09.00-10.00 Richard Galvan
Flash now and in the future – keynote
10.15 – 11.15 Carlos Ulloa
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Carlos spoke about pv3d and work planning. He talked about how they are working on a race game in pv3d and what they have done to come to the ‘final’ result. I put final in quotes, because they are not done yet and what he was showing was a beta, impressive none the less.
He referred to a couple of techniques they used to create the race track and AI, which reminded me a lot of the time when I had my internship at VESC / BumbleBeast (a sim / game developer in the Netherlands) about 4 years ago now. He was talking about using splines (lines in a 3d world) to lay out the track and using them for the AI and positioning (replay) cameras.
The most important thing to remember from his talk is to have a look at game developer forums and blogs if you want to do gaming in flash. There is a lot of information on gaming out there. You won’t find complete code for you, but you can probably use the idea or port some C# to AS.
Site: carlosulloa.com
11.30 – 12.30 Dr. Woohoo
Transforming ideas to pixels to atoms
He’s done some cool stuff and likes hooking up tools with each other. He especially like hooking the whole Adobe CS Suite together, Flash with InDesign with PhotoShop, etc… He does this by making use of the ExtendScript ToolKit (ESTK) and the cs3.swc. ESTK features a Scriptlistener that should help you get on your way to get to learn the CS3 API by seeing what functions are being used to perform certain actions, i.e. duplicate a layer in PhotoShop.
He created an interesting tool (Patch panel) to get him colour palettes for Illustrator from images loaded in a swf.
Site: http://blog.drwoohoo.com/
References:
http://www.blurb.com/ (Publish your own books)
http://inthemod.com/inthemod.html (In The Mod is dedicated to understanding the color palettes and hidden relationships of (in)famous paintings)
13.30 – 14.30 Mark Anders
A Preview of Flex 4 and “Thermo”
We all know by now how thermo is going to make developer and designer’s lives better by making layout easily interchangeable. Not majorly interesting, but learned a couple of things.
The most important one FXG is cool! This is a layout (and layout only) description language for Flex 4 (codename Gumbo).
Site: http://www.andersblog.com/
References:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/FXG+1.0+Specification (FXG Standard)
14.45 – 15.45 Richard Lord
Creating particle effects with Flint
Particles ROCK!!! That’s basically all I have to say about it. I just want to go and play with this.
Some features:
-Â Â Â 2D and 3D particles
-Â Â Â Can easily handle 10-15K particles at one time
-Â Â Â PV3D and Away3D integration
Site: http://www.bigroom.co.uk/
References:
http://flintparticles.org/ (Flint)
16.00 – 17.00 Erik Natzke
Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play
Cool stuff by Erik Natzke! He’s taken about 2 years to develop a tool for him to paint using Flash. It is really amazing, you have to see it to believe it! Basically what he created is a 2D IK (Inver Kinematics) system to paint with.
So check some of his work:
-Â Â Â http://uk.youtube.com/user/eriknatzke
-Â Â Â http://www.flickr.com/photos/natzke/