April Fools Is Gay

My Twitter Rules for April Fools:

1. If you tweet something that is in the "spirit" of April Fools, you will immediately be removed from my twitter timeline.

2. If you RT something that is in the "spirit" of April Fools, you will immediately be removed from my twitter timeline.

3. If you try to deceive me with a tinyurl in the "spirit" of April Fools, you will immediately be removed from my twitter timeline.

4. If you post anything about Flash finally coming to the iPhone, you will immediately be removed from my twitter timeline.

5. ONLY if you post something that actually makes me laugh, and/or looks like it took time/effort/large sums of cash/celebrity intervention/acts of god to complete will you make it to a deliberation stage. At that point I will review your tweet for the above mentioned criteria, and you will be graded on a 10 point scale. If you receive a grade of less then 6 you will immediately be removed from my twitter timeline.

You've been warned. Thanks.

FITC Amsterdam

I think my talk was a success. I had a couple of dudes that said that they really enjoyed the talk, and they actually learned something (that's a completely unexpected outcome)!

Thanks to Shawn Pucknell and the FITC crew.

Now on to Flash On Tap. . .

MegaMarioLandBrothersAS3

Ok, ok, that last post was pretty bitter. Well you work on an impossible project for 5 months and tell me how you do. Regain composure, breathe in, and repeat the following: and so it goes, amen.

I've decided to dive into a couple of side projects to get my Flash groove back, and guess what? It worked.

Flash is good for a lot of things, 3d is just not one of them. Unless, you are cool with a pathetic 4000 polys for your ENTIRE scene! I mean come on!

And so it goes, amen.

Let's focus on the positives. I'm going back to 2d, and I'm developing a Flash Framework called MegaMarioLandBrothersAS3. If you have any brain at all you can figure out that it is a framework for old skool platformer games.

What will it include? Funny you should ask, because I've got some bullets for ya.

• 2d physics built in (gravity, colliders/collision detection, springing)
• Finite State Machines for A.I. (working on A* Pathfinding as well)
  
• Easy Art Implementation
• Super fast level creation

It's just a little pet project that I've been playing with. Should be releasing code within a couple of weeks.

Ding.

Flashhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I've been noticing that a lot of the main flash dudes are talking about things that are very un-flash lately. Such as: Unity3d (which I'm a super fanboy of already), Cocoa/ObjC/iPhone Development (I'm wondering if that market isn't already oversaturated), Facebook Development (really now?), Silverlight (it's actually really powerful, and once they unleash it's 3d power. . . flash had best watch it's back), and just generally telling all the Flash/Flex Developers to learn some new languages.

Was there a memo I missed? If you were to follow all of the flasherati's blogs and forecast where all of this is leading, you would start to wonder about Flash's future. Pixel Bender was touted as the Flash savior, but it's still too young yet (and not to mention how Flash seems to break Pixel Bender's knees somehow only allowing it to gimp along). Flash's 3d support is sad. Although the amazing teams working on Away and Papervision have pushed Flash into new territory, it's still kinda sad the poly count that flash can deal with (especially comparing to Unity3d's output).

Long story short. . . Flash is going to remain king of RIA for a while, but I think the lack of Flash support on the iPhone has really hurt it. The flash bubble has been popped. Now what?

My 2009 Resolutions

1. Be a good dad.

2. Be a good husband.

3. Learn Unity3d and Complete a game within 4 months.

4. Be a good pack leader.

5. Add some positive energy to the universe at least once a day.

6. Learn Chinese.

7. Create www.webiquette.org and www.thishurtsme.com

My week with Adobe Stratus

So, last week, Adobe Labs released Stratus, and ever since then it has been a mission/obsession of mine.

Here's my findings.

New blog post about Flash Lite 3 and FMS

I had fun doing research for this one.

My blog post for Influxis Labs.

"Things just need to work these days, why can't they make things just work?"

- Britt Mileshosky

Papervision Optimization Techniques (aka taming the Beast)

I've been working with Papervision very intensively for the last 5 months or so, and I've learned quite a bit about what is under the hood.

Also, I've been using it mainly in Flash (due to me designing everything in Flash as well, as developing). So, that being said, I primarily use MovieMaterials for all of my Primitives. With using MovieMaterials that opens up a whole other can of worms. CPU issues

Here's some ideas to get you going:

1. Set animated to false as much as possible. If you need it to animate occasionally, use some checks to turn the value on and off. Because when the material is set to animated = true, that material is being redrawn every frame.
2. Toggle the smooth and precise values on only when needed as well. This is especially true with smooth, because that is a major CPU killer.
3. When using objects that extend off of the screen make sure that you divide the segments appropriately. If you just instantiate something like: var ground:Plane = new Plane(groundMaterial) it's using it's default values (segmentsW:1, and segmentsH:1). That will cause the ground to be clipped by the Frustrum (basically it will disappear out of view when it should still be in view), because there aren't enough segments to subdivide. Usually (I say that loosely), a setting of segmentsW:5 and segmentsH:5 will do (unless you are dealing with something huge. . . then you would have to go higher).
4. Use flash 10, and turn on the Hardware Acceleration (direct not GPU, because GPU has toasted some of my test computers video drivers), which will not help with the rendering of the triangles, but it'll at least help with redrawing the screen. I've seen it decrease CPU load by over 30% in some cases, with smoother performance.
   

Oh, and lastly, do a reality check. Not everything has to be in 3d, try mixing 2d and 3d elements wherever you can.

Generative Musings

I've finally jumped into this realm, and have already been having a lot of fun with it. I was really impressed with Bit-101's Art From Code site, so I've finally started playing with some Math.randomness.

Even though I'm late to the tea party, I might as well take a sip.

Here's my first piece I'm working on:

Missile Command Cityscape

Basically what I am doing is generating random circles, with random colors, and scaling them with a you guessed it. . . a Math.random(). But then I also graph the scaling and the circle's x and y values and that gives me the cool line work on the left. What gave me the idea to do that is I've been really into visual complexity lately. And I've been trying to figure out how to create more visuals by graphing out data that my code is already creating. It kind of goes along with the ideas I used to have to make music that sounded like Autechre. Take a sample of your own song, and then play it at various octave intervals all at the same time.

Yeah, it's no Eric Natzke, Jared Tarbell, or even Keith Peters, but it's fun none the less.

I'm also thinking of working on generative site layouts, and generative art using Papervision or Away3d. Is there room for another Sound Visualizer?

Old blog, new nonsense

So, here's the new format, and I'll be talking about the following on my blog:

Flash/Flex
Actionscript
Flash 3d
general awesomeness
my experiments
neat-o stuff

First, I'm going to show the last thing I've completed for the awesome company I work for:

Paradigm Player

Oh, and I write for this blog too:

Make Me Pulse