I was stoked to get my copy of Mass Effect for XBox 360. Not just because this one of the most beautiful looking games for the platform (the graphics are stunning), with a really rich plot, but also because gskinner.com contributed to it, and it’s not every day you get to see your company name in the credits for a blockbuster video game.

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now is port our ColorMatrix class to AS3. ColorMatrix provides a way to adjust Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and Hue based on a range of numeric values as well as multiply matrices. The ColorMatrix can then be passed into ColorMatrixFilter to apply color adjustments. Download the source files here.

I’ve started playing around with some of my old experiments again. One of my favourite older experiments is my vein logic – it’s just such a beautiful example of recursion, and can be applied to so many things – so I decided I would rewrite and rearchitect it for ActionScript 3 and wound up building what I will affectionately call the Flaming Hairball.

Grass swaying in the wind, clouds drifting by. This experiment is meant to look like you are cycling alongside an endless tranquil beach on a perfect day.

That’s right… spinning, flaming 3D logos! Courtesy of PaperVision3D, my Fire Effects class, andJohn Grden.

TextHighlighter is a very powerful class for finding and highlighting words in a text field in real time. It includes a ton of features, including support for manual selections, multi-line highlights, smart targeting, autoupdating on change and scroll, interactive highlights, and more. Here is a simple demo of the TextHighlighter in action. Less than 10 lines of code…

I finally got the time to finish off my fire effect component for Flash CS3, which makes it easy to add flames and other cool effects to objects on stage. I am also releasing the AS3 source code that powers it, which is one of the most requested piece of source code I’ve had… some of my favourite effects: Fire, plasma, sparks, water fall, baroque, and 70s.