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.

One of the cool new features introduced in the recent Flash Player 11.2 release is the ability to lock the mouse when in fullscreen mode. What this allows is a sort of ‘infinite scroll’ effect where the mouse movement directly controls the application, rather than having to rely on the mouse cursor position.

To demonstrate this I’ve added a mouselock feature to a new Away3D demo that allows you to fly around a 3D globe using the traditional click n’ drag approach. If you enter fullscreen by hitting the spacebar, you switch into being able to control the rotation of the camera simply by moving the mouse, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a much more enjoyable experience and frees up mouse clicks for whatever else your application might require.

Of course, the construction of this demo has been about more than just mouselock. I wanted to create a convincing globe simulation using real data and so searched through as many online resources as I could find. The best resource that eventually turned up was from a fantastic NASA archive called Visible Earth. The Blue Marble category is where most of the earth textures come from, although some tweaking was necessary in Photoshop to achieve a slightly more realistic end result.

When creating an earth simulation, a lot of enjoyment seems to come from rendering the perfect sunset from space. This has many nuances such as Fresnel refraction from the water surface, a band of light forming along the horizon due to atmospheric aberration, visible relief of mountain ranges, artificial lighting from towns and cities on the ground… the list goes on and on. In achieving some of these effects I’ve actually added a few new features to the Away3D material classes, which will soon be available for use on our dev branch – check them out if you’re interested.

Because of the wide range of rendering approaches that have ended up being covered by this little experiment, I’ve decided to include a step-by-step walkthrough of the construction process – a little look behind the tricks techniques used here, as part of my upcoming Away3D training session at BTPlay. The conference is now only a couple of weeks away and something I’m really looking forward to as it will be my first Away3D training session for over a year. So much has happened since then, its sometimes hard to remember what life was like before Stage3D…

If you’re interested in finding out more on mouselock, you can learn how to implement this and other new 11.2 features over at Tom Krcha’s blog in the following article: http://www.flashrealtime.com/mouselock-right-click-middle-click-in-flash-player-11-2/

I’m pleased to announce a brand new Away3D training workshop that will be taking place on the 27th April at the Beyond Tellerrand – Play! conference in Cologne, Germany. The conference spans 4 days from April 24th – 27th, and has a great variety of speakers talking about code, creativity and inspiration.

The workshop I’ll be giving is called Stepping into the 3rd Dimension, and will cover initial setup and creation of an interactive 3D scene using the latest Away3D 4.0 APIs and accelerated Stage3D capabilities of Flash 11. We will cover interaction, animation and the various optimisation techniques for dealing with Stage3D content, as well as some cool stuff that can be done with accompanying libraries that leverage Away3D’s rendering, such as Augmented Reality and Physics.

The entire cost of the day-long workshop is 350 euros, and full details along with registration links can be found on the Beyond Tellerrand workshops page. Hope you can make it!

Well, what can i say? The impossible has happened and we have managed to actually get a beta build of Away3D 4.0 out the door. Hallelujah!

For those of you who waited, our apologies and thanks in equal measure. While work is by no means done, this milestone puts things back on track for future updates, of which we are expecting many. For a description of just some of the changes made in this release, please read the full article over at http://away3d.com/comments/away3d_4.0_beta_released

There are a few of the usual links to dish out – firstly the following github repos have now has their master branches updated and tagged to 4.0.0 beta:

https://github.com/away3d/away3d-core-fp11

https://github.com/away3d/away3d-examples-fp11

Then there is the updated livedocs page which will now reside at the linksafe address of http://www.away3d.com/livedocs/away3d/4.0 (all older urls will simple redirect here)

And finally, there is the download page for those who prefer their libraries zipped and / or swc’d: http://www.away3d.com/download

While we are still working on new examples and tutorials, many of the older ones have been ported to the beta codebase, tidied up and released as source downloads which you can access by clicking any of the images above. If you like the look of an example and want to see the source, simply use the right click (yes, thats back too) and select “View Source” from the menu. All new code examples  will eventually find their way onto github after some tidying up – if you have a code demo of your own that you would like to consider adding to github or are thinking of creating one that you’d be interested in open sourcing then please do get in touch!

The next few weeks are going to be a blur as far as Away3D activities are concerned, and we will be updating everyone soon on what to expect next from the team. As usual, feedback is welcome!

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!

Next week both myself and Richard Olsson from the Away3D team will be heading to New York to speak at the second annual Flash and the City conference. While its great to catch up with old friends, it’ll also be a chance to meet some news ones as New York is a place neither Richard or I have spoken at before. We’ll actually be doing separate talks – I’ll be presenting my Simulating the Real piece and Richard will be covering more practical aspects of the new Away3D tools being built for 4.0 with a talk entitled Flash – will it Blend?

