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?

My sister just had her first child and I’m reading Darwin.

Your webcam in depth. Black at back white at front.

Works best in a bit darker room.

Desire of stability in the middle of vortex of change. Consider it absurd.

Sure I know it’s the self talking to me.

I’ve been coding Objective-C lately and less Flash. I have decided to learn more languages properly and the language of evil fruit company is one of those. I feel humble to be such a newbie, but at the same time I found new ideas for my AS3 coding patterns.

The constant of diverse is getting stronger and it’s quite obvious that in the future we need to know broader stack of techniques. Also we need to know these techniques deeper. For creating something ‘new’ we have to look even farther out of the box.

This is all because of the ever growing flood of information in this digital cosmos. Things are old at that very moment they where released. Our eyes glimmering we are producing piles of old crap.

It’s not depressing or even worrying. This is how it has always been. Things are again getting faster, broader and more diverse.

It’s the same Julia fractal animating under the hood that I created on last laboratory output. This time it’s rendered with 3d particles. I’ll post something else then particles next. I promise.

You may want to view it with flash player 10.1 beta 3 release :)

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.

I’m heading to FITC Amsterdam so if you’re there and recognize this happy fellow with pinacolada or this suspicious bloke with coconut please come to say hello. Would be nice to meet the scene a bit.

I’ve also done some coding and reason for no-output for few weeks is that some of the stuff will be included to a demo. I’m doing effects for it one more week or so. After that I’ll post a bunch of stuff. For those effects I did it again; written a new 3D engine.

This time it’s called evoFace3D. There are a lot of playing to do with that.

I don’t read tutorial books. For learning new I simply start building something and learn by try and fail –method. Because of my human brains when I’m enjoining I’m motivated and consequently learn easily.

I also get bored. Change must be constant and therefor I decided to shift the learning pattern when Mr. Rohit Shetty from Packt Publishing asked me to do a book review.
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