dispatchEvent()™

I’ve tinkered a bit with Flash Player 10. One thing that seems almost funny about the 3D effects of Flash thus far is that very few examples show off actually 3D objects. Most examples I’ve examined show 2D planes transformed in 3D space. So, I’ve created a sample 3D cube primitive in AS3 as a convenient example for people who want to get started with their own parsers or drawing tools (etc).

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1. Versatility - Great for tweening animation, yes, but also great for calling functions, disptaching events, playing sounds, controlling MovieClips, and more. Virtually any code can be run at a specific time. In KitchenSync, any event or behaviour that can be sequenced is called an “action“.
2. Advanced sequencing - There are several types of action groups designed to meet the real-world sequencing needs of projects.
3. Interchangeable groups - Treats all actions, including groups of actions (like sequences), as the same type of object so they can be interchanged. That means you can nest sequences inside of other sequences.
4. Video-like controls - All actions, even groups, have the ability to play, pause, stop, reset, play backwards, loop, and jump to a specific time. Calling one of these functions on a group affects all of the items in the group.
5. Beyond Penner - All the familiar easing functions are included as well as several original ones like oscillators. An easing utility class has also been added which allows you to create hybrid easing functions.

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One of the new features in KitchenSync 1.5 is the ability to tween animations on a MovieClip’s timeline… and I’m not just talking about gotoAndPlay(), I’m talking about controlling the starting and stopping points, speed, and easing functions of an animation on the timeline with code. It does this by incrementally controlling the current frame number of the MovieClip using a KSTween and a special ITweenTarget (a class used to control the values of an object) called TimelineController.

Take this FLA animation.

As you can see, there is a simple animation using a guide layer and labels on the key frames.

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Odds bodkins! The latest version of what is arguably the best sequencing and tweening system for AS3, KitchenSync, has just been released! I jumped from version 1.2 to 1.5 because this one packed in so many cool features. Features like:

• Improved performance (50% faster!)
• Filter tweens
• Tween MovieClip animations on the timeline
• Use a KSSequenceGroup like a function queue

I’ll be posting some demos over the following days. In the meantime, check it out!