FATC is yet another Flash conference that covers a range of subjects beyond simply the Flash variety, and there is a strong speaker lineup including Lee Brimelow, Ryan Stewart, Keith Peters, John Lindquist, Ben Stucki, Bartek Drozdz and Stacey Mulcahy to name but a few. I haven’t been back to New York in a while so it’s certainly an exciting prospect for me – looking forward to seeing you all! The most up-to-date information on the conference can be found by following the FATC blog at http://blog.flashandthecity.com/2011.

Being a little slow of the mark with my promotion this time around (apologies Shawn!) i thought it would be a good idea to do something of a write-up for the recent FITC Toronto conference by way of compensation. As this was my second time presenting Simulating the Real, i actually had a chance to see some of the other presentations and take in a bit of conference atmosphere in place of the usual mad rush to finish slides.

The conference venue itself was a divvied-up nightclub with a rabbit-warren of corridors and rooms and some fairly impressive looking murals & decor on the walls. It did feel quite cocooned from the outside world, which was no bad thing considering the outside world for the duration of the conference decided to do a very good impression of a typical British summer. The slightly gaudy surroundings if anything added to the feeling of detachment, and once inside the WiFi did its bit to assist with a sporadic connection speed. But in many ways this didn’t really matter, and I was more than cheered up by the goodies we got on arrival which included a selection of sweets you could actually eat! I can’t remember the last time I had a candy necklace…

As a kick-off to the event, we were treated to the now legendary MK12 opening titles sequence, which used a 50′s drive-in theater style to get across some kind of unholy underlying pop-corn themed blood-lust. Well that was my interpretation anyway – make you own judgment below.

(note to vimeo – stop making your movie player so hard to embed in wordpress blogs!)

The first presentation i saw was Veronique Brossier’s Video Tapestry – the application of which i had first witnessed at Adobe Max last year. It focuses on the idea that a video timeline control can take on key images of the points in the film they represent, and i really hope we end up seeing this in some sort of Adobe component in future as the resulting application provides a much more intuitive navigation method than traditional controls. Rather than sticking to a standard film-strip of screenshots, the tapestry approach allows blending between images to create a seamless transition between scenes, adding to the overall appeal. Another trick is to allow for realtime temporal zooming, which looks frankly amazing the first time you see it. Veronique is author of the recently published book Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR, and the finale in her talk was a demonstration of the video tapestry application running seamlessly in AIR on a Samsung Galaxy Tab. You can view more on the Video Tapestry effect by watching this Adobe Labs Video that summarises the key ingredients of the technology.

Next was the Adobe Keynote, which this year has been uploaded to Adobe TV and can be veiwed in its entirety here. Things kicked off with David Wadhwani talking about Flash’s past & present covering fairly run-of-the-mill ground (ie. Flash has gone from animation tool to Enterprise runtime application etc etc). All the usual culprits such as video and games-based Flash applications were present, but it felt that at least some of the more wild claims were for effect more than accuracy (I think the quote “Flash has inspired web standards” is a little overstepping the mark frankly!) and possibly only done to dig one in the ribs of HTML5 advocates. While it is no doubt that Flash has been a trailblazer in many areas of the web, Adobe could potentially do with a more introspective look at Flash’s past glories… but what do i know.

After some cool hardware-accelerated demos showing Flash video playing seamlessly in 1080p first on the desktop and then on a Blackberry Playbook hooked up to a Hi-def TV (!), David then handed over to Richard Galvan with some new features in Flash Pro for publishing to mobile, Deepa Subramaniam with some suspiciously FDT-looking new features in Flash Builder (templates, anyone?), and finally Lee Brimelow talking about Molehill. Of course, i have to mention the 3D demo that Lee showcased (after declaring Away3D “A solid 3D engine with an easy to learn API” – Thanx Lee!) – the molehill-enabled game Delta Strike courtesy of our friends at Pro3games, running with the latest Away3D 4.0 alpha codebase. If you have the incubator build of Flash 11 installed on your machine, you can check out the demo for yourself here.

