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 Rather then writing the summary of the FOTB conference experience, as I did the last time, from 2 year ago, this year I decided to write some suggestions, or a wish list of the things I’d like to hear about, and perhaps as well, things I don’t want to hear about.

Perhaps now could be the time the speakers (and organizers) are starting to consider the content of the next Flash on the Beach conference in Brighton..

First I need to say, I do love FOTB. I’ve been to the all of them so far (apart from the very first one) and always stayed throughout complete duration of the conference, which hopefully gives me the right to speak about it from the experience ..

So, here are my suggestions:

More advanced level talks!

Let’s consider the target groups, for a sec here.. I think it’s safe to assume, 70-80% of FOTB visitors are professional flash/flex dudes. Amateurs with little interest in this technology would hardly invest  in rather steep admission price (around 1000 EUR), price of the hotel accommodation for 3 days plus price of transportation , and journey hundreds of kilometers from all around Europe… Yet for such a large group there seems to be a very few sessions aimed at upper intermediate - advanced level.

While it’s fairly easy to get your hands on beginners level video tutorials, Lee Brimelow’s gotoAndLearn website is an excellent source, there’s Lynda.com and Total Training of course, that is not the case with the more advanced stuff.

Anybody can find a tutorial on how to make a rotating cube in PV3D, but there are very few resources on how to integrate papervision in flex to make a custom transitions for example..

FOTB should be a platform for flash gurus to come and share this kind of advanced knowledge…

More focused skill level sessions!

When you looked at the FTOB schedule there are sessions with levels marked as Level : Beginner - Intermediate - Advanced. I have been to quite a lot of those. Unfortunately; what happens there is a speaker starting with the beginner stuff and by the time he gets to the juicy bits everyone came to hear about, he runs out of time. In better cases, they would have about 10 minutes left to cover it, so they would rush through it with hectic tempo, barely scratching the surface.

I am not saying there shouldn’t be a basic level sessions. Last year for example, I had only a vague idea about Red, so the level of the session was perfect for me. This year, if I went to the same session, it would be a wasted time.

I am saying there should be session DEDICATED to a certain skill level. Not trying to cover all skill levels within the breadth of a session. That’s way too short time!

Have a webspace for sessions follow-up

I would suggest that on the official FOTB website, under the session description, would be a place to post comments, or questions for the speakers about the session, and to have a space for speakers to upload a source files. Although after speaker finished his session there’s usually a little space for Q&A what often happens is that speakers barely manage to finish on time so there’s actually a very little time afterwards. Also sometimes speakers promise to upload a source files on their blogs, but more then often they forget to do so…

Some topic suggestions :

Open source packages

We all know and heard about PV3D of course, but there are other interesting projects that deserve an introduction: e.g: FlexLib, AS3Lib, Box2D…, would be interesting if somebody did a brief overview of about 6-10 of the most accomplished open source flash projects , that have been developed for some time now, and are being used by an increasingly larger group of developers.

AS3 Frameworks

Again some top level overview of frameworks, i.e: Pure MVC , Cairngorm, Prana, Mate…their strengths and weaknesses, examples of usage and what their are most suitable for..

OTHERS

- Gumbo, of course, practical sessions for all levels, this would include nuts and bolts of FXG + examples..

- Advanced session about the new Flash plugin 10  text engine (Advanced text layout)

- Advanced session dedicated to new Flash plugin 10 sound capabilities.

- Air 2.0  (I’m hopping by the time of FOTB there will be at least demo version..)

- Advanced practical session on Flash Collaboration Service  (Cocomo)

- Advanced session on Alchemy

- Advanced session on how to use Pixel bender for things other than custom effect (i.e. sound, hyperthreading, 3D computations etc..)

I’ve decided to share a bunch of flash games I build for various clients over the past few years. Most of these aren’t online anymore, and I thought it wold be a shame if they all went to waste : ) (more…)

In keeping with the space theme from my previous post (and not wanted to leave Starfield entirely empty) here’s another papervision parametric 3D object/component : Asteroid.  Similarly to Starfield, asteroid is textured with pragmatically generated texture, so no need to look for images, it has configurable surface deformation as well and it’s default form it can be simply created and placed in your 3D scene with this only line of code : scene.addChild(new Asteroid());

(more…)

Some PV3D sessions at Flash on the Beach inspired me to play with Papervision3D again and I sort of went for the “space” theme. And there’s certainly no space without stars! (more…)

I’ve been working for couple of weeks now on a large Flex 3 based project at the company I work for. It’s a multi-user  publishing system for various flash based creative types, that aids and alleviates the whole creative from concept creation through approval cycles to deployment on various platforms.

In this project I had a page that contained a tab navigator with a custom editors inside of it. It all worked fine, before I needed to make sure the data on the page is saved before going onto another tab. To make this work I had to essentialy force tab navigator to cancel select child action after user click on the other tab and the data on the current weren’t saved.

This proved to be a problem. (more…)

Flash (in AS2) has one unpleasant habit. Interactive handlers (i.e “onRollover”, “onRollOut” , “onRelease” etc..) are being canceled as soon as you place a movie clip on the top of it with at least one interactive mouse handler defined.

Typical situation is a rollover pop up that needs to have some buttons on it. As soon as you rollOver those buttons, onRollOut event is triggered on the pop up, even though you still physically over it with your mouse.

There are of course different workarounds for this, but generally it’s a pain to code around this unfortunate behaviour.

AS3 doesn’t have this problem fortunately, but for the projects that still needs to be made in AS2 for whatever reason I created a MCEvents2Decorator class. (more…)

One one side you have euphoria of what’s POSSIBLE and on the other side what is REALISTICALLY usable. An all important parameter is the width of the gap between these two sides. After some time spent playing with PV3D I reallised just how deep this gap is.

I found out, that unless you cheat ( a lot ) , there’s no way, you can do a 3D that’s even close to a todays CGI  standard. Among other problems, there’s a very low limit to number of fully shaded (goraud/phong) triangles you can have in a 3D scene before you send you CPU usage soaring.

Notice that even quite big names pv3d based sites (Absolut, Canon, Sony) although using very very, simple geometry aren’t quite smooth on even most powerful PCs. Even on a quad core intel machines you can notice a reaction lag, that distorts the smooth interactivity experience. On a below average machines this kind of sites can quickly become unusable. (more…)

With flv videos becoming essentially THE video format for the web, there are many flv players, components to choose from so why bother with this one ?

It’s not your typical feature rich component, all it does is plays the flv file, you can pause/resume, mute on/off , shows you playback and loading progress and you can seek by dragging the seek button. Which I found is 95% of functionality you need anyway.

This player has originally been written for flash banners, I called it VideoPlayerLite, had no buttons and byte size was the most import criteria. This is extended version of the lite version , which has seek functionality and I added buttons. It is still pretty lightweight, code itself has 3.7 kB with buttons and bars has 4.3 kB. (more…)

One of the sessions at Flash on the Beach got me interested into playing with particles. Seb Lee  showed us an example of a using particles to explode a skeleton. You clicked on a skeleton and bones went flying. The only problem was, you had to manually break up the skeleton into a bunch of movie clips first and placed them into the skeleton timeline. That got me thinking… There must be a way for Flash to do this programmaticaly. So I spend some time (and caffeine) and wrote a class capable of doing just that…

Above demo loads the titles of the blog entries from durej.com , breaks them apart and uses them as a particles. You can also roll over with your mouse to trigger particle animation. (more…)