Flash

Tuesday the 20th of March sees the first meeting of the Bedale Group set up by James Governor of RedMonk: The Bedale Group is… “An unassociation for the UK Adobe ecosystem. If you’re a software or services company that specialises in Adobe platforms I would be very interested to hear from you. The idea is to create an occasional forum to drink wine and discuss what Adobe needs to do to sustain and improve its engagement with the local corporate developer community.” ...

So I’m on day 2 of a project I’m un-imaginatively calling “PaperTron”, my first foray into making a game with PV3D, and I thought I’d post up a little screenshot of what we have so far: I hope this shouldn’t take too long, but considering it’s taken well over 2 weeks to make myself spend the time I have, it could take a while ultimately ;). Either way, it’s a lot of fun, and PaperVision 3D makes it pretty easy, let’s face it, if you’ve ever done any 3D in Flash before, it’s not easy, so anything that helps you do just the fun stuff is great in my books. ...

I’m afraid to say I got different [relative] results to those published on the site (the Flex cache as bitmap version was by far the highest FPS on my machine), but I’d have to dig into the source to see how these have been put together… Link to the examples Link to the results and discussion. Some personal notes. I tend to think a Flash only (non-Flex framework) example would be a better option to a Flex app. Also the Flex example uses a Timer, he probably should try making use of the ENTER_FRAME event to see what results that gets. Also worth trying the fullscreen-then-back trick the Papervision3D guys are using to get a perf boost. Any other tests out there? Something like this would be interesting 😉 ...

I’ve just fixed my last Flash 9 experiment, I hadn’t built it in such a way as to not error if you don’t have a webcam installed at all. Also I developed this on an intel mac, and it runs smoothly at 60FPS, with over 200 firework particles at once, for some reason my pretty good PC is only running at around 5-10FPS with only 25 particles, but this may just be the PC here so please feel free to try it out. ...

I went to see Alias’ presentation at LFPUG the other night, and it made me keen to get back to some experimenting in Flash, in particular with Flash Player 9. You may have seen my last example which used Flash 8 alpha video as a mask. This kind of extends that, in that we are using an alpha mask again, this time we have some fireworks. Before the SWF, here’s a screenshot: ...

I’ve been thinking about video quite a bit recently. One thing that really bugs me is how people tend to treat video as this thing that sits in a box and plays from start to finish. When Flash 8 introduced alpha in video it opened up a whole new range of techniques, and I’ve just spent a little bit of time roughing out a simple (and rather crude) example: This example is seemingly simple, but there are quite a few steps involved which I will explain below. What happens here is that you can click a colour, and the car’s surface will fill with that colour as it rotates, as if paint were splashing into its existing finish. ...

What can I say? I’m blown away by Papervision3D. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve used Sandy (enter via UK/Europe), and although it wasn’t me who tried it personally I can see it is a fantastically full featured engine. However, for me, I wanna see enough polys for a full on game, and that’s the sort of speed you can expect with PV3D as it grows. So here are some pretty basic initial tests I made to see just how fast it is. These examples are NOT optimized, nor are the models really. The Delorean car for example has over 800 polys. ...

Well today I had a play at making a Flash game for the Wii using some rudimentary gesture recognition for the wand style of input. You can see a sneak peek of how the gesture recognition works here: http://richardleggett.co.uk/wii/gestureRecogDemo.html So Aral and Mario together have un-earthed some real gems the last couple of days, I think there could be a lot of fun to be had making some Wii games. It’s like Flash Lite, even simple games are much more fun when put on another type of device, and with the “wand” style input, it’s even more fun. ...

Friends of ED is holding a competition where you could grab the top prize of an Apple Mac Book, 3 FoED books, Camtasia and SnagIT software and a copy of gProject (from gskinner.com). There are also runners up prizes so it’s worth having some fun here. You just need to produce something cool that uses some of the provided assets, it looks pretty open to interpretation, just stick to the rules of coming under 2.5 minutes and 10mb. ...

Introduction: I’m going to keep this very factual. I’ve been developing Flash for the last 6 years and intend to carry on doing so, as a result I’ve learned to accept a lot of criticism and be open to review all things new, in effect I’m opening by saying I have not been “bought” as you will no doubt see in this article I aim to give an entirely balanced perspective, the politics interest me not, just the tech. With that in mind, I’ve been able to get very deep into WPF/E for the last week or so, I’ve always enjoyed dipping into a brand new tech and getting fully engrossed in it, so it was a nice experience to be given the opportunity (thanks). You may find me making a lot of comparisons to Flash, this is only natural for obvious reasons. ...