Flash on the Beach 2008 – Wednesday

Keith Peters

Some interesting insights into Inverse Kinematics. I already knew most of it after a game I did for Disney’s Wall-E movie.
I’m looking forward to the new book he’s working on which will deal with the more advanced stuff you can do in AS3 in relationship to games.
Also pointed out a good article on Gamasutra about advanced character physics.

Andre Michelle

I was blown away by his session last year. I mean come on, creating sounds in Flash using code?!? So cool. I love it when he asks ‘could you put music a bit louder please?’. He does this at the start of every one of his sessions. Usually followed by a little laugh.
What more to add to this guy, he does wicked stuff with sounds in Flash. Couple interesting links:

Koen De Weggheleire

This started off with the presenter struggling with his name ;-) . I can’t blame him if you’re English. Interesting insight is that Koen seems to be dating Angelina Jolie.
Koen showed us how to use filters like the colormatrix, convolution and colortransform. I knew most of it but it was good to see it explained again. Especially the transformation matrix. Weird, just looking at my notes and the Adobe site, I think Koen swapped the tx and ty values with the u and v values.

Mario Klingemann

Ok enough with the fun stuff, this is serious business. Just looking at my notepad, I have about 5 sheets of A5 paper with scribbles from this session. Mario basically explained how to build your own 2d barcode / QR Code reader. An example is the Kaywa Reader. Let’s see if I can make sense of my scribbles.

The three main things to use are: getPixel, threshold and histogram. The threshold basically should work in a way that it makes every pixel above a threshold white and below it black.

To extract all the blobs from the image we use Floodfill. In 3 steps, floodfill, getcolorboundsrect, threshold. Then delete it from image (fill with white).

Once all data is somewhat extracted we start looking at it to find the 3 main squares. Top left, top right and bottom left.

Then comes a bit which was quite hard to pen down. Basicaly you paint a radial gradient where center of square is. Use getPixel to check distance to that square. This is called a Voronoi Diagram. To find the closest, move towards light.

Then you have to find the smaller sqaure in the bottom right. Look for black dot in white area. Then look at the dotted lines that run from each of the corners to another corner. They are called timedots. This way you can find the scale of the grid.

Use projective mappings for image warping. This is useful as no-one keeps the image at a perfect angle. Paul Heckbert is the man who came up with this algorithm.

Ok once you’ve got your list of black and white dots into flash you can do 2 things. Compare them to a set of predefined patterns and pick the closest match. Or you can build an actual QR code reader. The source is available from sourceforge.

Breathe in, breathe out…

Jonathan Harris

This was an interesting one. Excellent pick to end this conference with. It really left you thinking. His message to the Flash community was that there are a lot of great people in the Flash world. Very technically advanced stuff is coming from the Flash community. So we speak the language well. BUT, and that was a big but, there haven’t been any real masterpieces. People can speak the language really well but we need to figure out what it is that we want to say.

I might not have put it down in the complete right way but I can certainly see where he going with it.

A couple phrases to keep in mind next time I create something:

  • Can it make someone gasp or cry?
  • Does it truly represent our time?
  • Does it say something that has never been said before?
  • Personal is powerful.
  • Only fools get trapped by tools.

Tags: , , ,

Sunday, June 7th, 2009 Flash

Leave a Reply

Blogroll