The following day, my presentation was unfortunately the main distraction of the morning, complemented by some hurried last minute changes to get a selection of fur demos into the talk after seeing the state of the walls in my room. These were a recent set of experiments produced by one of our core team members Greg Caldwell, and you can find an online preview here. The effects shown was first pioneered by a PS2 game Shadow of the Colossus, and it is interesting to think that soon over 90% of web users will have a PS2-like 3D engine at their disposal, courtesy of the Flash 11 Molehill API. I will be posting an online version of my presentation slides hopefully within the next week for anyone who is interested in actually following the Shallow Water Equation walkthrough to its conclusion – its not for everyone and i feel now that if I’d honestly given it the time it deserved we’d have all been there for another hour! At least the ridiculously complex-looking final equation got a laugh, even if i didn’t complete what I’d set out to do.

As a nice way to wind down after a frenetic morning, I got a chance to catch Tali Krakowsky and Branden Hall’s Bloom talk, which fittingly featured a series of hippy-trippy animated mural installations. Branden seems to make a habit of creating design tools with which animators and artists can create beautiful interactive pieces, and the Bloom project appeared to be no different – aside from the setting, which in this case turned out to be huge billboards in LA Plaza. From that to the contrastingly sterile world of lightcycles and blue skintight suits, TRON GFX by Bradley Munkowitz provided an incredible insight into the process behind film effects production. I have to say I’m a sucker for any kind of ‘behind the scenes’ retrospective of a film, but there were some great moments in Bradley’s pres that provided more than just a glimpse of the creative thought process behind certain scenes – in particular the ‘ISO brain-surgery’ scene where Jeff Bridges does his obligatory stoner impression.

The final day started a little slow for me as i had some catching up to do at work, but I managed to make it down to see Lee Brimelow’s Don’t Hate the Player – a snapshot of what is currently being done across platforms with the Flash Player, and where things are going. There are some truly exciting times ahead with the whole approach Adobe is taking to multiscreening, and i sincerely hope they continue down this path as one of the most positive outcomes we can expect for the Flash Platform in the short term is in its cross-platform gaming potential. Lee demoed several nicely done Flash games on Android and iOS platforms, as well as yet another Away3D demo – this time the preview from the Jiglibflash team of their implementation of the Bullet physics engine in Molehill. Expect to hear more on that in the coming weeks…

I also got a chance to drop in on Seb’s What the Flux talk, in which he goes through the various reasons why Flash hasn’t always had the best press in the web world, and how the anti-Flash brigade have some valid points on how the web is evolving. Its a difficult subject to get across, certainly, but Seb’s dry-witted performance gives the whole thing an energy beyond its subject matter, while keeping to the main points of the talk – a general consensus that Flash is not the last word in web development! The pre-recorded interviews were especially great (although Jer Thorp looked like he was wrapped inside a bin liner for some reason) and the ‘Flashy Fortunes’ gameshow played out halfway through the session is an inspired piece – one that gets the relevant information across in a truly engaging way. I think if Seb ever gets tired of the world of web, he has another career as a gameshow host waiting in the wings…

Overall, the FITC hometown experience was a pretty interesting affair  – a huge crowd of eager creatives and a collection of great speakers made it pretty special, and it was great to see everyone involved once more. Cheers to Shawn and Lisa for the show & hospitality, cheers to Adobe for buying us Gyros (with chips!), cheers to the other speakers for being awesome, and cheers to the attendees for making me feel so welcome! Reboot next year

Well, it was going to happen sooner or later, but i think most of us weren’t necessarily expecting it to happen today!

Earlier today at the Flash Gaming Summit keynote, Adobe announced its incubator program for the current Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 builds, which gives public access to the new features of Flash 11 as they are developed, including the current state of the GPU-accelerated Molehill APIs. After the announcement, Away3D 4.0 Alpha (codename Broomstick) was released on away3d.com, with all code and examples uploaded to the Away3D googlecode svn and mirrored source repositories appearing on Github. The Away3D Team have been  working very hard to get to this point, and all credit must go to them for the incredible job already done on the engine.

The above video shows one of the code demos (ShallowWaterDemo) published in the example sources in action. In order to compile and run these sources you will need to follow the instructions on setting up your development environment on the Adobe Labs Wiki for the Flash Player Incubator release. You can see this and a variety of other demos running live over at http://away3d.com/away3d-4-0-alpha-release-broomstick.

It is important to stress that at this point, both the Flash Player Incubator release and Away3D 4.0 framework are in an alpha state and are therefore only to be used for prototyping and demonstration purposes. However, with the Incubator program, Adobe have opened the door wide for user testing and feedback on the planned features of the next Flash Player, which should ultimately lead to a better developed, more stable release. So cheers go to Thibault Imbert and everyone involved in the Incubator program at Adobe!

More updates on Away3D 4.0 will follow on away3d.com and the Away3D google group in the coming weeks, so be sure to keep an eye out for new demos & resources.