As part of the Digital Shoreditch festival this year, I will be attending the Make & Do event on the 15th and 16th of May as a presenter for Away3D. The idea with Make & Do is to create something in less than two days, based on a series of challenges set by the organisers. The “thing” can be an idea, demo, interactive game, mobile application… really anything so long as it resides in the digital domain.

I’ll of course be working with the teams who want to create something using 3D, and we’ll be using Away Builder, Away3D 4.1 and Away Physics to help us on our way. You can read more about the event (and find details of how to sign up) by visiting http://digitalshoreditch.com/make-it-do-it-create-it-hack-it/

A week later, I’ll be heading up to Cambridge to present at the Cambridge Game Creators meeting. This is a regular community event that recently became an official “Adobe Community” for Cambridge and the east of England. I’ll be presenting a session titled Cross-platform Gaming with Away3D, and will have time to go through some of the aspects of Away3D’s integration with the Adobe game Framework SDK, and how we are evolving with new updates and tools in the future. More details will be available on the CGC meetup page in the next few days

Earlier this week, around the same time that Adobe was getting all amendy with their Flash whitepaper, we published our updated roadmap for Away3D & The Away Foundation. If you’ve not yet read it and are interested in what 3D shenanigans to expect from us, nows the time to have a look!

With a schedule beginning to form, my attention is drawn back to the some of the upcoming events we’ll be attending over the next few months, and in some cases, speaking. The first in line looks to be Casual Connect Europe, a games conference hosted in Hamburg from 12th-14th Feb. I’ll be presenting a short talk in the Indie track on Wednesday called Cross-platform 3D to the Max, which will look into some of the savings we can make when balancing performance and quality on the GPU – something applicable to many of today’s games published on tablets and phones.

The 2 days following Casual Connect will be spent joining in with the Adobe Game Jam group in Hamburg, where I will be teaming up with Chris Benjaminsen of PlayerIO and seeing how far we can get creating a multiplayer 3D social game. The event promises to be a lot of fun, so if you’re around in Hamburg for the 15th & 16th and are interested in joining in or just coming along to observe, sign up for free attendance here.

After the jammin’, I’ll be heading over to the FITC conference in Amsterdam, where Richard Olsson of the Away3D Core Team will present a very exciting new talk called Away3D in The Open, with WebGL and Javascript. You can kind of imagine what that is going to be about, and the implications for us at Away3D are potentially very far reaching. However I’m not wanting to steal Richard’s thunder, so for more information you’ll just have to go to the talk.

Something to look out for almost directly after FITC, and especially if your a little less mobile, is the online Stage3D conference on Feb 22nd. check the website for details as things get closer, there’s already a strong lineup covering a very wide range of libraries. I’ll be talking about the cross-platform potential of Away3D & other Away Foundation projects, and there will also be a chance for Q&A on where we see things headed in the longer term.

Jumping forward  a few weeks, I’ll be attending the Flash Gaming Summit event in San Francisco for some shiny gaming nuggets, and this will be closely followed by the obscenely gargantuan GDC conference. The latter will be an interesting opportunity to showcase some new Away3D games to a wider gaming audience at the Adobe expo booth – for those who’ve not yet seen, we are taking submissions for any Away3D game developer interested in being part of the showcase content on the Away3D user forums, so if you’ve got something great in development that will have some sort of public release (or even promo video / site launch) on or before GDC, reply to the forum thread and let us know!

Finally, at the beginning of May, I’ll be returning to the West coast along with Richard to attend the “better late than never” revamped Adobe Max conference in LA. We will be presenting a new session titled Cross platform gaming with Away3D, and will be taking a look at some of the recent developments in 3D-land as well as some practical examples of Away3D workflows and optimisations. We will also be attending an Actionscript Gaming Frameworks panel along with other members of the SDK development teams for Starling and Feathers. Should be an interesting discussion about the current gaming landscape and where the various SDK libraries are headed.

I’m always open to meeting up with local Away3D groups or companies/developers using our libraries, so if you happen to be in the area at any of the events above and are keen for a chat, please let me know!

As one of the cornerstone concerns of the recent 4.1 Alpha release of Away3D, GPU optimisation is something we will all have to start paying more attention to in future. The discipline used to be reserved for the hardcore console elite, but these days the application of GPU technology is literally everywhere, and the consumer has wised-up to the importance of smoothly performing and battery-efficient software.

