

I haven't made anything in Flash as of yet and reading though the posts it proved i know sweet FA about it.

I might have to look up some sites and learn abit before I even attempted one :P
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby ImaginaryZ » Tue May 12, 2009 4:34 pm

Update; All my tests are done. The results:

Again, we are lied to about software. No surprise coming from Adobe.

'drawTriangles' does what it is supposed to, but the speed of using it compared to traditional normal bitmap tweens and symbols is not comparable; It's still usable, but it's still triangles.

'Bone Animation' in flash does not work; If you try and use their broken bone system, it intentionally tears the symbols out of your tweening layers so that you can no longer apply scaling or other transforms to them through the timeline; Basically, it turns your normal hierarchy of layers into a scrambled mess; And good luck with their IK algorithm that requires 10x more time to use because of toggling rotation/position checkboxes.

'Bone shape Animation' does not work; If you add a bone to ANY shape, it 'cuts' your shape up into pieces, so that what you would expect does not happen, and even with properly weighted extra verticies, you still can't apply scaling with bones, plus, managing a skeleton that requires so many thousands of little clicks to enable/disable locking on position and rotation is far slower than tweens.

'Motion Tweens' are CS4's newly designed tweens; However, they are way harder to animate for precisely controlled animations and are designed for intentionally flakey animations. The difference here, is you have to use the motion editor, which requires 10x more clicking than traditional tweens and far more screen space, and yet again slow everything down. It does add the option to animate shaders and colors though; But at the cost of hours and hours more mouse clicking. Also, the context menu doesn't let you specify much about copy and pasting keys or additional standard animation features. 'Motion Tweens' are special case tools ONLY.

ActionScript 3.0 : Gone are the days of simple, basic scripting; replaced by the horrendous newbie OOP style API's that attempt to objectify too many things for no reason other than to confuse and dissuade new coders; Gone are dynamic typing variables with a syntax that'll make you want to die; Say hello to event messages and lack of a well defined control or timing structure; If you wanted A to happen after B, you're fucked. AS3.0 is terrible, hard to use, and offers only 1 thing, and that's a pile of objects. Not too surprising since Adobe made it.

And good luck trying to set keyboard shortcuts for these new features; They ain't there.

For a fair speed comparison, what took me 5 minutes to do in blender via bezier curves took me nearly an hour in flash; And that includes animation. Blender is the best human interface design I have ever seen or will see, so it works as a good benchmark for these things. Read up on Fitt's law.

If they made something decent and simple, they couldn't sell you training, now could they?

Again, Adobe Flash CS4 is a complete waste of money and time; Avoid this mess at all costs. You might as well be using Flash MX or Flash 8.

I am gong to try and port my current project down to Flash 8, because 8 still has shaders, and it works with normal tweening, which seems to be all you can do in the end.

So, if you want flash 8 to play with, lemme know...

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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby Modeseven » Tue May 12, 2009 4:41 pm

ImaginaryZ wrote:Nitro_Titan:

LMAO, did you ever see 'A Scanner Darkly'? awesome.


No, I haven't, and what do you mean? Did I make a reference?
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby SinowZoa » Tue May 12, 2009 4:53 pm

I said AS3 sucks :<
also bone shape animation isnt in CS3 and so long as you keep to AS2 files, its fine (but it is pretty much the same as flash 8 )
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Re: Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10

Postby Quantium » Tue May 12, 2009 5:26 pm

From my own expirence of this program, and some of the tutorial videos I have seen, Adobe Flash CS4 is not a good choice of program if you want to do "advanced" animations with bone systems and such, the bone tool Adobe Flash CS4 have is more for making some tasks easier, like animating an arm or leg, it's not meant to be some sort of a fundamental tool for animating, unfortunately.

If you click the bone tool in the program, it only have 2 options, "bone" and "binding", which is very poor.
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