Go

Building a tween on the Go platform is simple. It takes just a few minutes and you get to be the designer, but you end up with a robust, sturdy, highly portable & reusable animation class.

Tutorial: Creating a tween with Go

Want to keep up with Go? You can join the golist here.

Filed under: Go, VideoTutorials by mosesoak
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Update: I rerecorded this video, please check the next post.

Filed under: Go, VideoTutorials by mosesoak
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Jérôme Birembaut, aka Seraf, has released his WOW Engine for 3D physics, based on Alec Cove’s APE (2D ActionScript Physics Engine). It apparently works with both Papervision and Sandy – Seraf seems to have been more inspired by Sandy’s architecture – and makes heavy use of polygonal labs’ AS3 data structures for game programming.

This is great news, as most of you following the Go project know, providing an environment that incorporates 3D physics with Go’s existing tweening base classes is the next big step, and perhaps WOW will fit the bill. If you’re excited about 3D Physics and interested in helping make it work with Go, please be sure to join the Go mailing list, linked from the official Go page.

Filed under: Go by mosesoak
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I think I forgot to mention at this blog that I recently did a new round of optimizing GoEngine for efficiency to good results. This time my focus turned to how tween engines tend to run a lot of processes during the setup and removal of animations. This can really add up when you run benchmarks that try to pump out thousands of tweens at once, in many cases choking the player to the point that it shows no animation at all or times out. I was able to get Go to live up to its promise of being “like wearing nothing at all” – that is, staying extremely lightweight and fast even under the toughest crunches.

I should remind of my intentions, although I’m excited to see such great performance I don’t regard this as a competition whatsoever. Quite the opposite, Go is architected so that other tween engines can make use of its codebase and potentially improve their own performance. I’ve also released my benchmarking tool TweenBencher as an open source utility that you can use to run your own tests and help optimize your own work.

Check out all of the benchmarks here along with some notes.

Filed under: Go by mosesoak
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Chug a lug a…. it’s a slow but steady start and we’re off. I was just invited to speak on scripted animation at FlashBelt in Minneapolis, wonderful!

Most exciting of all, people are starting to use go! (Including me, finally.) Check this out, the first Go-based Fuse clone has cropped up at GoogleCode from Sebastian Weyrauch, a utility he’s calling Tweego that looks to have a near perfect copy of Fuse’s sequencing syntax. Go Tweego! Donovan Adams posted an all-purpose script called HydroTween plus a demo of using Papervision with Go at his blog Hydrotik recently. I grabbed HydroTween for a current project, worked great!

I’m seeing hints of Go getting a some interest around the community. A recent post from Bitch Who Codes gives Go some love, another review comes out of Analog Design’s blog.

All very fun. Hey like, tell your friends and stuff. Please be sure to join the brand new Go mailing list and keep up with the latest.

Filed under: Go by mosesoak
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Just wanted to very quickly clarify some apparently common mistakes & misconceptions about Go, please be sure to spread the word effectively so as not to promote any confusion over these points:

• GoASAP is the Go animation Platform, not ‘package’. The term ‘animation package’ normally refers to Alex Uhlmann’s excellent work by that name. Go is called a platform because it’s a set of base classes that you build on to create your own animation tools.
  
  
• Go is not Fuse 3. It would be possible to build a Fuse syntax over Go, in fact you can start doing that now since Go ships with Sequencing. But, Go is a generic set of base classes that should support many kinds of animation systems.
  
  
• Not only is go not Fuse 3 but, it doesn’t have any specific syntax of its own! You create your own syntax, as you build your own tweens and other items and utilities. It’s all as generic as possible.
  
  
• Go is still at its infancy, and the hope is that you and others will contribute to the codebase to make it as lightweight, fast, and widely portable as possible. At this first release, the tweening portion is fairly complete including groups and sequences, no physics support yet. Join the Go mailing list to stay on top of updates.
  
  
• Finally, Go is not for beginning AS3 coders. It’s clearly documented and the code is well-commented and readable, but this is a toolkit for coders who want to roll their own, not a prefab kit like Fuse.

Thanks for helping to spread the word about Go!

Filed under: Go by mosesoak
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Thanks very much to everyone on the Go beta. Go is now live to the public with a website, googlecode SVN, complete documentation and a new mailing list!

As far as naming the URL & classpath I went with the catchy acronym GOASAP, for Go ActionScript Animation Platform. Please visit the site and be sure to join the mailing list!

www.goasap.org

Filed under: Go by mosesoak
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Go calls for a common AS3 animation library. But take another step back and it’s apparent that there’s no common thread at the product level either. Flash, Flex and After Effects all support ECMA-based motion-scripting capabilities, with nary a stripe of animation code in common.
Diagram: Current Situation

I am proposing very simply that Adobe create a Core Animation Library that is portable between all of their products, and perhaps JavaScript. It wouldn’t define specifics like Flex’s MXML Effects syntax, but instead provide a set of common building blocks used by all animation systems (in many cases redundantly today).
Diagram: Proposed Core Library

For the record, I understand that this sort of proposal is a bit of a tall order to fill — Besides creating the new code base, it involves multiple product departments and some remodeling of existing libraries. However, one could argue that now would be the least painful, and most practical time to implement such a strategy as the Adobe suite continues to evolve.

Link: How does this proposal differ from the Go initiative?

Question: Would you be happy if Adobe provided such a system?
Drop a comment and voice your opinion!

Filed under: Go by mosesoak
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Donovan has been messing around with Go to nice effect at his blog Hydrotik.

The cool thing about Go is that it doesn’t define any syntax: You define it yourself. So although Donovan is already doing some amazing color tweens and Matrix transforms, that’s totally his implementation.

Others have used Go to create a Fuse-style object syntax or plain Tween objects.

Filed under: Go by mosesoak
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I wanted to thank Barney Boisvert for pointing out that it’s possible to store arguments with a method closure by wrapping them in a second closure:
(more…)

Filed under: Go by mosesoak
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