Finished Flash training

Flash

Flash training is now complete Neil jenkins was a great lecturer. Enjoyed the last days of the training the most flash is a great package and its potential keeps growing.

Studying multimedia i find one thing the most scary and most unique fact about the industry it never stops moving. I gave up on flash about a year ago when a lot of people started complaining about it's accesibility problems, after reading the pas 78 i relised that yeah flash does not adhear to all standards within web design but aslong as you design other options if a user can not handle flash its fine. One thing i do wonder is it possible to create accesable games in flash for a person with bad sight i guess it is possible maybe you could create a 3d audio enviroment within flash using stero panning and welcome messages. That could be an intresting project maybe even with some web 2.0 elements you could even create an online enviroment for people to speak and an online community.

Back to my personal favs game creation and 3d engines.

I truly adore 3d technology its what first grabbed me about the multimedia industry creating an enviroment where people can run away from everything and everyone and truly emerse themsleves in a completly new world .

Flash FREE 3D Engines (oh yeah)

Working with 3d engines in the past they are probablary the most cutting edge peices of technology to an interactive designer and definatley the most complicated to use. Though good or bad its what a lot of people peg the interactive industry on.

Found this little juicy morsal http://www.flashsandy.org/. This is one fo the nicest 3d engines i have seen made with flash so far. Smooth fps and uvmaping awsome could have some real fun with this beauty.

With Flashes growing community and development scene is their anything flash is not capable of doing anymore. Apart from a smooth framerate in which case it can never be forgiven (flash 9 please include some of these).

Demo of sandy shes a beauty

http://www.flashsandy.org/sources/1_0/tests/CameraTest/

Thats a game model of a starwars id say its around 500 polygons+(tris +)
It apprantly will import 3d models form an xml file with their texture cordinates retained this is really intresting.

Just Found another great engine but it lags a little this one has some physics awsome.

http://blog.noventaynueve.com/papervision/

demo of papervision

http://www.noventaynueve.com/lab/NRG-2006/

I need to find an excuse to use one of these and soon.

Worrying times aheed Adobe vs Microsoft

Microsoft is attempting to break into the interactive design world with their expression packages id like to say on face value they would fail.

Looks like they could win on one front at least looking into the expression packages even though most designers use macs. Microsoft have one package called sparkle which will be capable of creating web applications similar to shockwave though using their direct x libary sparkle will be capable of creating realtime 3d objects within a web application.

As a trainee in interactive media i find the possibility of microsoft gaining a foothold quite frightning in some instance and quite intriguing in others. It would be niave to dismiss microsofts work. Guess this explains the rise of asp.net servers .

Only current problems i can see with these packages are they are made by microsoft who have a poor reputation for the frontpage product and the fact that sparkle will only work with a windows vista machine. Looks like theirs more to learn, though theirs at most another 2 years before every home user has definatly switched to vista.

Hope adobe has a rival other than lingo to XAML otherwise they might just loose the battle before its started.

Links

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193500186&pgno=5&queryText=

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/08/microsoft-entering-adobe-territory.html

Sound design and flash

Sound Design

At the end of last week 23 - 24th nov we had sound design training with reason and audacity from jean paul jones.

Audacity is a gnu sound editor free which is nice though no where near as poerful as its competiters though and has a bad habbit of falling over (crashing) hopefully the creators will get that bug out though.

Reason is a really great synth/sampling package. The whole package is based off what i used to use in my old uni to record sounds by anologue nice to know reason is kind of halfway their to replacing it. The lectures were intresting and the moby dick sound excersise had more than one pirate in for throw. Yo ho me heartys yo ho.

Flash

We have just started flash training we have had one lecture already on it already and moreover the next todays. The lecturer truly knows his stuff he has been working with flash before it was owned by macromedia. Ive been in and out of using flash since about version 5 and have made various things on it im no expert because i would prefer to use and opengl libary to create games though after speaking to the flash lecturer i was shocked to learn their is an application that will let me do this OH YES YES YES!!!!

May i present http://processing.org/ it also has a libary to create mobile games (AWWWWW drooling) Now all i need to to is figure out how to get some physics working and a basic 3d engine JAd and jar games rule.

P.S For those considering creating a 3d game for a mobile phone.

What you will require

1. 3d engine (opengl is the libary not an engine) In open gl this can be done a lot easier thand flash.

