Now that Flash 8 has been announced, Macromedia is letting members of the beta post their experiments and answer questions about the features in the upcoming release. Flash 8 has been the biggest reason why blogging has been so hard recently. There is so much that is cool, so much that is important, and I haven’t been able to make a peep about it.

well, PEEP!

This is the first experiment that I would like to post. This will also be the foundation for my next personal site at infinitumdesign.com (yes, it is about time for the jeep to go away).

Features:

The experiment is really a combination of four files I have worked on:

• Dynamic lighting: Notice that as you approach the stars, light is cast on the ship. As you change direction or move away the direction and intensity change.
• Filters on particles: As you move the ship around, lots of little stars are shot out as thrust. Each star is rotated, and scaled, then has a random blur filter attached. There can be hundreds of these movies on the stage!!
• Cloaking effect: This is is the one that I am most excited about. make sure to click into the flash file, then press the space bar to cloak and de-cloak the ship. I tried to model the effect after the Romulan cloaking effect from Star Trek.
• Nebulae: It wouldn’t be a cheesy sci-fi effect without nebulae. You will be shocked at how easy that is.

How?

Dynamic lighting is done by stacking the Gradient Glow Filter three times with the red green and blue version of the ship. I adjust many of the filter properties to get the right lightness, blurriness, distance and direction. These filters are re-applied per frame.

The particles are pretty straight forward with their blur filter, though it is worth noting that this is all very light on the processor. Running lots of stars still doesn’t break 50% on my processor.

The cloaking effect. This one took some doing, but I think it is worth every moment. I’m using the displacement map filter with some dynamically generated images that animate changing the displacement map.

The nebulae are just me taking my mouse, picking a random color and making a squiggle with the paint brush tool. I make several of these, make them into movie clips and then apply some filters, and maybe blend modes. it takes 20 seconds top. Flash 8 really let’s me have an idea and execute it without running into some of my normal “design challenges” that leave me unhappy with the final product.

Performance & Optimization

This file is 8K! All of the rich elements in the file are all done using the new features in Flash 8. No more importing clunky graphics to get close to the effect that you’ve been dreaming of since Flash 3. The filters also save a bundle on the processor. Running this file in just a normal way generally won’t let the processor go much above 50%, and I haven’t tried to optimize performance even slightly. The cloak an spike a bit higher, especially when over the nebula, but that is just a spike not a constantly running effect.