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I’ve just received an email from Nonoba with information on their new multi-user offering, which includes an AS2 and AS3 API, but what I find particularly interesting is that they also include free hosting and execution of your game logic. The aim appears to be to lower the barrier to entry for anyone wishing to create a multi-user game. These can include turn-based, or real-time games. They currently have some demos up on the site, and these include Nonoba Racer, Fridge Magnets, Multiplayer Asteroids and DrawPad. ...

It’s that time again 🙂 The 3rd Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament is now open for registration. The event is completely FREE and will take place on the 27th May at 7pm at the Loose Cannon Poker club in Cannon Street. Adobe are providing the beer and prizes as usual. This event is open only to those who use Adobe products professionally. Don’t worry if you’ve never played before as there are always lots of newbies and the dealers at your table will be giving you all 20 minutes of training if you need it. Go register at www.pokercoder.com and if you have any further questions, contact the organiser at sean@pokercoder.com. ...

UPDATE: It was raining cats and dogs but it didn’t seem to put people off. I ended up getting 45 mins 5 seconds so I’m quite happy with that and really keen to do another one soon! On the 26th of May I’ll be running the Bupa London 10,000 charity event beginning and ending in St James Park, London. This is just a shout out to say I’ve set up a sponsorship page, so if you know me, you’ve found this blog useful in the past, or you just feel like helping a good cause please click the link below and donate anything you can. ...

My colleague Rick Williams just found an excellent game called Echochrome which is coming soon to PS3 and PSP. It is very reminiscent of Escher’s work, the difference here is that you must complete the illusion yourself by rotating the 3D-space to allow the inhabitants of the world to complete the puzzles.

Quick warning regarding loading images using the Loader class in Flash Player 9… Image files that are saved with a CMYK profile will appear with inverted colours, this includes JPEGs. It might sound a random thing to encounter but it can happen if you are allowing users to upload images. So it’s probably best to re-save the images on the server using an RGB profile and also check for things like a high DPI, which is likely to also be the case with CMYK images that have been designed for print originally. ...

I’m a big fan of Unity3D, great for cross-platform 3D games. So I was glad to find out from my colleague James that Unity is coming to iPhone, a platform I have also invested a good amount of my time in recently. Typically Flash has formed the basis of my work over the last 7 or 8 years, but I’m finding now that the technologies are all so similar, it’s just syntax (and more often than not those are nigh-on the same). We are also more able to apply our learnings in say Papervision, to OpenGL ES for iPhone or Unity without too much of a learning curve, and more importantly, we have many more options for spreading our ideas across a wide variety of media without incurring the enormous costs that multi-skilling in those areas could have meant before. ...

Quote: “Move Media Player and Microsoft’s Silverlight To Create The Most Flexible, High Quality Streaming Video Platform” Here’s a strange one. Move Networks is offering a HD video player “powered by Silverlight” that comes in the form of a Firefox extension. Once installed you are redirected to a page that shows a HD video, but a look at the source shows the video player header and controls/progress bar are all made in Flash, it just overlays a block, streaming in a QMX file (doesn’t open in Windows Media Player when renamed asx). ...

There are a few posts out there relating to Shantanu’s disclosure of a standalone Flash Player being developed for the iPhone using the newly released SDK, but of course that doesn’t answer the question as to whether people will be able to browse the web and view Flash content in-line, given that Flash makes up a huge chunk of the web, and also provides the revenue for a great many sites through advertisements (fallback GIFs are not what advertisers are paying so much money for). ...

Ran into a couple of issues today with Flash Player 9. I’m communicating with a server which uses REST-based services and is very “standards compliant”. So when PUTting* to the server, it was responding with a HTTP 201 code (that’s a “created” response) and a 204 status code for a DELETE*. The Flash IDE was choking on this and generating an IOError, unable to read the stream. (*as a sidenote Flash Player doesn’t support the PUT or DELETE verbs right now, so we were using POST instead, and using a request header (“X-HttpVerbOverride”) to specify the correct verb.) ...

In a press release today Nokia announced that Symbian OS will include Silverlight. This includes both high-end S60, and low-end series 40. Silverlight is of course the cross-platform RIA runtime from Microsoft, that can be considered a subset of WPF (at least with version 2.0 which has a substantial feature list). I wonder if Microsoft charged a per-device license fee to Nokia like Adobe did, and if so what the difference is. On top of that there was of course the controversial price to pay for the developer edition of the Flash Lite runtime for Series 60 which is thankfully now free. Clearly there is a fierce competition to be had in this space as the web continues to leak out onto what we currently call “devices”, and Microsoft have made it crystal clear Silverlight is high on their list of priorities. ...