As a reaction to this, I have been busy preparing a new presentation that takes a look at what GPU optimisation means for the web & mobile industry in general, as well as in the specific case of Flash based products. The talk is called A Million Little Triangles, and I’ll be giving a preview of the session at the newly reformed LFPUG this Thusday, as well as the upcoming FlashGamm conference in Kiev, Ukraine in a couple of weeks time. We will take a look at some of the history of accelerated graphics, and some of the general principals that today’s hardware adhere to – principals that make steering round the pitfalls all the easier. Hope you can make it to either one!

***Update****

Sadly, there had been a change of plan on the LFPUG front, now looks like this will be delayed until January.

Only a month left until the new format for the creativathon that was Flash on the Beach, now Reasons to be Creative, kicks off in Brighton.

Being the uneducated heathen that I am, I’ll freely admit to being unfamiliar with the work of at least half the billing this year. But judging by past choices, I don’t doubt it will contain plenty of inspiring and interesting nuggets, the paydirt of any creative conference and the thinking behind why you must absolutely, definitely, without question or worry for your liver, be in attendance.

With the recent upheavals in Away-land, I’m pleased to say there will be plenty of Away3D team members and supporters at the conference, bringing together the very latest on library development and the work of  The Away Foundation, something that I will be speaking about in my session Forward the Foundation on Monday.

Another of our team David Lenaerts will also be presenting on some of the magic he conjures up with the work for dynamic lighting in Away3D, as well as more general principals used in computer graphics in his session A Trick of Light on Wednesday.

Tickets are still up for grabs, with reduced pricing available for another 3 days until August 10th, after which the full ticket price is required.

Not sure what happened to any form of restraint – this month sees me with no less than 4 conference appearances which has got to be some kind of record. For me. I know some of you are workaholics, but sadly I only ever seem to collect addictions that are bad for me.

However, as I try not to look those deadlines too squarely in the face, I can be somewhat comforted by the fact that there is currently quite a lot worth talking about. Firstly there is the ever approaching Away3D 4.0 gold release which we are hoping to occur some time towards the end of the month, as well as new development on Away Physics and analysis on how the Adobe premium license (or “speed tax” as it is more affectionately known) will affect us here. Then there is Prefab 2.0 which is getting closer to a release as well although Fabrice won’t give too much away on an exact date as yet – expect more information soon enough.

First event on May 17th will be the exotic looking FlashGamm! conference in Moscow – a day long game developers festival based around Flash, social and mobile (like it says above. What do you mean you can’t read?). Having met a few Russian devs at previous conferences around the world I’m fairly confident their a friendly, outgoing bunch but the country itself is something I’ve not experienced before. For some reason, all that comes to mind when thinking of Moscow is Tetris and James Bond. Which doesn’t sound right at all.

I’ll be presenting a new talk titled Away3D for the accelerated age – you can probably guess what that will be about. The Alternativa guys are a FlashGamm! sponsor this year, and I’m really looking forward to hearing more about what they’ve been up to after the recent open-sourcing of their engine. At least now I can’t feel bad about me invading their turf.

Straight after FlashGamm!, I’ll be presenting at the larger KRI conference – another Russian game developers event (bearing some similarity to the GDC in San Francisco) that takes place over 3 days from May 18th – 20th. I’m a little confused so far on the name, as all the signs clearly call it “KPN”, but in certain text its KRI and some even have it as RGDC… whatever its called, I will be presenting Dissecting the Gloop – a breakdown of a recent mobile project collaboration called Gloop-a-hoop. The game is being released later this month and was an interesting experience on using Away3D and Stage3D with the latest FP11.2 and AIR3.2 APIs that I hope others will find useful.

After I make it home from Moscow (always assuming that happens), I’ll be attending and presenting at the Digital Shoreditch festival in London. This is a two-week long collection of various events with a creative and/or technical theme, and I’ll be part of the lineup at the Next Tech event curated by The Hoxton Mix. This presentation will be a more involved exploration of the Gloop-a-hoop game and will hopefully give attendees the information they need to start creating and publishing 3D content on mobile devices, with a bit of help from the various free tools and libraries used here.

Finally, on May 31st I’ll be presenting Away3D for the accelerated age at a slightly more usual stomping ground – the monthly LFPUG event in London. I’m pleased to say that the accompanying speaking here will be none other that the daddy of Flash 3D, Carlos Ulloa himself. And that doesn’t worry me at all. Nope, not in the slightest.

