What a name, uh? Well, after finding this tutorial/paper on friday I spent quite a lot of hours implementing it to my 3dengine in flash. I've to say that there are a couple of bugs on that tutorial (but I won't say which one are :D). Also I had to find a way to implementing 4Dmatrices and Vectors to the code (as Actionscript doesn't have them). So, yeah... 'Now with camera' may sound simple, but isn't (atleast for me).

Again, a bit of history. All this started when Gargaj sent me 2 years ago (?) a .fla with a 3D test he did. It was just a cube (kocka in hu) rotating, with circles on the dots. Starting from there I got interested on it, and learnt all the theory behind the 3dengines and wrote from scratch a new engine which I decided to call it kocka as a tribute to the original kocka.fla :)

So, well, now it has a camera... the controls aren't done properly yet, I'm trying to find the way of doing quake-like camera control, I guess it will take a bit more of time :)

However I guess I'll stop the dev of it with AS2 and move it to AS3... I'm really looking forward to see what's the improvement in this example :D

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Althought this is going to be one of those noise posts (as thousands of people will write one like this), I think the news is too good that I have to.

Adobe has finally released their Flash player for Linux. That means a lot of expansion (and also some people won't be able to complain whenever I try to show them my stuff done with flash9 :P)

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

PS: Oh, looks like M$ released IE7 too, but... who cares?

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There was this guy on Domestika asking if it was possible to convert a .EXE (which is actually a Flash) to .FLA again.

I had a similar problem some time ago when doing Rolf Harris website. We didn't have any rules for storing the files at Spring by that time, and one of the results was losing the .FLA for the homepage flash. Luckily Sothink SWF Decompiler did the job well. It added a little bit of crap but it was quite reusable.

However, in this case, the guy was asking for an .EXE (Windows projector) decompiler, and I never saw that option with the program. So, I had a fast thought about how to fix the problem, and applying what I learnt with Madgoblin's steganography I had a little hack for it in a couple of minutes. So, in case anyone elses need it, here you have:

EXE2SWF

I've tried it with a couple of .EXEs and it works. Let me know if it doesn't with yours.

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Hehehe, yep, finally moving to AS3. So, I didn't know a better way to start learning the new changes than porting one of the olschool effects that I did with AS2.

See it on movement here.

AS3 gave something like 5 more fps to the effect, but as you can see it's still slow. If you think you can make it faster:

Download the sources from here.
(You may want to delete anything fps related first)

PS: Should I have to say that the texture is from the demo Second Reality?

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What a silly bug made me lose quite a bit of time!!!

Ok, If you were planing of doing a game controled by the keyboard for Flash player 8 you'll find a little BIG issue. Using this code:

var keyListener:Object = new Object();
keyListener.onKeyDown = function() {
    trace("PRESSED -> Code: "+Key.getCode()+" ASCII: "+Key.getAscii()+" Key: "+chr(Key.getAscii()));
};
keyListener.onKeyUp = function() {
    trace("RELEASED -> Code: "+Key.getCode()+" ASCII: "+Key.getAscii()+" Key: "+chr(Key.getAscii()));
};
Key.addListener(keyListener);

Then, if you doing this sequence:
1. Press DOWN  (40)
2. Press RIGHT (39)
3. Release RIGHT (30)
4. Release DOWN (40)

You'll get this result exporting to with Flash player 7:
PRESSED -> Code: 40    ASCII: 0    Key:
PRESSED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:
RELEASED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:
RELEASED -> Code: 40    ASCII: 0    Key:

However, with Flash player 8 player you'll get this:
PRESSED -> Code: 40    ASCII: 0    Key:
PRESSED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:
RELEASED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:

As you can see, Flash player 8 forgets which Keys you pressed as soon as you press another one, but without releasing the previous ones. Which may cause that your ship goes down automaticly.

Well, atleast looks like they've fixed this issue already in Flash player 9.

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Hehehe, this thingie end up being quite fun! Didn't expected it to be that dificult for everyone!!

First of all, a bit of theory... The GIF format was the shit years ago. 256 colours (8bits)! You could do a lot with that!! Unfortunatelly, gfxzone is down now so I cannot show a lot of graphics done with Deluxe Paint pixel per pixel (no wacoms!).

So yeah, as I said, using a GIF you can have up to 256 colours, and, now listen carefully, 2 colours of those 256 could be the same, you can customise the palette however you want, in fact, with good old programs you could even move the colours in the palette. Quite a lot of games used the trick of using the first colour in the palette as transparent colour, so the graphician had to setuop the palette of the graphic like that.

So yeah, the trick was that 2 colours (even 3) where black (I added a transparent one because a "bug" with irfanview). So, in order to show the text, you have to change one of those colours to any other colour :D That trick was very used by graphicians long time ago, they used to add hidden text (greetings to other graphicians) in the empty parts of their graphics. Isn't it cool?!

So, here you have the steps:



Select the first colour:



Change it to white, and that's it!



