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Flash tutorials | AS3 Timer class tutorials roundup

September 20th, 2008 | admin | 7,196 views | 0 Comments »

This post shows a lot of Timer tutorials, You create nice flash countdown Timer for special event or create flash game with timer class, programming with date, time . End of article, I collects some nice countdown components.

I.Tutorials

1.Flash Countdown Timer

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a timer in Adobe Flash that will count down the time to a given date in days, hours, minutes, and seconds. If you were looking for a great Flash tool for counting down holidays, birthdays, etc, this is the tutorial for you.
Also, this Flash countdown timer tutorial allows you to preset any day of your choice with in AS2 and AS3. Have fun!

2.Running Timers are not Garbage Collected. Ever.

On a certain mailing list, something was mentioned about Timers, cleaning up, garbage collection, etc. Arno Gourdol from the Adobe AIR Team made the following statement:

Just to be clear: even if you have no references to a Timer, as long as the timer is running, it will not be Garbage Collected (think of it as if the runtime was keeping a reference to running timers).

That was interesting to me, and as it recently came up on another mailing list, I thought I’d do a little test.

Here, I create a Timer and a Sprite as local variables. The timer has a weak-referenced listener for the Timer event, and the sprite has a weak-referenced listener for the enterFrame event. I let them run for a second and then force garbage collection using a trick Grant Skinner mentioned a while back.

At that point, you can see the enterFrame stops firing, as the sprite h

3.Timer based Vs frame based

« Hey, first I love your new game Summer Couples, it’s wasted far more of my time than I should have allowed it to. That’s the sign of a good game!

Anyways, I was playing it when I had a pretty intensive flash game running in another tab in Firefox. I didn’t notice until about 3-4 minutes in the game, but it seemed like the game wasn’t really getting harder. I then noticed that the timer bar was going much slower than what I might have expected at that point in the game.

4.Using the Timer and Date classes

There are several methods in ActionScript for dealing with time. We have shown before how to find a user’s response time using the getTimer() method as we did in the enanced (final) version of the Arithmetic Quiz from the tutorial, “Using Textboxes in an Arithmetic Quiz” in our Basic section.

In the present tutorial, we will show how to use a Timer object to create animated motion or a simple repeated event. On a related note, there is a Date class that allows you to display the system time. We show how to combine this class with a Timer object to create a simple digital clock effect.

5.Image Animation via Actionscript 3

The setInterval() and setTimeout() functions were the two most commonly used ways of calling a function after a specified amount of time had lapsed. In ActionScript 3 we now have the Timer class which lives in the flash.utils package. This class contains all the functionality that you will ever need for time-based applications. In order to use the class, you first must import the flash.utils package as seen is the example below. The Timer constructor expects one argument that represents the desired delay in milliseconds between function calls

6.Using the Timer class in ActionScript 3.0

Another great new addition in ActionScript 3.0 is the Timer class (flash.utils.Timer), which essentially replaces the setInterval() and setTimeout() methods in ActionScript 2.0. For example, here’s an example of the setTimeout() method in ActionScript 2.0:

7.Accurate Timing With Actionscript 3

Finally made some time to update my blog!!! I’ve been working hard and added lots of new classes to my library which i used for my own games. I’ll be updating this site with new classes and examples over the coming months - so be sure to stay tuned for all the updates!

8.Creating an Optimized AS3 Game Timer Loop

It this tutorial we create what I consider to be my most optimized game timer loop. I will start with the game loop created in my last tutorial and optimize it further. We will add three different optimizations to the game loop. First, we will simply lock our canvas before we use the copyPixels operation on it. Then we will unlock it after. Second, we will implement a sleep based active render timer. Third, we will make sure our game loop updates on every event rather than on every frame.

One of the most discussed, least understood and ultimately most frustrating aspects of Flash game programming is keeping a constant frame rate across all of the different SWF players. We seem to get a different frame rate inside of the IDE, in the stand alone player, and in different browser / wmode combinations.

9.AS3: Basic Timer example

Flash’s Timer Class requires two parameters. The first is the delay (in milliseconds), the second is the amount of times you want the delay to fire.




var timer:Timer = new Timer(1000, 2);


    timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, blah);


    timer.start();



function blah(e:TimerEvent):void{


     trace("Times Fired: " + e.currentTarget.currentCount);


     trace("Time Delayed: " + e.currentTarget.delay);


}

10.[Air] Simple Timer

Important note: I’m working on the next version of SimpleTimer. I won’t continue working on this release. The new version will be released within the next month!

Just like other timesheet tools, you can track the time you’ve spent for a specific task.

11.Tutorial - Creating a Timer in ActionScript 3

Today’s tutorial comes with a bit of good news. Yesterday, my pregnant wife and I went to the doctor and discovered that our first baby is a girl! So naturally, I thought I might post a tutorial on how to create a countdown timer with Flash CS3 and ActionScript 3. Since my wife’s due date is August 30th, I’ll use that as our countdown date.

This tutorial will cover the basics of using the Date() class and the Timer() class in ActionScript 3. The Timer class, as you may know, is new to AS3. The ActionScript 2 equivalent of a Timer object would be the setInterval method, which is no longer available to us in AS3. So, with no further ado, let’s get started.

12.Countdown Timer in Flash AS3

I have some free time before the busy weekend starts, (2 really cool DJ gigs this weekend) so I started brain storming on a plan to finish up the DJLance.net site. I’ve really let that go, and it’s pretty important to me. I think in the last few weeks, I’ve had this overwhelming sense to make a very big music push. Step one was to gear up the myspace page. Now that it’s done, It’s time to fix up the website. After all. Once myspace is gone, my website will still be there.