If you’re interested in hearing about the latest Away3D releases, sites, collaborations, experiments and updates, then check out the conferences below for when i will next be presenting a session. The talk is called “Getting some perspective: Away3D 4.0 & friends” and is a loose collection of all of the above plus a few observations about the general state of 3D in Flash, and what the future might hold.

FITC is the daddy – one of the longest running Flash conf…. sorry, creative conferences. The Amsterdam version is always a blast and one I’m particularly looking forward to. Partly because of the eclectic mix of speakers it attracts, and partly because its only a 45 minute flight away from London. I’ll be speaking on Monday – also look out for Richard Olsson talking about stereoscopic 3D effects in the Voodoo Influxis Lounge later in the day.

As Flash moves further into the hardcore gaming realm, games conferences are getting ever more relevant for its development community. FGS has been a trailblazer for Flash gaming for the last 4 years, and I’m very happy to be attending for the first time. Many of the speakers are people for whom i have a massive amount of respect for the work they do and contributions they make to the community, so all in all should be a very exciting event.

Beyond Tellerrand – Play is the new name for the Flash Forum Konference (FFK) in Cologne, Germany. This conference has a massive 2 days of workshops as well as the main speaker event, and I’m happy to say I’ll be hosting my own workshop on using the latest Away3D apis with Stage3D in Flash 11. More details will be posted here shortly – in the meantime a seat reservation can be made here and costs €350 per person.

So after an explosive end-of-year work schedule (none of which i can talk about yet, always the way…), followed by a collapse-in-exhaustion-rather-than-actually-do-any-proper-holiday-stuff extended Christmas break, things have woken back up and I realise there is quite a bit of housework to do on the whole online digital presence update thing. This is like the time i had to physically place my driving license renewal form in the doorway to my office to force myself to complete it. And it didn’t work straight away either, i just stepped over it for a couple of weeks…

Ok so its not quite like the driving license but it’s definitely time for an update. I thought I’d start with the Adobe Max conference as it’s the last major event i attended in 2011 and boy was it a big one for 3D.

So you may or may not know that Away3D had a session at Max. We shared a room with the guys from Flare3D and did a joint presentation on our respective frameworks. Thanks to the wonders of Adobe TV, you can watch the entire session in the player above (or if not, from the direct link here). I love the guys from Flare3D, they are some of the most upbeat, creative, generous guys and I know I’m far too serious to match their relaxed and jovial style. As a result, Flare3D CEO Adrian bagged quote of the session in reply to someone asking how they should choose between frameworks. The answer was simple “How do you choose? In the same way that you choose a woman when you go to a disco – try everyone!”

Our finale for our half of the session was a demo done specifically for the Adobe Max conference and a second time collaboration between Away3D and the Finnish demosceners EvoFlash. As well as the video (above), you can read a ‘making of’ post-mortem from Simo Santavirta, one of the EvoFlash coders on the project. Once again, the result was the work of many different pieces coming together and from it you can definitely see how far the engine has come since the last time we got to do this in 2010. As a side note, you can see these and a load more Away3D related videos on our very own YouTube channel now up at http://www.youtube.com/away3d.

While there were many sessions on 3D this year, Adobe saved their biggest announcement for the big room – Flash is going accelerated and if that wasn’t enough, here’s Tim Sweeney and a gollum-like helper of his to introduce you to the single most impressive thing done in Flash to-date: The Unreal engine running with Stage3D. OK, so not the full Unreal engine, but still a large portion of it… hold on, are those realtime volumetric lights… how many particles are coming out of that… WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!!!!

It transpired, of course, that Unreal has a trick up their sleeve – access to some new Alchemy opcodes which allow significant speed increases for runtime CPU calculations in Flash. In general use, processor intensive calculations are compiled from C code using Alchemy and then run inside their own FastMem buffer (for more info on the existing Alchemy tool, take a look at the Alchemy Labs page on Adobe.com). Of course, in the case of the Unreal engine, they had managed to use a newer Alchemy compiler to convert their entire library in a matter of days. This next version of Alchemy is not due for public release as of yet, but is something many of us are looking forward to seeing – certainly we hope to be able to bring you even faster performance with it for certain 3D effects and enhancements in Away3D, including the Away Physics engine which currently uses older Alchemy opcodes.

