AS3 Flash Resources List

This was my bookmark dump from February 2009, when ActionScript 3 and Flash were how most of us made things move on the web. The list itself is preserved below as a period piece — the ecosystem it describes is gone, but plenty of the people and ideas in it went on to shape the modern web.

What happened to all of this

Adobe killed Flash Player on December 31, 2020 (official EOL notice), and browsers had already spent years strangling the plugin. If you need to run old SWF content today, two projects keep it alive: Ruffle, a Flash Player emulator written in Rust that runs on WebAssembly, and the Flashpoint Archive, which has preserved hundreds of thousands of Flash games; the Internet Archive also emulates Flash titles in-browser.

As for the links: a surprising number of the sites below still resolve — bytearray.org, kirupa.com, GreenSock (now GSAP, alive and well in web animation) — but most are frozen in 2010. Adobe’s livedocs, Google Code hosting, and half the indie engines (Box2DFlash, Tweener, Papervision3D in practice) are gone. The 3D crowd largely moved to Three.js and Babylon.js; the animation crowd to GSAP and CSS/JS standards; the multiplayer-server crowd mostly dissolved into WebSocket backends of every flavor.

The original 2009 list

BOOKS:

1. Essential Actionscript 3.0
2. Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation – Making Things Move – Keith Peters – Friendsofed
3. Object Oriented ActionScript 3
4. Flash Game University
5. The Actionscript Bible
6. AI Game Programming Wisdom
7. Advanced.ActionScript.3.with.Design.Patterns
8. O’Reilly’s Learning Actionscript 3.0
9. Flash Professional 8 Game Development

WEBSITES:

1. ByteArray.org
2. polygonal labs
3. BIT-101 Blog
4. Kirupa’s ActionScript 3 Tips and Tricks
5. https://gotoandlearn.com/
6. http://chrisbrimelow.com/blog/
7. http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/
8. http://flashgameu.com/
9. Flash Enabled Blog
10. http://www.8bitrocket.com/
11. PeachPit
12. Cartoon Smart ~ (sadly, this isn’t free)
13. http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/229808/50
14. http://www.lynda.com/ – $25/month access to all videos. I have a subscription, it explains it so ANYONE can understand it. If you’re just starting in AS3, these are highly recommended, even if you’re semi experienced.

    3D Engine

15. Papervision3D
16. Away3D Flash Engine
17. AlternativaPlatform
18. Sandy
19. Mathieu Badimon | FIVe3D
20. custom:media & SWFZ
21. shirotokoro & WOW-Engine ~ 3D Physics Engine
22. moock.org

Isometric Engine:

1. zenbullets Isometric Game Engine
2. FFilmation

Tween animation library:

1. GO ASAP
2. GreenSock & TweenLite (AS3) – A Lightweight (2K) and FAST Tweening Engine
3. Twease | visualcondition playground
4. tweener – Google Code
5. Uza’s Blog & More & AS3 Easing
6. AnimationPackage
7. boostworthyisryantaylor & AS3 Animation System v2.0

Artificial Intelligence

1. http://munsterkiler.890m.com/wordpress/?p=24
2. http://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/
3. http://www.ai-junkie.com/ai-junkie.html
4. http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=16649

Game

1. http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/flashSharedObject/index.html
2. sephiroth

Physics:

1. APE – Actionscript Physics Engine
2. Fisix Engine | Flash Action Script 3 Physics Engine for Game Developers
3. Box2DFlashAS3 1.4.2 (via the Wayback Machine)
4. foam-as3 – Google Code
5. motor2 – Google Code
6. glaze engine
7. physaxe – Google Code

Socket server:

1. ElectroServer 3 – socket-server, multiplayer, server-side ActionScript, server plug-ins, database support
2. moock>> unity
3. Palabre :: Flash Xml Multiuser Socket Server – Home
4. SmartFoxServer: Socket server for Flash multiplayer games and applications
5. Swocket – A Modular XML Socket server in Python
6. RED5Server
7. MMOcha – Platform for Multiplayer Games
8. Nonoba Multiplayer API – Nonoba.com

Other:

1. Flint Particle System
2. Projects < ByteArray.org (various, including alivePDF and wiiFlash)
3. flare | visualization on the web
4. AsWing
5. as3ds – Google Code
6. ASProf – Realtime Actionscript Profiler
7. evoengine – Google Code

Forums:

1. FFILES
2. Official Adobe Forum
3. Kirupa

Path Finding:

http://www.gameai.com/pathfinding.html

Still worth a look, seventeen years later

Of everything above, the sites that survived with their sanity intact are kirupa.com (still answering forum questions), bytearray.org, gotoandlearn.com, and GreenSock’s docs. If you’re chasing the feeling of making things move with code — which is what this whole list was really about — Three.js, GSAP, or a canvas tutorial will get you there faster than anything Flash-shaped.