After 4-5 months of twiddle it payed off and we won again at Assembly. You can checkout the outcome in realtime by clicking the picture or view it in HD at Youtube. Here’s also the link to the info file and link to pouet of course.

As I mentioned earlier I invited David Lenaerts to help with the demo. All those fancy Away3dLite stuff with shadows and reflections came by his hands. Awesome!

I also compiled the whole shit through Joa Ebert’s Apparat. It did speed up it a bit.

I also had a presentation at Assembly. I talked about my flash art and introduced the evoTinyEngine, evoCunningParticleEngine and evoSync-tool. I haven’t found the recording of the speech yet but here are some of the links I had there.

– evoCunningParticleEngine at googlecode
– evoTinyEngine at googlecode
– download the evoSync air app

You can also download the presentation in pdf format.

Then the bad news. I had an accident last Friday. I fall down from the fence and my wedding ring got stuck at the top of the fence.
The ring peel off all the skin, muscles and stuff out of my finger. The main tragedy about it was that it also ruined my fingers blood vessels and the finger had to be amputated. So I won’t be coding new experiments for a while now I guess. I also need to learn how to type fast with 9 fingers. I will recover eventually, but it’ll take some time and hard work.

I’ll post more info about the particle engine later when it won’t hurt so much to type.

p.s. We also did this little demo with Jalava to show that 4k intro can be done with Flash. It’s not too fancy but it proofs the concept :)

Evoflash has released products at Assembly every year since 2006. Our score has been “great success” so to speak. 1st 06, 1st 07, 1st 08, 3rd and 2nd 09. This gives us a pleasant ground to move on. We don’t have to “win” anymore. We can experiment a lot and give more space for design.

We gave us a huge goal this year to produce three demos and I can say for sure that there will be at least one! It has always been a bit shame that flash demos are lacking competition. I started a crusade this year when Peter Nitsch asked me to help him with the blockparty invitation intro. I introduced him the evoTinyEngine and everything went really smoothly. It’s easy to work with such a talented person.

This experiment gave me certainty that this is the right way to introduce demo making to new people. The scene of flash experimentalists is huge and I have always find it odd that these guys won’t release demos. I’ve had a conversations with skilled people who would like to do a demos but are hesitating for some reason. Maybe it’s the respect they give to PC demo coders and the whole scene. Maybe they feel that they would ruin it?

The demoscene does not equal to PC-demoscene. As Wikipedia so nicely put’s it:

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer. The main goal of a demo is to show off programming, artistic, and musical skills.

The platform can and should be what ever. The point is to show what you can do with your skills on that platform. It can be Amiga, modern PC, Android mobile, your mothers washing machine or Flash player inside browser.

For this years Assembly Real wild demo I invited David Lenaerts to help me with the demo. I’m hoping that this way he’ll get an easy push inside the rabbit hole of demoscene. I’ve also been drinking around Europe (=ones in Amsterdam…) and challenging people to do a demo. (=I asked Ralph Hauwert ones…)

It’s a big job to create a 4 minutes demo. It takes a lot of code, designing and time. The evoTinyEngine is build to help. I’ve also created a new tool: evoSync. Which is a synchronisation tool made with Adobe Air. If everything goes well I’ll give a speech at Assembly and show how to use these tools. I’ll also share as opensource the latest versions of evoTinyEngine, evoSync and evoCunningParticleEngine after that weekend.

There is still plenty of time to create a demo. So why not?

Coding demos is all about having fun. It’s a hobby and therefor it should be as pleasant as possible.

Demo is a combination of frameworks, effects, graphics and sound. Handling all of that data isn’t an easy task. It can turn into a very neglectful pile of code and in worst scenario list of foolish performance costly if-statements.

When coding a demo the main focus is always on effects. That’s what you wanna do. When the right moment comes you want to get straight to the business. This often leads to situation where you just create a class, setup assets and run things on your EnterFrame event. You’ll end up with pile of classes that have a lot of similarities and it’s a pain in to ass to construct a demo from them. You’ll end up coding everything twice or you just realize that it’s not worth it and play the “no demo this year”-card.

My opensource demo engine evoTinyEngine is designed to serve two goals:
Maximum performance and effect creation efficiency.

It has three elements: Assets, Engine and Modifiers.