As a finisher for the year, i wanted to mention my appearance at the dotBrighton meetup in late October 2011, after all the commotion and madness from Max had dissipated. The group down there are great hosts and the entire evening was very relaxed and friendly, despite my slightly flustered demeanour (this was deep in crunch month at work). My thanx go to Nicola for looking after me and Influxis for the live streaming of the presentation to who-only-knows lurking on the web . I only wish I’d got a recording as that was the last ever presenting of my GameTime session and could have meant I’d have something to link to. maybe if i ask them very nicely…

Flash on the beach is just around the corner, and this year I’ll be heading down to Brighton as a speaker, something I’m fairly chuffed about. To me, FOTB is the jewel in the crown of European creative conferences and an event i feel truly honoured to be a part of.

As an added bonus, I get the chance to stretch the legs of a brand new talk entitled Flash 11: get ready for gametime. The subject on discussion should be fairly obvious, but I’m hoping the content will hold a few surprises, in particular towards people who’s main games background has so far been exclusively in Flash, such as myself. Although I’m pretty sure i won’t be surprised by it, unless i get someone else to write it for me…

I’m told there is only a week of standard ticket sales left, so if you’re still considering going along but don’t want to pay full walk-up price, time is running out! The main presentation I’ll be giving will be pretty much for everyone, although I will also be preparing a little something extra in an Influxis kickback lounge short session, for those who want to get a bit more techy. You know who you are, you geeky freaks

see you at the bar!

Picture: Higgs boson simulation, Cern (Mette Høst)

At the beginning of March I will be heading over to Amsterdam to attend the FITC conference, the annual excuse for designers & developers to get together in one of the coolest cities in Europe for two days of inspiration the dutch way… and I’m very happy to be presenting a brand new talk surrounding the programmatic approaches and practical implications of computer simulations entitled Simulating the Real. The talk is aimed at a broad audience so don’t be afraid to come along if you’re a non-programmer; a degree in particle physics is not required!   As a point of relevance, I will also be looking at how the GPU accelerated Molehill APIs announced at last year’s Adobe Max conference will affect the capabilities of the Flash Player in the area of simulation, with the help of the latest Away3D codebase.

The FITC organisers have kindly created a special discount code for any members of the Away3D community – simply type “Away3D” into the discount code box on the registration page to receive a massive 10% discount on any conference pass! Hope to see you there.

The Max conference in LA was a memorable high point this year – not only was Adobe’s hardware-accelerated intentions for the next Flash Player made clear, but the Away3D Team got their first chance to air some demos of the forthcoming Away3D 4.0 release that will be supporting these new capabilities.

If you haven’t heard the news, the next major Flash Player upgrade from Adobe will include an extensive 3D API that will support direct paths to OpenGL and DirectX-based 3D rendering on the GPU, as well as a new software 3D renderer fallback that will aim to provide the vast majority of computers with fast, reliable, 3D rendering in Flash. Armed with “Molehill” (the codename for these new 3D APIs) performance is set to increase to around 1000 times what can be squeezed out of the current Flash Player. Flash game makers, designers, and developers will finally have the option to use console-quality 3D graphics in their 3D Flash creations.

A large number of the Away3D Team have been working closely with Adobe to create an easy upgrade path for the Away3D engine, providing the same easy to use Away3D framework at a high level, but plugging directly into the exposed hardware APIs at a low level. A recording of our Max session New 3D features for Flash (which was jointly shared by myself & Richard Olsson, alongside fellow 3D coder Anton Volkov from Alternativa) can be found at http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2010-develop/new-3d-features-for-flash/ or by clicking the link below.

The presentation shows some amazing demos running realtime accelerated 3D from inside the Flash Player, with the help of our 4.0 prerelease build. The public beta of the new Flash Player is planned for release in the first half of 2011, and will be complemented by a public release of the Away3D 4.0 engine, enabling the Away3D community to start developing faster, smoother and less processor-hungry 3D Flash content as soon as the capabilities are available.

I’m also pleased to announce that we have been offered an opportunity to present content from our Away3D Max session at the upcoming AUG XL conference in Amsterdam on November 17th. This time I will be joined on stage by another key Away3D developer in the new engine upgrade – the extremely hardworking & talented David Lenaerts.

If you can’t wait for the pres (or the public beta) to get a glimpse of the 3D possibilities unfolding, be sure to check out the high-quality videos below of two current Away3D 4.0 demos.