Its Space Invaders, Jim - but not as we know it. Actually, its my new game that ive just put up on a relaunched 99lives site (needs flash 9). Have your microphone handy as well so you can record a voice clip for the high score table!

The WiiFlash project have just posted their first public release. Check out their blog entry here http://www.bytearray.org/wiiflash/?p=28.

Flii, as a desktop application which allows a Nintendo wii controller, or "wiimote" to be fully accessed from a flash movie. This allows the full range of 3D movement to be utilized from within flash.

Flii is very different to the flash integration method developed by Mario Klingemann Mario's solution is for accessing the Wiimote buttons from within a flash movie running in the wii web browser. Flii however, requires a standard computer with a bluetooth port, and enables access to the full 3 axis movement of the wiimote and nun-chuck.

Flii, is based on wiimote framework for OSX, and as such can only be run so far on a mac, this will be expanded to include windows based machines in time. In fact at present Flii is just at a proof of concept stage (i wouldn't even call it a 0.0.1 release :), and there is still a lot of work to be done. As such im not uploading any binaries right now. If your interested in this project then there's a fair chance you may want to help in some way, so please contact me directly.

My hopes for Flii are to provide a simple environment for developers to experiment with the new possibilities offered with Nintendos invention. In time hopefully this will lead to a better understanding of how best a 3D controller can be used to provide new and innovate user experiences. Ultimately it would be great if Flii can become a fertile breading ground for quickly prototyping control ideas for actual Wil games, without the cost of a Wii development kit.

In using Flash, I hope to create the most immediate and accesable gateway possible, as flash through its rich Actionscript scripting language, provides a wonderfully rapid environment to experiment with ideas. It is my plan to closely integrate the new Actionscript 3D API, Papervision which although currently in beta is showing the promise of really delivering a useable and beautifully speedy flash 3D experience.

Im very interested in hearing from anybody interested in getting involved with the project, I could do with assistance in the following areas

Windows: The wiimote api's are implemented on windows, help is needed to write a c based wrapper for them.
HAXE, Neko, and SWHX: The bridging between the OS and flash is implemented in SWHX, there's still a lot about these technologies i don't know.
FLEX - The front end UI will suit a Flex application.
Actionscript And/or Math - Developing good libraries for gesture recognition will be incredibly useful.

Otherwise, if you just want to get hold of the application , watch this space.

Flii in action. As yet not much to see. The Blue circle responds to motion form the wiimote, moving left and right while growing or shrinking based on forward/backward motion

This is a dump from the osx terminal, showing the Neko traces. notice at 3.34:11.107 the wiimote is discovered and then begins transmitting its positional data.

Links to P3D demos, sources, and tools.

Main

Papervison 3d Official blog
Blog of Papervison 3D lead developer, Carlos Ulloa

Tools

Model viewer [win]

Articles

John Grden's P3D page [code samples]
Creating models and texturing
Panorama / 360 & How to create your own CubeMap textures with 3D Studio MAX

Demos

Richard Leggett
Demo Scene geezer Mr Doob shows a full on animated texture example And some thing he calls Acid Cubes :)
Quake Md2 Skeleton [first real animation of mesh with p3d]
Mac World AS2 vs AS3 speed test [must see]
2007

Classes - please note contains beta code *NOT* for use in production sites as yet

3D Studio, Wavefront, and Quake .MD2 (with animation) importers [demos]

Example of generating a model with code [demo]
Grid Plane Object

FlashDevelop 2 is out of Beta today. I only started using this .NET based flash environment a few projects ago, but its already revolutionized my flash development. Previously I was using Eclipse with the ASDT plugin, but still jumping to the flash IDE to compile the movies. I just had never got round to setting up MTASC, the actionscript compiler up.

FlashDevelop does all this setup for you, all you need to do to cut the flash IDE out of your development loop completely is Write one new class, Main.as this acts as the start point for your movie. Think of it as the equivalent of the first frame in your traditional flash timeline.

Even better though, I'm using the 'code injection' features an awful lot. This allows me to take an existing SWF of graphical assets, and compile my code and inject it into this swf. This gives me a really great separation between the design and code. Meaning a designer can just supply with an updated SWF of assets,and i do nt have to keep the designer updated with code just so they can compile there assets.

Heaven. Seriously, like Fuse, if you do any flash work check out this OS software as soon as possible. You wont be disappointed.

Open up your actionscript documentation and find the entry for setInterval…

Scroll right to the bottom, where you get the example

Usage 3: This example uses a method of an object. You must use this syntax when you want to call a method that is defined for an object.
obj = new Object();
obj.interval = function() {
trace("interval function called");
}

setInterval( obj, "interval", 1000 );


obj2 = new Object();
obj2.interval = function(s) {
trace(s);
}
setInterval( obj2, "interval", 1000, "interval function called" );
You must use the second form of the setInterval() syntax to call a method of an object, as follows:
setInterval( obj2, "interval", 1000, "interval function called" );

Ok?

Yeah right...I missed it completely the first time round – In fact what I’ve been doing when using setInterval has been to use something like


_global.myObject = this;
setInterval( function () {_global.myObject.myFunction(), 1000 );

So in effect copying my class into _global and then calling a method from in in-line function. Why? Because ‘this’ when used in the two parameter version of setInterval is undefined.

Obviously it’s a messy way to do things, as you have to realy on the _global variable not being overwritten. However, the third version of setInterval allows you to do something such as

setInterval( this, "interval", 1000, "interval function called" );

from within your class… now setInterval will call your ‘interval’ method of your class, and this will be correctly scoped to the instance…