fotb
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:
- Popforge code.
- Musicdsp.org.
- The crazy sound tool on Hobnox.com.
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.
Flash on the Beach 2008 – Tuesday
Aral Balkan
Man than guy has some energy at 9 in the morning 
. Interesting talk about that you should just make and share more. This is very true for me, there are too many occasions where I thought of a cool idea and started coding it. Then decided not to put it on my blog because it wasn’t finished enough.
Also interesting one was that you should just put your idea out there. So others can comment on it and also because other people now know about it you will have to complete it.
- Scratch software from MIT that allows you to program in a very visual way. Simple but effective. I like it.
Jeremy Thorp
This session was about showing and approaching very complex stuff in a simple way. Also talked about Agent Oriented Programming. Instead of creating relatively dumb objects, he gave certain agents the possibility to take decision on their own. A simple example of this is the Flocking behavior. Where all the rules are quite simple but each bird can make its own decisions on what to do.
Another example was the ages old Conway’s game of life. I think every programmer should have programmed one in his/her lifetime .
Another interesting point was the ‘fitness landscape’. Great way to show that even though you think you found the best solution, there might be a better one.
Grant Skinner
Grant Skinner showed a couple interesting points that every developer should know. The main ones for me were:
- You must learn the rules before you can break them.
- Learn about every API. Not learn to use every API. Just learn enough so you know what’s possible.
- Spiking. Just try bits of code.
- Great way to debug: hit TAB + SPACE repeatedly.
- Write handy stuff for your designers/developers to use in Flash using JSFL. Adobe Link & Actionscript.org link.
- Have a look at a decent code editor like FDT or FLex builder.
After this was the Jam Session which was ace. Loved the performance art style coding in 10 minutes with Drum n Bass 
Hoss Gifford
Although it was an interesting session I think I enjoyed his session from last year more. Still couple interesting things.
- Ecotonoha. Interesting way of displaying messages that people have send.
- If you allow people to create something on your website, don’t start them off with an empty canvas.
I think that is definitely a good point. People sometimes don’t know where to start and it would be good to kick start their creative process. - Show the process of creation, not just the end result. This creates a narrative.
One of his examples was a drawing tool that didn’t just show the end result but the exact time line how people had drawn their pictures. This allowed the user to create a story. Simple but clever. - Design the experience not the user interface.
Small difference in approach could make a huge difference in the user experience.
After all of this I went to the session by Nando Costa and after diner to the GMUNK session. Both good.