Version 2.1.0 released

23rd June 2009

Today I released version 2.1 of Flint. This version includes a significant change for 3D particle effects, a large addition for everyone, and many small additions and improvements.

Flint is now compatible with the Flex framework. This means, there are now versions of all renderers that extend UIComponent (in addition to the existing one’s that extend Sprite). These new renderers can be placed in Flex layouts and with behave appropriately within Flex containers. The new renderers are in the mxml sub-packages and also in the manifest for use in MXML files.
Further to this, all emitters and actions have been modified or extended to produce MXML compatible versions, so entire particle systems can be created using MXML rather than Actionscript. All the examples in SVN and in the downloads have been implemented in MXML in addition to AS3.
The 3D geometry classes have been modified. There are now four classes – Point3D, Vector3D, Quaternion, Matrix3D. The Point3D class was introduced to make it simpler to distinguish between points and vectors and provide resulting optimisations in the code. The result is simpler code and slightly better performance of 3D effects.
All counters now have a complete property to indicate if the counter has finished. Emitters dispatch a counterComplete event when their counter is finished.
All behaviours (actions, initializers and activities) have a priority property for setting their relative ordering during execution. This is much simpler than the previous getDefaultPriority method and as a side effect results in a small speed improvement. The change will affect developers of custom behaviours, which need to be modified accordingly, but doesn’t affect the use of behaviours unless users wish to override the default priority, which is rare.
The explosion actions can be reset, in order to start another explosion with the same action object.
clearAllParticles added to the particle factory for releasing all cached particles from memory.
Fix bug in ChooseInitializer. (Bug report)
FrameUpdater now stops running when it has no listeners. (Bug report)

Get the new version from SVN or downloads and use the forum to let me know of any bugs you find.