Now you should see this:



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I sent an email (by mistake, as I was going to do it on Friday) to the Spring designers with this image, well, it wasn't actually a file called "byebye" without extension. So they had to figure out that it was a GIF, then they had to learn a bit about the format and find the text inside it and ready it. It's a message for them. One of them saw the text but was because a Irfanview bug (?). I've amended the image so irfanview doesn't show it. By now, nobody was able to read the text, even the Dev guys :/



I guess some of the readers of this blog already know what it is, as it's an old pixelling scene trick :D



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No words.. just links:
Super Mario MOD Player
AS3-Audiocyclebuffer

This guy is alwasy going 6 months forward!

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If you find yourself browsing and you find one website that opens in a pop up, and also resizes the window to get fullscreen, so it's on top of everything else you had, close the window! don't let it load or anything. Just close it and go away.

If you want to compare to something, is like buying sweets to your kid because he is crying for some sweets. If you buy him sweets, everytime he wants sweets he will cry again, and this is bad, isn't it? So, don't let the website developers use childish tricks like that to gain your attention, let them know that it's annoying just closing the window.

If we all do this the world will become better! :D

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6:23, Monday morning, I just woke up at 5:05 this morning, tho yesterday I went to sleep at.. uhmm.. 16:00? Hehe.. I really had to be tired :) However, it's time to do the Day 3 report.. tho It was 2 days ago, so let's pretend that today is yesterday..  :P

As on thursday I went to sleep at 5:00 or so, I wasn't going able to watch the 2 speeches before the lunch time (Granatta and Dr. Woohoo / Jürg Lehni)... I had a lunch with my parents and my brother instead (one of those things that happens once a year now.. So at 15:40 I was ready to go back to the festival...

Syrup (web)
I arrived when this one was going on.. Didn't see too much of them, but was again one of those conferences where the guys just browse their site a little bit a show projects and explain a bit of what they do for each one. I took some pictures meanwhile that one and I realized how many people was sleeping (probably the siesta thing)..

Rob Chiu (web)
After checking what was going on in the other rooms I sit down in the main room and Rob Chiu prepared for his speech. Nando Costa was suposed to do the speech following the timetable but looks like he wasn't able to come and also Rob Chiu (the ronin) didn't do the speech on Thursday because someone stolen his laptop in Barcelona (great! uh?!).
Again this one was about showing the work he did and explaining some facts about it. However, as it was motiongraphics it was somehow more easy to see. I really liked how each piece was musicalized, the audio was great in each one, well, anything he does have always a great audio ambient.

Erik Natzke (web)
Meanwhile Rob Chiu and Erik was swaping the stage I met Wences from DMSTK (a cool digitalart focused spanish forum I'm in) to see if they had any spare XL t-shirt for me :) So they had and I went to get some money to pay for it :P As soon as I came to my place (just in front of the stage I saw that was super full and was quite hard to sit down again there.
Erik Natzke was showing his work and his progress, at that moment I didn't know who he was but after being there a bit I remembered all their works. This guy is the inventor of the "book effect" done in flash. Respect! :D He showed great stuff done with Actionscript and ended up showing his latest stuff which reminds me a bit to Doobscii but done with ribbons, I was very impressed and very motivated after this speech.

Ben Fry & Casey Reas (web)
Ok, here started the down part of the day. It was cool to see the processing-script inventors, but was also very boring. Some bits and techniques of how Casey uses his script to creaty his illustrations were cool, but when Casey stop talking and changed to Ben Fry which was speaking about using processing and that style to visualize data information.. Well, I had to leave!!

Marius Watz (web)
During this one I was outside sharing some beers one of the guys behind CDMON (which hosts xplsv.tv), and also he introduced me to Yeoh Guan Hong. A guy that I didn't know anything about, and also he didn't know anything about me. However, we had a cool and long chat :) Then for some reason I thought I was missing the exposition room this year so I explored a little bit more the building and I found it (the orgos are always changing the rooms). Luckilly after finding the exposition room I saw there Joshua Davis just playing around with his "software", and leting the people play around with it too. I checked all the computers in the exhibition but 50% of them was already silly-fucked up (you know those people that try to reboot the machine or just go to other websites in exhibition computers, well I was one of those so, I should not complain :P). After that I went down to the main room again to see how the conference was going on and well, I wasn't interested at all. Instead of that I went to have some short chat with Rob Chiu and also with hahakid / Hi-Res which was more interesting than the speech going on :P

Tmema - Zach Lieberman & Golan Levin (web)
At this point I just wanted to leave the festival, the stuff that was going on was maybe to technical and not too creative (lack of concepts). However I stayed for the begining of this show, which was impressive on the beginning but boring after the 5th slide, so I left :)

After that I went to just walk throught Barcelona a bit, eixample, ramblas, sants.. the usual places but just to check the new things.. I think I spent 4hours doing a zig-zag walk until I arrived home. So that was the end of OFFF for me. See you all next year, let's see if I can meet more people!

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