I’ve known about Vizzy for a while, but I’ve previously had no real need for it and when I’ve tried to install it in the past it didn’t seem to work with Chrome (my current browser of choice) so it was uninstalled pretty quickly. But this time I had no choice but to get it working – and as it turns out, the solution was pretty simple…Step 1 – Install Flash Debug Player

First off you need to make sure that you have the flash debugger installed. You can download it here and you can test if it’s installed by clicking here. Don’t worry if you’re using Chrome and the test site is saying that you don’t have the debugger installed, if you view the link in any of your other browsers you will see it has worked.

NOTE: if you use FlashDevelop like myself then you’ve probably already got the debug player installed, but it won’t hurt to reinstall it anyway (and it will update you to the latest version).

Step 2 – Install Vizzy

You can download Vizzy here. To test, open a swf that you know contains traces in your browser and make sure Vizzy is open at the same time. Vizzy will act like your Flash IDE Output window. But again, don’t worry if you’re using Chrome and it’s not working at this point.

Step 3 – Disable Chrome’s pre-installed Flash player

Steps one and two should be enough for you to view flash tracing in most browsers – Firefox was working straight away for me. However if like me you want to use Chrome instead, you will need to disable Chrome’s internal pre-installed Flash Player. Don’t worry it’s very easy…

a) Open a new Chrome window (CTRL-N if you’re reading this in Chrome)

b) type

chrome://plugins

into the address bar.

c) You should see a list of plugins – Flash is most likely to be the one at the top. Click “Details” in the top right hand corner and you will notice that there are 2 versions of flash installed. One of these is the pre-installed Flash player and the other is the Flash Debug Player you installed earlier. Find the one that ends with gcswf32.dll (ie. Chrome’s version of the player) and click “Disable”.

That’s it, you’re done. Clicking here should now tell you that you have the Debug Player installed and Vizzy should now work for you.

Enjoy!

But yesterday I was introduced to something in FlashDevelop that I’d never seen before. The king of all shortcuts:

CTRL - SHIFT - 1

How I’ve lived without this shortcut before I don’t know. I feel like a fool for not discovering it earlier. It does absolutely everything…

• Place your cursor next to a class variable, hit the king and you get a little pop-up menu offering to create you getters and setters.
• Written a variable inside a function and now want to make it into a class variable? Place your cursor, hit the king and you’ll be offered to “Promote to class member”. It will then declare the variable at the top and correct your function accordingly.
• Need a new function? Type the function name, press the king, “Generate function”. Done.
• Need a new class? Type the name, king, “create class”, done.

This shortcut literally does absolutely everything from declaring variables to generating functions. I keep discovering even more things all the time. It’s such a timesaver. Truly the ultimate multi-purpose shortcut.

I recently downloaded a copy of Partigen 2, the latest version of the outstanding particle engine by Desuade. To say that I’m impressed would be an understatement.

Not only is the engine now written in Actionscript 3 and available as open source code, the full paid-for version comes with an amazingly easy to use Flash extension panel which allows you to create particle effects in literally seconds. The smoking example above took less than a minute to create (not including the time it took to crop the photo and import it into flash).

So not only is Partigen now code friendly for developers, it’s also timeline friendly for designers. An inspired move by Desuade.

Another extremely useful tool (especially for code ‘dabblers’ like myself) is the option to create your desired effect inside the Flash panel and then export it as XML for future use in Actionscript. This is something I fully intend to utilise over the next few weeks as I play with Partigen. However, for today I decided to stick with getting used to the internal control panel.

The example below was created to see if there would be any performance problems with multiple emitters. It utilises a total of 5 emitters – one for the smoke (sat behind a timeline mask) and four different snow emitters set at four different depths. It took about 30 minutes to create, but to be fair it actually only took 5 minutes to set up and then I spent the last 25 minutes pedantically tweaking the effects to acheive my desired look (I warn you now, it gets pretty addictive).

I know that this example isn’t exactly pushing the boundaries, but I’d say that it proves that the engine can cope with the majority of every-day requests that clients might make.

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve cringed at a client’s request of something like “I want a realistic fire burning, with lots of smoke coming off it and rain in the background”. These things always sound much easier than they actually are. Time can be a killer on things like that. Well, now it really isn’t a problem. With Partigen I could pull off that effect in under 10 minutes, with very little effort and quite a lot of style. Nice.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be spending as much of my free time as possible with Partigen to see exactly what it can do – and how easy it is to control with Actionscript. I want to try out custom emitters…and more interestingly moving emitters. Watch this space as I’ll post my findings as I go.