[Original books] serialization of "image programming in actionscript3.0 games" -- Preface

In 1946, computers were born and developed under the impetus of the third industrial revolution. Since then, there has been another kind of people on the earth. Their world is very simple. They do not interact with 0 every day, but with 1. They are low-profile people, high-profile work, they are pragmatic for the people, do not ask for fame, They are cute, cool it workers-programmers!

It is said that programmers are not easy to express themselves. That's right. If we leave 0 and 1, the programmers will barely speak. At the same time, programmers are just the most expressive people. They only use the numbers 0 and 1 to accurately convey user needs to computers and make them run correctly, its concise language, accurate algorithm, rigorous logic, and accurate results. In addition to programmers, who can do this? Therefore, it is better to say that outsiders do not understand the programmer's world than programmers do.

I have never known how many nights, and the number 255 has left me confused. For programmers, 255 is a sacred number, which is the maximum integer that can be expressed by 8-bit binary bytes. It represents fullness, symbolizing perfection, and is the supreme pursuit of programmers. However, whenever someone asks me what I am doing recently, I am stuck, and it is always hard to express my thoughts on 255 tumbling. In my heart, I understand that in their eyes, 255 is just a common number. I really want to hear it to them, either in exchange for a friend's puzzled or attracting ridicule from others.

However, I am gratified that with the increasing development of digital image technology, code is no longer a programmer's patent, and 255 of the Code is gradually on the stage of art, it not only depicts the scenery of the north country, but also express the romantic feelings of the cherry blossom, it not only allows you to ride in the green plains, it can also make you intoxicated with the peaceful and profound blue ocean and blue sky ...... all these dreamlike images share one thing in common: at least one color of light is reflected 100% of our eyes, and in the computer image field, it is used to represent 100%, this is the perfect number-255!

In this regard, no matter the programmer who knows nothing about art, the designer who is still familiar with the program, or even the fellow citizens who are insulated from the two industries, should have the title of "artist, the relentless pursuit of perfection is an important embodiment of the artist's attitude towards life, and this book is a perfect combination of art and science.

Therefore, this book is widely oriented to readers. As long as you love life, art, or have a perfect heart, you can find content that suits you in this book, moreover, the focus of this book is to explain the ideas of artistic programming. Whether it is interpreted from an artistic perspective or from a technical perspective, this book can withstand the test of time and secular bleaching. It will not be left out of the cold because of the sudden rise of the mobile game market, nor because HTML5 is born and lost, nor will it disappear because of software upgrades. It is like a cup of green tea, xiangjiu Yiqing, and Jiuyi alcohol. Each age gives it a different breath and spreads in every corner of the Earth, it opened up a piece of Pure Land for this impetuous society.

It can be seen that art is a very broad topic, and it is almost impossible for me to use a book to cover all aspects of art programming. Therefore, we should first select an appropriate field and then discuss the relevant technical points one by one. The ideas for the author and readers will be clearer.

In the IT field, the most typical and most popular art programming forms are game development. Therefore, this book will trigger from the key technical points in the game and tell readers some of their less in-depth understanding of art programming in order to attract more readers to this field, explore the subtlety of the program and the true meaning of art.

This book is intended for the development of traditional flashplayer (a version earlier than stage3d). It also introduces the impact of some new features of flashplayer11 on artistic programming and its application fields. Readers do not have to worry that the old version of the function may be eliminated. The focus of this book is the idea of artistic programming. In the art dictionary, there is only a classic interpretation, and there is no obsolete abandon.

In the game development process, most of the art elements such as scenes, interfaces, characters, animations, and special effects are imported into the materials prepared by the art designer, and then controlled by the program to hide the display and pause the playback, to achieve the interaction effect. However, not all the art materials are suitable for direct import into the game, especially in China, which has accumulated Chinese Character culture for more than five thousand years. Thousands, the complex strokes are embedded in all the characters, which is quite fatal for tianchao, where the network speed is not yet developed.

In most cases, developers call the default font (device font) in the operating system to display the text in the game. However, the only fonts are too old in most cases, unlike lively and vivid game pictures, in the current computer operating system, the font of the device is often sharply different, the aesthetics of the game will cause damage to different degrees.

Therefore, after a device font is called, we often need to beautify the device font, for example, to eliminate the sawtooth, stroke, deformation, and so on, to improve the integration of the device font and the entire game. This book is centered on the processing of device fonts, and discusses the bit by bit of image art programming with everyone.

In Windows systems, the commonly used types include, and. is too thin, while and are slightly more artistic. In contrast, fonts are powerful and powerful, it is more appropriate to use a simhei without too many modifiers. But there are also some deficiencies in the black body. For example, the edges are too stiff and the overall feeling is a little rough. After several confusions, I decided to use the slightly modified ones, in Windows 7, Microsoft micro-black device fonts that became popular in China were used for graphic processing and special effects.

Back to the beginning, this book is a medium-and high-level programming book, so I will assume that you already have a certain degree of as3 programming basics, have mastered the basic syntax of as3, and are familiar with common APIs, I will not explain these issues in detail. Therefore, designers and friends who do not know much about as3 or who have used other programming languages before reading this book, we recommend that you purchase one or two basic books for timely query. I personally recommend the following books: actionscript3.0 cookbook, actionscript3.0 authoritative guide, flash actionscript3.0 from entry to entry, and actionscript3.0 colorful programming (this book is very suitable for designers) actionscript3.0 basic tutorial on image processing.

In addition, before reading this book, I suggest you configure the development environment to ensure that the code in the book can be compiled and run properly on your computer, if you are not familiar with the development environment configuration, refer to the appendix in this book.
Everything is ready for the art programming journey!