Yet another year I decided not to attend FOTB. Even being a couple of hours from where I live, I have always find it very expensive for what it looks. However, I was very tempted this year when I heard that Jonathan Harris was going there. I really admire his work and how he uses creatively the technology to execute nice ideas. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to see this

After the event, seems like everyone is mainly talking about his speech and how arrogant he was and daba daba. But, from what I was able to read on blogs, you could include me on the "He is right" group.

He has written an article illustrating his points here and, definitely, he is spot on, and what matters most, inspiring. In fact, to me it's quite on the same level as Ken Robinson message.

I guess I'm the perfect example of what he means, a lot of experimentation but no ideas on them. Well, this is something I've been trying to work on for a while already, and hopefully will have some impact on my work in the future. I'm still learning the language I think.

Anyway... Thanks Jonathan! Once again.

#permalink

Some months(?) ago Youtube released the HD version of their videos. Well, that's nice, but take a look at this... now we have Super HD!



:P

#permalink

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Another step for being Windows/MacOS free! The alpha version was out for a couple of months already, but wasn't working too well. The beta runs pretty well the app I'm working on at work :)

#permalink

Román's idea seemed good excuse for me to start playing around with flash game development... you know, logic, timing, addiction, scores and all that.

It also was a nice little project for try gTween out, which seemed a bit weird in some cases, but was very easy to use.

And, this time the bug in flash player seemed to have random delays when playing sounds. It is only on the Linux version tho, on the other platforms everything was perfect.

Have fun!

#permalink

Another thing I can get rid from my to-do list. My introduction to the Pixel Bender/Flash10 Shaders world. Yesterday afternoon I decided to give it a try and see how all this worked

First thing was setting up FDT to compile Flash10 movies, something that ended up being quite easy thanks to this post. By the way, in case you're wondering... FDT on Ubuntu seems to be doing very well, no problems so far. Unfortunately I had to go to Windows in order to do the Pixel Bender part.

Dealing with Pixel Bender was kind of fun, although I was missing a timer (incremental) value, something to easily test my filter moving. Maybe there is something for it already but I just didn't find it on the few hours I played with it.

Once the filters were done I tried them with Flash10, and then that Tinic post popped into my mind and realised how slow it was (compared to the Pixel Bender). I'm sure the filters can be optimised but I just left them easier to understand so whoever feels like can start playing with the values. However, they are fast enough for 512x512 action or for fullscreen single frame distortion.

Ok, show time... Before you click in any of these things:

1) Flash Player 10 is needed.
2) There seem to be a bug on Flash 10 Shader code, on Pixel Bender the Shader looks fine, but it doesn't in Flash 10. I hope someone can spot if it's my code's fault or if it's actually a Flash 10 bug, I have no idea :S

EDIT: Tinic confirmed it was a flash player bug and seems to be fixes now. Looking forward to the next beta version available.


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)


.pbk (Pixel Bender file)

If you're wondering how I managed to do that many effects in just a couple of hours, here it's a hint... iq.

All the .as, textures and compiled shaders are here.

What to do now? Well, I would suggest you to download Pixel Bender load any of those .pbk files, find the line where it says // This is where the magic happens and play with the formulas there and make your own ones.

Have fun! :)

#permalink

Seeing that FlexBuilder Alpha 4 still didn't have refactoring I had to search once again for solution with FDT on Linux. And well, seems that a solution for my problem has been out there for months!

I managed to register it without problems, but when I was creating a class I had this:

package com {nullimport flash.display.Sprite;/**null * @author Mr.doob */nullpublic class Main extends Sprite {nullpublic function Main(){null}}null}null

Maxim Zaks posted the solution here.

you can check this by going to Menu: "Window/Preferences/General/Workspace" and than in the "New text file line delimiter" Panel change from "Default" to "Other: Unix"

Big Pheeew!!!! Having to swap between FDT and FlexBuilder in some projects were driving me nuts... this really looks like the final "Bye bye Windows!".

#permalink

Well, that was the first line in some emails I decided to answer today. There used to be a time I answered everything and helped everyone that asked for help, but seems like these days are over.

Well, not really, I still reply, only 6 months later ;) But... if I don't reply, please accept my apologies, blame to however invented time! :)

#permalink

I've recently seen the class being used in the wild so I guess it was time to properly publish it.

Since the beginnings I've always had a FPS meter class, really basic, but had to be there. Then Carlos came along with one with a nice visualizer of the performance and then I saw Alternativa's one and I though that was the best approach. However, it had some issues, the speed of the graph seemed a bit pointless as the history was of 1 second or so.



So I improved my own one on the direction of the latest, but having a graph history of about 10/15 seconds, having a clearer picture of how your app/site is performing. Theo came along and helped with the graph visualisation too and then it went public.

Anyway... if you need a tiny and easy FPS/MS/MEM control panel, feel free to use it :)

http://code.google.com/p/mrdoob/wiki/stats

#permalink

Again, it can, and damn fast. Well, if it runs fast is all thanks to Román Cortés. which has done a magnificent job optimising the experiment.



If you want to know a little bit more about the details check Román's post.

Seems like using voxels is the best way to have highly detail 3D meshes rendered with Flash these days, although it also has it's limitations...

Ah!! Sources are available this time. (This time it's quite hard to understand tho ;P).

#permalink

So, as posted, I was invited to do a speech at this year's pixel attack.

As the topic of my speech was mainly 3D works (with some exceptions) I've been working on during this year I though would be a good idea to do the slides in 3D and get some anaglyphic glasses for the audience. I found a shop with very good prices and in a week that problem was sorted.

This year's presentation system was a was a bit more complex than the one used at LFPUG :)

HOW TO USE:
Keyboard left-right: Prev / Next slide
Mouse left-right: Move camera left-right.
Mouse up-down: Move camera up-down.
Mouse wheel: Move camera forward-backwards.



So, the thing seemed to work pretty well, and the organisers did a great job making sure everyone could enjoy the effect moving tv signals around and giving glasses to everyone.



Some more (clickable) screengrabs :D





Unfortunately I ran out of time (better to run out of time than out of content tho) and I wasn't able to show the last slide. So here are some links to some of the experiments I wasn't able to show:

First a performance test of a 3D engine I was working on. In this test there are about 1000 balls with the depth of field effect. When I did the effect with Papervision3D long time ago I was able to put 200, although I'm sure it can be pretty much optimised too.



And then, something I wanted to try for a while. Andre Stubbe used to have a background on his site which looked similar to this. I though it was a render, but apparently was also real time (with Java). However, he sent me the sprite so I could try to achieve the same effect with flash.



And that's about it, many thanks to the organisers once again for doing a great job and keeping everyone happy, and hope they keep the vibe one more year! Which by the way, extra kudos for them as they probed that you don't need £500 tickets for doing these kind of events (the entrance was free).



On the pic (in a random order :D): Maria, Dave, Javier, Sole, Yingshun and myself

#permalink