Making Snow in Flash CS3

JK's Lost, found, and new MIDI songs?

JK_ · 2026-08-11T00:36:48+00:00

Recently, I was going through an old flash drive I found in a box. Everything on it was from 2011 or earlier, so yeah, I'm surprised it even still worked. What shocked me even more is what I found when I started digging through it. It felt like a time capsule. Way back, I used to try to use various music trackers and MIDI sequencers to try to write my own songs for games I never finished using Allegro (lol) and C/C++. I found a backup of a decent chunk of my old MIDIs and incomplete melodies along with embarrassing source code. Since the Switch is in its ninth year and I wanted a change from spending my nights programming and debugging, I decided to see if I could clean up and do something with them. I'm not a pro. I did/do this all by ear and math pretty much. Some of these are reworked songs and melodies from when I was in my teens. Some are new. Sometimes I get bored and replace the instrument samples with NES square waves. I upload them to SoundCloud, which I was recently told was probably a mistake, with AI slopped up thumbnails to save myself time. I have a thing for evil sounding church organs. I don't know why. They literally make me tear up. Here's my main SC page: https://soundcloud.com/j-d-k-vgm These are a select few: My Grandmother really liked this one. Actually, a lot people enjoy this one. This is an old one. It's not complex or anything, but I always liked it. This one has an interesting story. I actually wrote this as music for a YouTube video. Millions of people have actually heard a stripped down version of it, but nobody knows I wrote it. The YouTuber in question claimed they'd pay me, backed out of the deal (after they had the song, of course!), and never properly credited me for it. Since I wasn't paid, it's still mine, I guess. A lot of people in the comments enjoyed it more than the video. This is my most recent, new one. I got bored with orchestras and stuff. Wanted to try something different. I'm not perfect, but a lot of people are stunned I can write this stuff at all given I'm only a self taught guitarist. I have mild hearing loss in my left ear from playing metal for so long, so sometimes I mess up velocity and volume slightly. I'm aware of that. Feel free to leave me some sweet AI generated scam scripts and messages like the rest of the bots on SC. It's my favorite way to start my days now.

Qith

Well-Known Member

Member

Level 3

Dec 17, 2008

It's hard for me to explain the differences, since I started coding with ActionScript. That was AS2, however, and the difference between that and the current AS3 is really quite huge. AS2 was much more basic and a bit of a mess, of course you could organize your code but the rules in AS3 are much more strict. It's not likely to be very much like C++ since that language operates at a much lower level (I know it's not quite low-level, but ActionScript is decidedly high-level), but it is very similar to Java and even more similar to JavaScript (in fact it is based on the ECMAScript standard, which was more or less derived from JavaScript - though that whole history is more complicated than it is relevant

). To be honest, this particular snowing script wasn't very neat, but it's easier to understand like this for someone who has just started out in Flash with no prior programming/scripting knowledge. I'm pretty sure this is not how AS3 is advertised, most tutorials use different methods of enclosing code in functions etc., more Java-like if you will.

Okay I just realized I could go on about this for a pretty long time

(but I'm not going to!). The biggest difference between AS and what you're used to, I guess, is that Action*Script* was really designed to be that - a *scripting* language for automating parts of a Flash movie and for adding some interactivity. Since AS1 it has sort of evolved into something more complicated, and I think Macromedia/Adobe took a great step by totally revamping the language after AS2 and losing backward compatibility in favour of faster performance and a generally better-organized language. Right now, you can use AS3 to write full applications completely independent of the animating tools etc. that are in the Flash authoring environment (for example, using Flex). In such cases, it's more programming than scripting. But, when you use it in conjunction with regular (hand-)animation, you really are just scripting and in my opinion it's kind of useless to write classes and such just to get some extra behaviour into your movie. It's just not worth it putting the time and effort into structuring the code like you do when you're writing an application.

So I can see how it would be more difficult to understand the workings of Flash & ActionScript if you're coming from a world of *real* programming

. Maybe you could look into Flex, which was made for building applications with ActionScript - using that in conjunction with Adobe Air, creating web-interactive desktop applications... Oh the possibilities!

(Haven't done much of that myself, actually, but writing this made me realize I really should

)

Making Snow in Flash CS3

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