Alchemy has arrived eventually !

Today the timeline of twitter was filled by the tweets about Adobe Alchemy. This project is quite impressive for me because I am used to C/C++, and relatively new to Flash. Then I began to install it to my Ubuntu 8.04 in the VirtualBox.

There is a zip file of Alchemy Toolkit for Linux which contains README.ubuntu. At first I thought this file is valuable for me, but it was not. README.ubuntu did not help me. I read the install steps for Mac that is not so different from Linux's one.

After that the second problem has come. llvm-gcc is not found. when I tried following command;

gcc stringecho.c -O3 -Wall -swc -o stringecho.swc

there was no output in the console. I checked gcc.

vim `which gcc`

gcc is not a binary executable but a perl script for Alchemy from the time alc-on command is executed until the time alc-off is executed. I put some checkpoints in gcc and found that this script exits when trying to run llvm-gcc command. The reason of that is quite simple. There is no command named llvm-gcc.

$ALCHEMY_HOME/bin/llvm-gcc is a symbolic link to $ALCHEMY_HOME/bin/llvm-gcc4-ubuntu-install/bin/llvm-gcc that does not exist. I need this file or link llvm-gcc to somewhere appropriate.

VaporVision3D

I have published VaporVision3D for this year's April fool. I am writing articles about 3D representation on Flash from scratch, so this VaporVision3D does not depend on Papervision3D or such 3D graphics framework.

I do not think that Reinvention of the Wheel has no meaning, but reinvention of 3-D graphcis framework is a heavy task. Who want to use 3D graphics on Flash should use Papervision3D or such however implementing 3D engine gives you lots of experiences. But I am seriously interested in performance problems on 3D engines. It is a well-known fact that drawing of FlashPlayer is very slow. What we can do is to reduce drawing. For now, my articles intentionally cut performance problems for simplicity. The time to argue the problems will come soon.

Long path handling of JSFL File API

Copy function of JSFL File API can not handle long URI, for example a URI consists 300 characters. I've wrote extended copy function that can handle such long URI. This is first time to write a extension for Flash in C language, but I found that it is not difficult to implement it. The sample extension really helped me to understand how the extension works.