Banners in Flash (II)

Another banner in Flash freely created through PowerBullet.

I think that this new one is cleaner and more readable than my two-months-old past attempt. The banner already links to the official MekaWars site, but the site and the game are still in development. While waiting for the final version, give a look at the very early 2D preview posted yesterday.

CamStudio

A week ago I talked about PowerBullet, an easy to use tool to design simple Flash presentations (read the post).
Looking for a help in programming the code necessary to Video Capture, I have found another free utility related to Flash that is also a screen activity recorder. It is called CamStudio.

The purpose of CamStudio is twofold: one can use it to create several kinds of demostrations in AVI format, simply recording the screen activity; then the program can convert the generated AVI file in a Flash movie, easily embeddable in HTML pages.
The description from the producer's site says:
RenderSoft CamStudio is a tool for recording screen activity into standard AVI video files. If you move the cursor, launch a new program, type some text, click a few buttons, or select some menus - anything that you see on your screen - CamStudio will be able to record all these and allow you to play them back later on.
You can use CamStudio to:

• demonstrate features of a new software
  
• create movies used in user trainings
  
• track the progress of a program that executes for a long time
  
• record the sequence of steps that cause the occurrence of bugs in faulty software
  
• record a movie stream
  
• convert AVI files to Flash (SWF) files.
  

Explosions Generator

Yesterday I have described a program that generates images of animated caustics. Today is the turn of a program that generates images of explosions. You can download it here.
You know the importance of explosions in games. Often they are realized through the particles system, but also a simple square textured with an animation is good enough in some situations. For example, such are the simple explosions in "Urban Tactics".
In the case of this program, each frame of the explosion is drawn in a sector of the texture, so one can immediately use the APOCALYX AnimatedTexture class to render the animation on a transparent billboard and simulate an explosion.
The author says: "As a side-effect of working on a shootemup game I have a small program that generates sprite animations of explosions. Because there aren't many easy ways to get textures like this if you aren't an artist (without stealing them from other games) I thought I would do the decent thing and generate a few spare free textures that anyone can use, anywhere for anything, royalty free. If you are doing 2D or 3D games, you might find these texture helpfull in rendering explosions in your games.
You can download the program and configure lots of different variables to output your own unique texture pages of explosions. Happy exploding!"

Caustics Generator

Textures are fundamental for games. Nowadays the fragment shaders add a lot of versatility and realism to game scenes, but also a good animated texture may be enough sometimes. Hand drawing textures is an art, use and modify real photos is easier, but there is a third way: use texture generators.
In a past post (read it) I talked about the procedural texture generator included in APOCALYX. There are also programs that generate procedurally animated texture to recreate effects like caustics, the characteristics light-games under the sea surface. One of these program, devoted to caustics, is available here.

The author says:"Caustics can be described as the light pattern you see at the bottom of a pool on a sunny day.
This tool will let you render such caustics patterns. The rendered images can be animated and used for realtime graphics and are tileable in both space and time.
Caustics are a bit more than just the pattern seen on the bottom of the pool. Caustics is the name for the light phenomenon of converging light. Caustics are caused by the fact that light is reflected or refracted one or several times before actually hitting a surface. The more light that is refracted to the same area on a surface, the brighter the area will be lit.
The patterns rendered by this program are calculated by simulating the effect of light refracting through water. The water surface is made tileable in both space and time in order to make the rendered images tileable.
The rendered images can for example be used as realtime textures for games and animations."

Banners in Flash

Let's start a new topic a little off-topic for the main line of discussion of this blog: Utilities.
I had to write the flash-banner for a free game in development, the banner that you can see today on the left, and I never created one in the past (in fact, as you can see, the final result is not so professional). Anyway, I tought that some complex and expensive tools were necessary to put together things like that, but I was wrong.

I've found a simple program called PowerBullet, that in its 1.35 version is free to use. It can create flash presentations in a few clicks, in fact built-in buttons to advance presentations are already available, but it is useful also for create simple banners.
I promise that my next attempt will be better, but I think that the beginning is not so a bad.