2. Physics engine use a math function and to hell with the problems.

3. Low poly models (look the 3d modelers are shivering) 300 polygons/tris (main model= vehicle or Character sorry to be a sticular remember your working with cpus that run very very slowly with limited or no ram none of lifes little luxurys) everything else alpha mapped with collisions.Uvmapping only to display colours(unwrapping for short its about as much fun as an appointment with the dentist trust me i hate the dentist)

What should i do for my first project easy Formula 1 racing (racing games are always the easiest to create learn how to biuld a course then make and fps) Will start this project after flash during christmas will setup a new blog for its development shortly.

Web design project finished "Why use asp?"

The web design project is complete.

This has been a real eye opener as a project. Started out discussing the project thoroughly with my colleague Tom about what needed to be in the project. We achieved this by dissecting elements from the breif at first we were a bit confused about what information was going to go into the site after talking and comparing other websites we settled for what we though was best. In this project we decided our roles i would develop the back end for the website (cms system) and tom would work on the design in the end this worked out really well.

Last Friday we presented the project to the client (www.seqeunce.co.uk) they were pleased with the design and the content managment system. They had a small crit about me leaving the clear button on a form in the cms system which is perfectly understandable when i think about it in hindsight.

Looking at the other projects i was quite shocked at a lot of the people on the course most have never touched asp/asp.net before and pulled out some really great development work.

Given the option I would have developed the back end in php. Here are my list of reasons why i have a strong dislike to asp.net

1. Its structure is hard to follow in many instances and run's very chunky through a browser.

2. Asp.net(Microsoft's server technology is used by 31% of the world's servers where as apache an open source server technology is used by 61% of web servers I wonder why?).

3. In the architecture of asp and asp.net to make a third party application to run you need to install a 3rd party product directly into the server where as in php you can just upload a gzip file that will load without bothering any maintenance guys and paying for a dedicated server

4. Lastly its made by Microsoft the baron of pc themselves who most reticently have tested my patience's for the final time this is why. Their is a standardization for xml known as E4x Microsoft has refused to include it in ie7 why because they can.

This little piece of info is brought to you to explain many reason's why firstly asp.net is not the best to use.

Ask yourself these question's?

1. Why does asp/asp.net not run as standard on a apache server?

2. Why are 61% of the world's servers Apache non Asp/.net and 31% IIS(microsofts attempt at a webserver) ?

(statistics http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html)

3. Why do Microsoft block superior technology?

4. Why does Mozilla/Linux exist is it merely an alternative?

5. What is the language these apache servers use?
(let me give you a clue it begins with a P)

Another interesting question is do industry clients really want IIS the answer is simple yes they do or is it?

I thinks its more of a service option if i said to a client if i build your site in asp/.net i could charge you through the roof or i could use PHP is more reliable and safer than asp.net and does not rely on Microsoft technology the choice is yours. Most usa sites are PHP for a good reason think about it look at usa sites look at most sites on the web.

In 1995 a lot of dos programmers said this new operating system would never take off dos and cobol are the way to go. In 1996 they were unemployed and unemployable windows 95 was released.

Im writing this section in hope people consider learning php, Asp.net is worth learning but no future is stable in web or in the information technology industry 61% is a lot of websites in comparison to 31%.

Php sites can be developed on a shoe string budget. Asp.net sites can be expensive especially considering you really need a dedicated server/msdn libary and possibly visual studio for good development.

Web design project

2 week ago we were taught html and css from steve at atticus media. They were intresting tutorials ive never used much css before apart from font edeting, it was great to learn
that css can be used to create table. Last monday we were given the html breifs i have been paired up with tom a member of the course i get on very well with we have dicussed what we want to do in the site aswell as ways in which we can do it.

I was quite shocked to see toms sketchbook wow he has real talent at concepting and looking at his ideas for the website so far he seems to have a great capability as a designer. We agreed early on that we each wouldmake a design in photoshop/illustrator to demonstrate an idea. Mine is based on the idea of water and curves bubles etc.seeimage below his ideas are based on materials use in the bays architecture.

On monday we will discuss the design of the site and agree on a final idea, Tuesday we will code a design and on wednesday we will meet with phil murphy from sequence to discuss our final idea and possibly get a sign off to go ahead with the idea. I want to biuld a cms system into this site but im going to need to discuss this with phil. This is a tight shcedual we have to keep the project has to be presented a week friday. fingers crossed i hope my idea is not laughed at.

Maya finished

Maya tv ident project completed watch and enjoy