Halo 3 Awesome

The good: Just like the old Halos but high resolution and noticeably smarter and more numerous enemies. Really really awesome. Not that violent - should be T rated - my kids play it with me.

The bad: The menus are poorly designed - almost like they user tested the game really well, but nobody bothered to test the menus. Its pretty hard to figure out how to set up a local multiplayer game.

Flash Forward - Day 3

The first session by Seb Lee-Delisle was "particular"ly good. He showed some amazingly simple AS3 particle classes. He had the audience submit particle effects and he showed one of mine and had me come to the microphone and explain how I did it. This session was very valuable.

Next I attended the Papervision3d session. It was presented by Carlos Ulloa who was the creator of the engine. I met him the night before after he beat me in the awards competition and he was very gracious. His presentation was rather disappointing. Instead of showing how to get started with his engine, he instead gave a sales pitch on how great it was.

The next session was SEO for Flash which was pretty lame - he actually had the nerve to bash Flash in front of the all-Flash participants. Some of the info was ok, but mostly extremely biased against Flash. His name doesnt even merit mention.

The last session was given by Eric Natzke who loves to do art with Flash. His work is amazing, but I wish he would have showed less of it and more practical stuff. He did show us a little of his process which includes a few Flash physics prototypes which gradually become a working banner ad. One thing that was interesting was that his banners are designed in such a way that one Flash file can be used for any banner size no matter how it is scaled. He also had built-in hidden scrubbers to scrub through the animations.

All in all, a great conference. I had a number of meals with Curtis Morley, who is a collegue of mine. He taught me a lot about AS3. Thanks again Curtis. He blogged a lot about the conference here.

Flash Forward - Day 2 - Afternoon

Craig Swann gave a very interesting presentation where he hooked up a Wii controller to Flash. He also used a Momome and a homemade electronic pallette via USB to connect to Flash.

The next speaker was Samuel Rivello who spoke a lot about optimization in Flash. He showed how to get TONS of performance out of Flash using a technique called "Blitting" of "double buffering" which essentially paints stuff into a bitmap off stage then shows the bitmap. It was amazing and will help a lot with game performance. He will be doing an online seminar on Adobe.com on Nov. 6th.

In the evening we took the subway to Hard Rock Cafe. It was a lot of fun.

Flash Forward - Day 2 - Multi-user Multi-touch TableTop

Michelle Yaiser from MERL gave a visionary presentation using DiamondTouch which is a multi user, multifinger table and chairs that is multitouch. Sitting on special seats, your fingers complete the circuit. It comes with a Flash API that is very robust. I got to see into the future here.

Flash Forward - Day 2 - Morning Presentations

Still bummed about last night - lost to Papervision3D. But they treated all the Flash Film Festival finalists like rock stars. Afterwards I spoke to the guy in charge and he said that my Nitro Circus was chosen among 2000 applicants just in that category. I went to dinner with the guys at Red Interactive then came back to my room and watched Wild Hogs that I rented at Red Box - good movie. Also ate too many Blue Diamond almonds.

This morning I got some great Flash game optimization tips from Jay Laird. He had a lot of really clever techniques to really optimize Flash performance. His new site will be http://www.flashhatesyou.com/ (soon to launch). The site will be all about Flash optimization.

The next session was Mike Summers from http://www.kickapps.com/ . He spoke about the many dimensions of social media. His platform seems very useful. It is a way to add common widgets to a site (upload photo, video thumbnails, etc.). Looks very useful. He highly recommended watching the first Internet conference. He mentioned a very interesting concept called hyper-local which means neighborhood level web apps.

I ran into Curtis Morley and we are going to go to lunch. It was good to see him again.

Flash Forward - Day 1 - Afternoon Presentations

I attend three sessions this afternoon. The first was a bunch of lame Flash production magic tricks. I learned a few things, but it wasn't really the best session.

The next two sessions dealt with a new world that I never knew about -- hand-drawn animation in Flash. The first guy was a Disney Online animator named Sandro Corsaro. He presented a number of great animation principles: Persistence of vision (the human eye fills in the tweens), anticipation (which means you squat before a jump so the viewer knows it is about to happen), exaggeration is everywhere in animation, Dont overtween - very few flash tweens are used - its all about keyframing and onionskinning, and a lot more. It was fascinating to see him use his Wacom tablet to draw and clean up right in Flash - sort of takes the mystery out of Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends. He described drawing in Flash like pulling lines with clay. He dragged beziers around to shape them how he wanted them to look. He mentioned that the eyes are the most important element in a characters personality.

The next guy named Aaron Simpson gave a very similar presentation that was equally inspiring. Some key notes: "write what you know", "the web can waste a lot of time if you let it - be careful not to waste your time away in front of the web." He profiled a number of successful Flash animators. It makes me want to start drawing again. I am for sure going out to buy a Wacom.

Flash Forward - Day 1 - Intro to AS3

This is a day long to be remembered. I am no longer afraid of AS3 (okay, maybe still a little). Rich Shupe gave an EXCELLENT introduction to AS3. He went over all the fear points one at a time - sort of like a therapy session. AS3, while more verbose in almost every case, is a much better way to program. Now I just need some small projects to practice on. The Display List is still confusing to me. What really blew me away was the new Sound capabilities. He created an iTunes style visualizer with a very small amount of code. So I'm going to dive in. Boing, boing, boing, splash!

Flash Forward - Day 1 - Keynote

There are a ton of people here. The conference is sold out. Kevin Lynch from Adobe just gave the keynote. There was a free copy of Essentials of ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock on every chair plus a cd containing Adobe Air beta. Kevin covered: New features in Adobe Flash player (E4X was interesting), HBO Voyeur, a number of Adobe AIR apps, announced that the video codec H.264 will soon be in the Flash player, and showed how Adobe keeps making their player faster. A guy next to me from San Diego showed me how to take a picture with my iphone and send it to Flickr.

Boston Flash Forward Conference

I'm here. This is the view from my room and thats the Atlantic in the distance. I am right downtown at the Marriott Copley Place. Just found out that WolfPeak.net will be site of the week on Communication Arts home page. Wow - I was shocked. I'm starving - gonna go get food and get my registration packet.

Pixel Awards Nominee!

Nitro Circus has just won an nomination for the Pixel Awards! The competition is stiff but it is great to be in such good company.