This presentation had John Grden and Trevor Burton introducing their latest project - a Java/Flash based online MMO called Paperworld. The entire project will be released open source in April, but for now the demos shown gave a good idea of what we can expect in the coming months…

Paperworld consists of two parts - an extended Red5 framework on the server side streaming multiplayer data, and a custom Papervision3d framework on the client side rendering the 3d view. Presently there are many utilities and modules tools being developed and pooled for use by other developers and designers, to aid things like avatar creation, loading and movement management.

The Paperworld framework relies on precalc’d 3d transformations on the server that are pushed to the client - partly for speed reasons and partly to maintain coherence in multiplayer movement. The Flash client smooths server proxy positions and the current local position of your avatar to give a motion that is a little more robust to fluctuations in latency. To get round the problem of larger 3d environments choking on download bandwidth, the Paperworld server does not use sharedobjects, but has relevant set selection - a technique which checks how far away an object is from each player, taking into account direction of movement, to intelligently load content

Currently a website exists for people to register their interest in the project, so if you would like to be kept informed of updates and releases of the Paperworld framework, goto http://www.paperworld3d.com and sign up!

I never got a chance to ask Robert how he got paid for doing this stuff, but i guess if we all knew that there wouldn’t be people left like him to impress us with the sheer complexity of his work. Essentially the subject of the presentation was examples of computer generated visuals using mathematical systems that included flocking, tendrils, attractors and so on. There are many online videos of the different systems that were showcased here, you can find them on his blog at http://www.flight404.com/

For jaw dropping visuals, the finale used the latest version of Robert’s Magnetosphere demo. This is a custom built particle effects system controlled by music. If your feeling like a wait you can download the full 193meg quicktime version at http://www.flight404.com/_videos/magnetosphere/, otherwise you can see a slightly smaller flash video version here (with different music). The visuals were created in an open source Java based graphics language called processing, on which you can find more info by going to http://processing.org/.

Rob

Well i could hardly not go to this one!

We were treated to an exhaustive look at Carlos’ back catalog, with many demos i’d seen before but always look great on a big screen. We also got to see Carlos’ latest commercial work for Sony which is a massive achievement visually, and has already won an FWA site of the day. Here are links to just some of the demos shown (which reminds me, must write more Away3D demos!)

http://www.noventaynueve.com/portfolio/index.html

http://www.noventaynueve.com/2007/

http://www.papervision3d.org/

http://www.carlosulloa.com/demos/spaceship/

http://bravia.sony.eu/

Mario Klingemann’s presentations are fantastic to watch not only because he keeps doing new things, but also they always contain something a little unexpected. This time it was his closing demonstration of a multi-touch interface that took me by surprise. You can find the entire presentation in his archives at http://lectures.quasimondo.com/ , although be warned that the ending may not be quite what you expect…

Rob

I was hoping this was going to be a list of howlers that Ted Patrick had made at various points in the past concerning Flex development but instead it was a cunningly disguised list of don’t transformed into do’s. I won’t cover it in too much detail as the session will most likely appear on Ted’s blog in the near future, but it had some good general advice that included:

• Collect components that sit next to each other doing related tasks into a single custom component.
• If your project involves more than 2 developers, use a Framework
• Use classes to organized code (pull it out of the mxml file by extending the base classes).
• Dummy data urls can help kickstart the client developent before server coding starts.
• Beware of optimising early!
• //Comment your code
• Be careful with bindings (eh? what about the Caringorm object model? I think a little coherence here would be good)
• Release early, release often.

There was also a mention of shared libraries when it comes to publishing multiple swfs that all utilise the same base framework. While this is a good idea, i think the new Flex caching features of Flex 3 are a far more advanced way of reducing download sizes of applications that use the Flex framework.

Rob

I won’t cover this in too much detail as a copy of the presentation notes will be available from Keith Peter’s blog at http://www.bit-101.com/blog/

The presentation covered the various ways you can make money from writing flash games, and was interspersed with Keith’s own site of Flash games presented as an example at http://www.wickedpissahgames.com/ (nice!)

The two main ways of generating revenue from self-hosted games seem to be http://www.mochiads.com/ which uses a pay per view system, and https://www.google.com/adsense that I imagine many people already know of, which uses a pay per click system.

Other income ideas involve the licensing of games to various advertisers, with the possibilities of contract terms involving

exclusive or non-exclusive licensing, branding etc.

For more info, check the blog link!

Rob

A new beta of the Adobe AIR runtime has been released recently, and there are a heap of new features that complement the concurrent release of Flex 3 with extra publishing options for AIR. Mike opened with a fairly decent example of an AIR application that can be downloaded from the site http://www.finetune.com/ which is available as a desktop player download for their music library. We need more examples like these!

