September 2009
Flash on the Beach 2009
Fortsetzung, Teil 4
Once again Brighton was a bit different from what I expected. So much for typical English rainy weather, as this years Flash on the beach took place having bright sunshine and being sold out. The Dome balconies were opened to the attendees as well as John Davey invented the "3 minute wonders", a new session-format for the first time.
Monday morning started quite musically, having three Mariachi's getting the crowd in the right mood for the conference. Adobe's Keynote, presented by Mark Anders and Richard Galvan showed a few outstanding Flash10 code-examples which underlined the FlashPlayer10 performance. Beyond that they gave us a little sneak-preview on Flash Professional CS5 (codename "Viper"). One substantial feature is a better correlation of the FlashIDE and the FlashBuilder. So, prospectively you can create a FlashBuilder project from the export dialoge of the FlashIDE and vice versa.
Casual Game Architecture
Subsequent to the Keynote Keith Peters talked about game -setup, -structure and -architecture. He showed the possible usage of design-patterns and explained why typical models like the "game loop" aren't quite handy in case of Flash. At latest Keith shared his work on "Asobu" with the audience, a game-framework he's currently working on. If you ever programmed games by yourself you might not agree with all of Keith's basic approaches, but all in all this session was worthwhile to expand your horizon.
Inverse Kinematics
This topic sounds so promising becoming a new hype before the FlashPlayer10 was released last year, but somehow didn't hit me since then. Also you couldn't find much examples dealing with or even using that feature yet. So I was keen on seeing this talk. To put in a nutshell, Rich Shupe showed a lot of entertaining examples, but the essence I expected from it stayed out. You can´t setup or use Inverse Kinematics without the FlashIDE, meaning for example, you can't place bones "on the fly" via Actionscript – which declares the spare use of this interesting feature by now.
Day 1 – definitively the day of Joel Gethin Lewis
In the evening Joel Gethin Lewis showed in the "Inspired Session" really impressive work he'd done at his time at United Visual Artists. Outstanding: An interactive lightshow as part of Massive Attack's stage show, secondly a project called "Regent Street Christmas Lights", a festive street lightning concept which interactively reacts on people. Additional he presented projects he'd built with "openFrameworks". "Lights on" for example, an audiovisual performance developed for the opening of the Ars Electronica museum in Linz (Video). I'm pretty sure, after this session it's not only me who want's to take focus on working with "
Day 2 – 3 minute wonders
Actually I've to say that I'm unrestrainedly partial regarding to this session, which was perhaps down to the fact that I was one part of the twenty speakers. The idea was having twenty speakers in one hour, each one presenting his or her stuff within three minutes to the audience. Sounds impossible? Well, after a non-mentionable rehearsal on Sunday and a fabulous second rehearsal on Monday, it all ends up in a brilliant premiere on Tuesday. If we trust in attendees feedback this hour was a successful and very well varied experiment.
Btw., my talk was about Image Processing, triangulations and Flash10 native 3D, all packed up within a little Demo. For those of you who missed it for any reason, or maybe some of you even want to watch it again? Here you go: dasprinzip.com
Standing ovations for leaving the sandbox
On Monday evening I was, among others, sitting in the pub with Joa Ebert talking to him about his upcoming talk on Tuesday. I sayed-so: There will be a lack of space in your hall 'cause of the many attendees wanting to see your session. He disagreed. But on Tuesday the hall seems to burst at the seams despite the fact that Joa's topic is quite a technical one. Well, "leaving the sandbox" on the one hand brings closer several low-level Flash-Compiler optimization techniques, on the other hand Joa introduced tools like TDSI, REDUCER and lastly TAAS ("Three Address ActionScript") to the audience. And using TAAS is quite sneaky: It eliminates dead code, optimizes as well as improves your code so that up to 100 percent performance-boosts are possible (have a look at Joa's before/after examples. And one more thing! At the end of his presentation he compiled Java- and C# into a SWF. Truly a reason for standing ovations which Joa received from the audience. (Videos)
More than bending pixels
Image filtering, ShaderJobs, pure number crunching or mixing sound via Pixel Bender, Paul Burnett gave a good general view on applying Pixel Bender Shaders to Flash-projects. But honestly I've to say, there was nothing new for those who might have tried this tool by themselves before. Most examples Paul showed where released month ago and can be found online in several blogs, or are by now inherent part of Adobe's Pixel Bender showcase. So you could end up saying: "Nothing new, Paul!" But he ceded the last ten minutes of his session to David Lenaerts. And his presentation indeed was very sweeping as he displayed some Pixel Bender madness used as Material-Shader within away3D.
Day 2 ended in its on advanture
Joel Gethin Lewis did set the bar very high with his "Inspired Session" the day before, so Craig Swann, in my opinion, had problems to go one better, not meaning that it wasn't such a bad thing after all. Craig didn't show some of his experiments and code-snippets on stage, but showcased third-party experiments and documentations on how sound reacts on various surfaces for instance. He talked about several characterizing moments in his life, leading him to contribute his insights in his daily work. This session truly was kinda divisive. Some of the audience left the room early, other part of the audience was absolutely delighted. You really should see this talk forge yourself an opinion.
Surprise surprise – Day 3
The third day was the greatest, according to what the audience said. So let me summarize it from the perspective of a visitor who had to catch his flight way too early.
At the beginning Andre Michelle awakened the public with his sounds and extracts from the Audiotool, the Flash-based program he and his team is developing at Hobnox. Among all his well-known audio-experiments, like the ToneMatrix or the Karplus Strong Algorithm, which produces kinda guitarre like strings, he introduced Granular Synthesis. Very impressive and luckily available as video.
Afterwards, Mario Klingemann as often entertained the audience with his computer-generated tilings- and patterns, visualizations of primes and Cellular Automata experiments. As a result: Lot's of gorgeous and stunning patterns and visualisations. At the end Mario showed an encoding technique applied to an image of Mona Lisa, which allowed him to post the image within a 140 character short "twitter-tweet". Chapeau!
Finally Ralph Hauwert made quite a splash with his talk, showing numerous brilliant experiments and the like. As one of Papervision's core- developer Ralph dropped a bombshell saying he´ll quit his Papervision team membership.
He'll now focus on developing personal projects and ideas. And I think, as long as his results stay extraordinary like these three experiments we can expect a lot more remarkable work from Ralph in the future:
- flash-10-massive-amounts-of-3d-particles-with-alchemy-source-included
- fp10_shadetests/Test_1121_Faces.swf
- tinysidflash
Just another year
After such an amazing conference it's quite difficult to leave. The flair that this sold out Flash on the beach conference and Brighton bring along are rather unique, from my point of view. Honestly, you shouldn't miss this big spectacle. It's one of the conferences I surely will visit next year again!
Frank Reitberger
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