Another surprisingly beautiful day in Brighton.
Started the day with the “Elevator Pitches” session – 20 speakers all talking for 3 minutes each. A few that stood out to me to delve into later: zenbullets.com, a generative art blog with source code for download; swingpants.com, where we saw Jon Howard make 3 games in 3 minutes using Away3D and an undisclosed physics engine. ASAXB looked like it may be a useful way to bind .xml to .as classes and was one of the funnier pitches. Andrew Fitzgerald (aka desuade) gave a nice look at the partigen particle engine (though not the best examples were shown). Perhaps the most surprising presentation (at least to me) was from Bartek Drozdz of everydayflash. He showed how to build a 3D bowling game using Papervision3D and Jiglibflash physics engine. Sound familiar? Well, it was very reminiscent of this tutorial I did for the techlabs a couple months ago including using a timer to determine the end of each roll and the pin skin rotation to determine if they were down. Now, Drozdz is the genius who gave us as3dmod, so I’d really like to give the benefit of the doubt, but it’s a mighty big coincidence and I have to admit, I was more than a little ticked off during the pres [Just my own ego kicking in - check out the comments].
Next up was Grant Skinner’s presentation on code optimization. Of course Grant always has way too much good stuff to try to sum it up in a quick blog post, so keep an eye on gskinner.com/talks/ for all 100 slides of this fantastic session. Also be on the lookout for his performance testing framework and Chunker.as class for help with future apps.
From code optimization to bytecode optimization with Joa Ebert. Now, most of this talk went right over my head, but that didn’t make it any less amazing. Joa showed off some low level optimizing stuff he’s been experimenting with lately and blew us away when he showed a bitmap drawing app running at a respectable steady 60 frames per second to an optimized 510 FPS! For a finale he then whipped out his java and c# to .swf compilers. Freaking beautiful stuff.
Then came a great look at Pixel Bender from the Rubik Cube juggling Paul Burnett. Great tips and examples of not only image manipulation but sound and data massaging. He said he will post the source, so be sure to check out his blog for that useful material.
Finally came a presentation on (un)conventional web applications from Ireland’s own Contrast. I saw this presentation at FOWA in Dublin and it was pretty nice. At Flash on the Beach however, it seemed a little out of place. To say that the web is “moving towards multimedia” to a room full of Flash/Flex developers is a tad anachronistic. They did win over a few with the great quote “the html/javascript coders are bringing a knife and you guys are bringing a fucking flamethrower.”
Getting ready now for the inspirational session and really hoping tonight’s party is better than last night’s (where you couldn’t talk, move or breathe and I had to immediately drag my wife out)…
DISAPPOINTED! I was hoping to hear they made mention of you. And were impressed enough with your work to actually credit you. Perhaps a little digital “toilet papering” of his inbox is in order?!
oh yeah and what bothers ME the most is this:
“… I will show a new 3D Flash experiment made especially for FOTB…”
Really?!
Hi,
I just found your post, and first of all I am very sorry that you felt this way about my presentation. Let me assure you that it was not my intention, and also that I found out about your tutorial only at this moment.
However, a 3D bowling game is in no way an original idea – there are hundreds of them. Even in Flash, and even in JigLib: http://labs.blitzagency.com/?p=634 I think it is also a pretty natural idea of a simulation you’d want to make to show how a physics engine works. That was the reason I choose it.
Your tutorial is by no doubt very interesting and shows a good way to approach the same old problem: how to hit a number of object with a ball. However both points you mention above: determining if a pin is down by its rotation and using a timer are just the most obvious ways to solve such a problem, so please don’t assume that I needed to borrow this from anyone.
What I focused on instead was creating proper 3D shapes for the pins and, most importantly tweaking the physics so that when the ball hits the pins it looks and acts right.
I will publish the sources on my blog soon, along with the demo. I hope you will be able to appreciate this extra effort that I did put into making the simulation much more realistic.
Thanks
Bartek
Hey Bartek,
Thank you for the comment. As I pointed out in the post, with your talent, it hardly seemed likely you’d need to boost ideas from me – or anyone else for that matter. In retrospect, I think I was more upset with myself for not taking the initiative to attempt putting myself up there. Perhaps next year. I look forward to seeing the source you post and tweaks you added.
Thanks again,
d.
Hi,
I browsed your blog, and I think you are doing a great job, so you should give it a try next year absolutely!
On my side, I promise next time I will google much more in depth to check if anyone has been already doing the stuff I plan to present :)
Thanks
Bartek
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