One day a month ago when I was supposed to start building a particle engine to new Away3D Molehill my mind started to drift into abstract directions. This often happens to me when I’m in situation where I ‘have to’ do something. It can be cleaning the house, traveling to somewhere or in this case where current work doesn’t instantly take wind under it’s wings. Don’t get my wrong I’m still motivated to create that particle engine. It’s just that chemicals and synapses in our brains takes their own tracks producing distractions all the time. I think we should always follow this animal intuition. (in case it doesn’t cause harm to no-one)

Anyway…

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I wanted to post these ‘oldies’ to get them into my gallery. They are raytraced balls and some slimy turds in 1×1 pixels with decent framerate. I used Pixel Bender to create them. I haven’t done much experimenting because of two reasons.

1. I’ve been coding a lot of Objective-C lately. It felt easier to return coding with whole different language. It’s still sometimes a bit frustrating to code AS3. I do typos for example with ‘<>‘-marks and with some sort-cuts but when it comes to iPhone SDK I learned new way of typing. I also want to point out that the development tools of Apple are excellent. I should get my first App out very soon.

2. I joined the Away3D group to help them with new extremely secret project. I have nothing more to say about that yet :)

Lastly here are few Pixel Bender tricks for you:

How to create a loop in Pixel Bender?
– With help of clever brains of @MrKishi = http://www.simppa.fi/source/LoopMacros2.pbk

How to make your #define’s readable?
- with “\”-mark

And apparently you can do like this:

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?

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

Works best in a bit darker room.

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.