Made for TIG Jam UK 4 with Joe Bain.

Ok, so AS3 has its fair share of problems. It is slow, it has next to no support for templates/generics and somewhat sparse standard library. And yet still I love using it.

Why? It has managed to pull together some of the rarer features that I think every language should have. Language designers, take note of the following.

I'm releasing an alpha version of Box2D Flash 2.1. It's got a shiny new website, too. It has may features that were lacking before, but you'll have to discover most of them for yourself.

This move is prompted mainly by the announcement of Erin that Box2D 2.1 itself is going to be delayed for more features. Also, the wiki got wiped out, so documentation is at an all time low (frankly, I'm glad the wiki's gone. I sunk much work into it, but it was still a useless reference source).

Yeah, so I finally caught up with Erin's changes to the C++ version. It's still not quite usable though - a few bugs remain to be found, not to mention the fact patches of functionality are missing or broken. I'll be putting up a preview version soonish, though.

I also spent 10 minutes cutting out one of the more flagrant ways the engine creates too many objects (instead of re-using objects internally).

I measure the average benchmark time (using the newly created benchmark program) has decreased from 1537ms to 1378ms. That's 10% faster (as a rough estimate). Not too shabby for just one quick change. I've attached the benchmark reports.

Performance of the engine doesn't really excite me though (this is FLASH we're talking about). But it seems the done thing in dev blogs, which this is rapidly turning into.

Ok, the first revision (r52) of Box2DAS3 for the next version is available now on SVN. Phew, that was a lot of work.

Lots of stuff doesn't work, but the reduced testbed ought to compile and run.

Quick bulletin that I'm working on porting Erin's recent changes to Box2D, which will eventually become the bulk of 2.1. It's a pretty big job, which I'm doing at once, so there'll be nothing compilable for a while. I've done maybe 10%.

I have a few changes planned for 2.1 beyond mirroring the C++. Box2DFlashAS3 will be breaking compatibility with the C++ and backwards compatibility in both API and implementation.

I saw a poster on TIGSource talk about manually cutting up sprite sheets, so I've dusted off a project from 2007 to solve it. Just load up a sprite sheet, select the background color, and export the results into a directory. It's got a few extra features useful for what I originally wanted it for, too.

Announcing my newest finished project, Box2DWith. I'm collecting together various utility classes for doing all the stuff with Box2DFlashAS3, but found annoying. Demo, Docs

I've not posted for a while, but that doesn't mean I've not been doing anything. Generally less visible stuff (yes, some porting), but I have converted Box2DFlashAS3 to use ASDoc to generate beautiful documentation.
The results are available here. For lack of a better place, this will be their permanent home, and I'll try to keep them updated to the latest revision.

I've put in a few customizations to the standard ASDoc template, that I'm going to share here, as they are generally useful. You will need to customize the files a bit for your own project, though.

After the success of b2BuoyancyController, I'm releasing a pack of useful controllers to do other common tasks. I hope you appreciate this, these were boring to write. Demo