Improvements

[Looki]

Hey there, while developing extensions I've found quite a lot features that are not available in the Flash runtime, but can easily be implemented.

Ink effects
For Add and Subtract, you can use DisplayObject.blendMode.
Set it to BlendMode.ADD or .SUBTRACT.
For Invert, use DisplayObject.transform.colorTransform.
There is an offset and multiplier member for each color channel (e.g. redMultiplier, greenOffset).
So just set all multipliers to -1 and all offsets to 255.
For Monochrome you could use a ColorMatrixFilter but it might be overkill.
Not sure about the bitwise ones.

Scaling SWF applets
I really don't get this one.
Just set stage.scaleMode to e.g. StageScaleMode.EXACT_FIT, and you can resize your SWF in HTML and it will automatically scale.

[Forum User]

Good stuff Looki I'm sure Francois will appreciate this. I know people have been asking about the scaling problem for a while now.

[Looki]

Also, there's stage.displayState for fullscreen.
Combined with stage.scaleMode, I don't see why he couldn't have fullscreen.
There's a limitation though, first of all you have to allowFullSCreen="true" in the embed parameters, and you can only call set displayState in certain functions... e.g. in a callback from a mouse click.

[Ross]

My Character Images object takes advantage of all this stuff.

[Olivier]

Sounds good! Many users (including me) will be happy if these features get implemented. Thank you for sharing your findings Looki.

[Looki]

Why is the transparent option for objects like Active disabled?
I'm porting my Surface object and it could benefit from it quite a lot. You can easily implement opaque display objects:
http://www.adobe.com/livedocs/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/display/DisplayObject.html#opaqueBackground

[Francois]

It says in the doc you pointed at: A transparent bitmap contains alpha channel data and is drawn transparently.
This is exactly our case, we draw images as active objects.

[Looki]

Hey Francois, check this out!

http://hyperspatial.com/flash-development/actionscript/how-to-set-textfield-alpha/

[Francois]

Great! Thank you...

[Looki]

Finally.

I have found a way to use UIComponents. Too bad the runtime has been out for so long now, changing the objects would be critical.

After a lot of testing I figured out what the root in an MXML application is: ho.getApplication().stage.getChildByName("root1").
It's a SystemManager. Cast it and then you can use addChild.
However, it seems like a constant child of the stage or something, because when you add a control, it will be invisible - because rhApp.mainSprite is in front of that.
To fix that, I changed line 403 in CRunApp.as from:

stage.addChild(mainSprite);

to

(stage.getChildByName("root1") as SystemManager).addChild(mainSprite);

Voilà! You can use UIComponents.



I might make some dedicated objects for this. I think it would be very nice because they are very customizable and there are tons of different ones.