Idea is that you create Modifiers that use stuff from Assets to draw into a shared bitmapdata. The engine manages the Modifiers by initializing, calling their render method, providing essential data like time and dispose Modifiers when they are no longer needed. All this happens in a periods of 16th note beats.

This way you separate sequencing from effect creation. You just create effects(=Modifiers) and when the time comes for building them all together it’s easy and another fun phase of demo creation. You can run multiple Modifiers at the same time and they can have four roles:

1. preprocessing // first render
2. effect // second render
3. postprocessing // third
4. overlay // last

I rarely use the preprocessing. It’s there for to give possibility to stack two main effects together in desired order. Effect is an effect and postprocessing comes after that. Those can be radial blurs, blooms or some distortion effects, what ever. Overlay is for overlay graphics or texts that you don’t want to be affected by postprocessing.

Read this pdf to get more detailed information.

Here’s the hello world code:

It has been used in Severity of Grey and Blockparty 2010 invtro. Happy coding.

All the following stuff is under this completely open license.

These sources consist four different parts:
– EvoTinyEngine
– Evo3d
– EvoTween
– SoG Demo

None of these are documented so I have created this little pdf to clarify the concept of demoengine used in this demo.
Read the rest of this entry »

It was ranked second. What a gargantuan surprise for us.
quote Jalava: “Real confusion was: Why did everyone vote our prod in 64k :) It really didn’t deserve the place from my point of view. I mainly coded it for the giggles :)”

Well it’s understandable that it was appreciated as a milestone (first flash 64k) , but this rank was way too much. It wasn’t that good intro. We could do so much better. You could do better. And you should try to do better. Please come on create something better! The bar is not set too high, _yet_.

This what it’s all about. Beat us so we can beat you and we all get more skills. I’m eagerly hoping to see some entries next year made with flash in Real Wild or even in 64k.

Sources and plaaplaa’s coming later.

We split the task’s with Jalava between Real wild and 64k since Minomus created supreme music for both. We also didn’t want to step on each others toes on design issues.

Jalava created an excellent soundsynth with all kinds of effects and filters. You should focus on the details of the sound when it’s released. So he took the 64k task and the real wild was for me.

I have spent a lot of time creating this evo3d and wanted to build a proper showcase for it. I also created a very small but fast demo engine and tiny tweener that both benefits the performance of linked lists. Unfortunately Jalava won’t use them on 64k and only little part of the evo3d. So completely waste of time from me? -Well not entirely.

No matter if they are small in bytes, they are strong in performance and in memory usage. So this years real wild is build with them. I respect all the open source projects out there, but it’s great to have all the code in demo home made. It also gives more possibilities when I can tune the library the way I need.

The real wild is almost done. Only little adjust here and there. So make sure you check it out on next weekend.
I also publish all the sources after the compo or at least in a week from that.

The biggest Demoscene party is approaching again. The Assembly is held 6.-9. of August.

Traditionally we have took a part on Flash compo, Browser compo or Real wild compo depending on what the organizers decide to call it (‘the compo that flashdemos should be post’).

EvoFlash has won those compos in three years in a row and we decided that it’s time to turn bar more higher. I personally think that the most appealing compo of all is the 64k and this year we are crazy enough to go for it!

At the moment we have a demoengine that is 4k 3.6k, 12k 3D engine and soundsynth+track in 20-30k.
So there’s still something like 20k for the actual demo. Let’s hope we can pull everything together and surprise the scene with our platform.

I’ll give all code (at least made by me) away after the compo.

You need latest flash player to view these. (installation)

Just wanted to report that now I have a camera. :)

—— updated 5:55pm ——-
Here‘s an example where you can control the camera angle with your mouse.
Yeah, it’s a bit crappy, but proofs to mr. doob that it’s a valid camera :)

You need latest flash player to view these. (installation)

6 x 24×24 spheres and a sky. Each sphere is calculated. They all have same animated texture since the perlinoise+threshold eats too much performance. ~14000 polygons. If you get fps 30, like I do, then it means 420 000 polygons per second. I think I can do better then this…

Click on it to see polygons.

ohh and the size of the engine is now 4kb. (still very clear)

Lesson 1: Let the player do the work.
Lesson 2: linkedlist is the fastest method for looping and z-sort.

Next: Working camera and dynamic lights.