This is what I call a nice desktop environment :)

I still depend on Flash CS3 for some vector stuff so I needed to have WindowsXP with Flash CS3 running properly. After trying some virtualisation programs (qemu, vmware), some guys recommended VirtualBox, and... oh boy, it does really run fast!

Here it's a little video of me playing around with my new desktop environment, (you may need VLC):



I wonder if you can record your desktop at 1920x1200 with Windows or MacOS :P

UPDATE:
At start, I was amazed how fast WindowsXP was booting up. But after installing JRE, DirectX and everything seemed to make it quite slower. Here you have another video to see WindowsXP booting up fastest than ever :D



PS: If you're wondering about what's my wallpaper... here you have the answer

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Now that everyone is talking about 3D and flash, for some reason I'm getting a lot of emails about people interested in my little photo gallery. Seems like people want the sources or just the .swf but for their stuff. Well, when I did that version of Phodoob, the code was indeed better, but then AS3 poped out, and since then I've always wanted to move it to AS3... I believe I can make it run much more faster with much more pictures on it.

My work is very based on motivation periods. It's hard for me to follow a list of things to do, but if I get inspired with something I just crack on it and release it.

So, apart from all the people asking me to do screensavers with my effects, I'm at the moment 100% motivated on cracking a new version of phodoob with AS3 and a few surprises. And with the sources available this time :)

Thanks for the people that shown their interest, it's all because you ;) Now, stay tuned (Give me 1 week or so).

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Just in time for flash on the beach, Jalava has just released the demoengine that he has been using for the latest Evoflash demos.

Thanks a lot for sharing this Jalava!!! :)
Now... it's time to learn some tricks. But while Tortoise does the checkout, what about watching the last demo done with this demoengine?

ADHDTV by evoflash

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I have been looking to get some time to play around a bit with APE, and after doing the usual tests that everyone would do, I though that may be a good idea would be to mix the physics with the blobs effect.

And here are the results:



Quite slow, but it's a good start I guess. If you wonder how it works, here it's a behind the scenes version of the same piece:



Main.as (you'll need Blobalise.as  and APE)

Enjoy, enjoy!

PS: If you click on the background you'll create some drops, and if you refresh it will create a different scenario.

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http://www.blackpawn.com/dev/flash/FireSkull.html

You may know at this point that I've been (and I'm still) pretty active on the demoscene world for 10 years already. But I've never been a coder in that scene, I've usually done the graphics, design, direction, screenplay on the prods I've worked for. Lately I've been coworking with a new American coder. The bad news for you, is that mr.blackpawn some weeks ago decided to give a try to AS3, and he has been developing his own engine as he wasn't very happy with the actual APIs.

And the link above all this boring dabadaba is his first jawdropping test (and I'm not talking about the skulls jaw :P).

Here you will find a buch of tests he has been doing lately.

Welcome to the AS3 world Jim \o/

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Well, I though I was going to have the energy of working on this as soon as arriving back from work... but I didn't. Anyways, waking up early again to finish up this stuff.

If you want to save time this is the link you were looking for:

http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/vis/effect04/vis04.fla
(you will need this little class too: Pyramid.as, also you'll need to use Phunky version of pv3d (yes, Ralph, I finally tested it :D))

But, if you want me to explain a bit what's the deal with the fake glow and these things.. keep reading then ;)

So, the thing I was saying about the fake glow/blur is easy to achieve just copying the rendered image to a tiny bitmap and scaling the bitmap to match the screen. The code is simple:

mtr = new Matrix();
mtr.translate(stage.stageWidth * .5,stage.stageHeight * .5);
mtr.scale(.01,.01);

and then... every frame:

tinyBitmap.draw(rendered3D,mtr,null,null,new Rectangle(0,0,stage.stageWidth,stage.stageHeight));

I asume you know how to attach the bitmap to a Sprite and resize it.  The benefits of this method is that you get a not-so-bad blur that if you were using BlurFilter instead you would need a lot of blur passes to achieve the same amount of blur.