A few included features for the new release are:

• Native menu support (for mac)
• Windows toolbar support
• Support for “View Source” option in the right-click menu.
• XML descriptor file used to set up variables that are used by the runtime and installer (things such as name, description, systemchrome etc.)

A walkthrough was shown of a demo AIR application that, once compiled, could create and save a simple text file. This was achieved using the File system class extensions for AS3 designed specifically for use with AIR, which are capable of saving any type of data as a file including text, binary and even flash object files (something that might be useful for caching application settings etc.)

Available installation options were also a topic of discussion, as AIR is still a relatively new runtime. The application you create requires a core set of files to run, and these need only be downloaded once. Your installer therefore checks the desktop machine to see whether the AIR runtime is already present, and downloads a copy automatically from Adobe if it is required. A new template available from the link below allows for a one click “badge” installer (seem to remember that from Central days…) that can be inserted in a webpage and does most of the detection work for you.

Another security feature that Adobe have introduced is the technique of signing an AIR application. You can send a webform to Adobe to get an official app-specific signing code, or autogenerate an unofficial code. I assume you’ll get some disclaimer written into the installer file that tells the user whether the code used for creation was a trusted code from Adobe, and people can choose whether they want to trust the author based on that information.

I’m not sure whether the presentation will be put online, but you can always find out by visiting Mike’s blog:
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/.

For more details on the latest AIR development tools, check out the links below

http://www.awadobe.com/go/air/

http://onair.adobe.com/

Rob

This was a huge presentation with many snippets (over 50, in fact!) of useful information. I suggest you check out Grant Skinner’s presentation notes that should be available at http://gskinner.com/talks/50reasonsAS3/ and learn something new about as3.

Rob

This was an interactive session that I failed to interact with as i couldn’t make it. But it sounded very interesting despite this. The source for all the examples showcased can be downloaded from http://www.sebleedelisle.com/?p=130 if you want to check out what i missed. Always worth looking at particle effects in my opinion…

Rob

I didn’t get a huge amount of sleep on my first night in Brighton thanx to someone putting a bottle crushing machine outside my hotel room window. Strangely, the people operating this machine felt it would be best if they only confined their bottle crushing to one hour intervals throughout the night. I’m wondering if there are people in the world who find the sound of breaking glass beneficial for sleep. All i know is i’m not one of them…

Despite this i managed to get myself up early enough to make it to the keynote, which opened with Ted Patrick and Andrew Shorten doing some kind of Sherlock Holmes parody that concerned itself with the unsolved mysteries surrounding a mythical Flex project. Andrew claimed later that this idea ‘was an a American thing’. Maybe Adobe are hoping their next slogan will be written along the lines of ‘Flex: Fun for all the Family’. I can just imagine the posters…

Some of the solved mysteries straight from the Homes & Holmes detective agency:

Problem: A Flex project has started running slowly due to an overloaded function call!

Solution: Use the new profiler in Flex 3 to get an overview of all processes running in the player and locate the exact method containing the heavy code.

NB. Ted revealed later that the Flex profiler is actually being used by the the Flex development team to fix bottlenecks with the Flex framework itself. More info on the profiler can be found on Adobe Labs here. The profiler presents information never really seen before about the running swf that i can see myself taking advantage of in future for Away3D optimisations.

Problem: A method in a class need renaming to clean up a project’s codebase!

Solution: Use the new Flex 3 method refactoring tool (better than a simple seach and replace) more details can be found here

Problem: A Client wants a Flex webpage ported to an AIR runtime!

Solution: Use the ‘new release’ option in Flex 3 that publishes final version of an application as an AIR installer.
After the detective thing lost momentum we moved on to other snippets of information. The Flash 9 update 3 has gone beta and contains, among other things, H264 support, multi-core support and hardware scaling in fullscreen mode.

Then the bit I’d been waiting for - info on the upcoming new version of the player Astro.

Some of the new planned features:

• 2.5d transformations of bitmaps (this is basically a quad tranformation similar to the old Director 7 transform methods).
• Custom filters created in hydra will run in Astro (will this be faster that current bitmapData filters?).
• New text api for textflow (columns, native right2left text, cleaner/faster glyph renderer).

Then something a little unexpected appeared - the first steps being made in the development of the new IDE for Flash cs4. This included a look at:

• Object based tweening on the timeline.
• Frame independent, transformable tweens.
• IK tween manager.

Adobe seem to be driving a lot of new directions for Flash that were always requested in the past but never followed up presumable because of the logistics and limitations of Macromedia as a company at the time. I think we can all breathe a little easier now that intentions of Adobe for Flash are coming clearer - and look to be inline with what the community wants to see.

Rob