If you set stage.quality = "LOW" the effect you get is this:



Which is also an interesting effect. In order to smooth that out you need to put the stage to at least MEDIUM quality. Doing this you will get the effect that you already know:



Then, the other interesting thing for this effect was the Random camera movement. Tweener made an excellent job here with just this code:

function generateCameraPath()
{
    var bz = new Array();
    var bz_t = new Array();

    for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++)
    {
        bz.push( { x: Math.random() * 3000 - 1500, y: Math.random() * 3000 - 1500, z: Math.random() * 3000 - 1500 } );
        bz_t.push( { x: Math.random() * 2000 - 1000, y: Math.random() * 200 - 100, z: Math.random() * 2000 - 1000 } );        
    }

    Tweener.addTween( camera, { x: 2000, y: 2000, z: 0, _bezier: bz, time: 1000, transition: "linear" } );
    Tweener.addTween( camera.target, { x: 0, y: 0, z: 0, _bezier: bz_t, time:1000, transition: "linear" } );
    Tweener.addTween( this, { time: 1000, onComplete: function() { generateCameraPath() } } );
}

I'm afraid I don't have anything to put colors on the code on this blog yet, but anyway, I'm sure you get the idea ;)

Anyway... if that wasn't enough, there are even more bits. Originally I said that I was playing with all this because I wanted to do the visuals for a radio I usually listen to. I also said that I changed the plans because the link to stream wasn't working anymore. This morning I was able to speak with one of the guys behind the radio itself, and we managed to put a crossdomain.xml in place! Which means that now I'll have a lot of fun coding some visuals for the radio and see what I can do FFT analysing on the fly + 3D (which, neither Apple or Microsoft did much in their players :D).



Thanks a lot Jason!

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Woke up early this morning and for some reason went back to the visualisations that I did months ago, and tried to make it run again (lots of classes missing in action).

The original idea was to link it to an online radio I usually listen to, but the stream that I had didn't work any more, so I changed the plans and while using a super track done by Gloom and Flipside I just played with some stuff I had in mind.



First thing is the camera. In this test I'm using Tweener for generating the random camera path for the camera and the target. _bezier property is all you need, and the whole snippet for the camera is about 7 lines of code. This means that the piece isn't interactive this time, but is still hipotising ;)



Second thing is the cheap glow trick. That also something I had in mind that Ralph confirmed in one of his latests test. The trick consists on drawing the rendered scene into a very tiny bitmap and then rescaling it to fit the screen, if you don't put the smooth on it, it will also look nice as you will have pixellation for free, but for this effect looked nicer with the smooth.

If this sounds confusing, wait for this afternoon, as I should be updating this post with the .fla (gotta fix some issues when resizing the window, and hopefully making it run faster).

Enjoy!

PS: Core2duo+ recommended, and if you have Internet Explorer, try watching it with it, as the flash plugin goes much faster there.

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Wow! man... that's wow!! You have to see this :)

The 2nd AS Japanese God, roxik, (the 1st is still yugop imho) did a reversion with his own engine of the DOF test. The difference is that he was able to draw 10x more sprites that on my tests.. I still have a test to do with a new experimental version of PV3D that maybe will allow to put that many sprites.

http://www.adobe.com/jp/events/ cs3_web_edition_tour/page6.html

Ah.. now I'm impressed that even he saw my little tests :$

Thanks to fazeaction for the tip :)

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Seem like Mr. Jorge Fuentes aka Zomb finished the v2 of his own portfolio. Seems to be a nice system done by Feiss and it has the always nice touch of Frem.

Enjoy the works (or play with the piano otherwise ;))

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I've tried everything...

Tools / Global Classpaths / AS3
Project properties / Classpath

and even adding this -source-path+= 'CLASSPATHGOESHERE'

Project properties / Compiler Options / Additinal Compiler Options

FlashDevelop was finding the class, but Flex2SDK wasn't when compiling. In the end I had to go to
C:\Program Files\Flex2SDK\frameworks\flex-config.xml

And change (and uncomment) this Node:

<source-path>
<path-element>locale/{locale}</path-element>
<path-element>CLASSPATHGOESHERE</path-element>
</source-path>

I believe it's just a bug from FlashDevelop 3.0.0 Beta3, hope they fix it soon, meanwhile, I hope this helps someone.

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