25 April 2008
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on April 25th, 2008 @ 10:28:52 am, using 80 words, 411 views
My colleague Rick Williams just found an excellent game called Echochrome which is coming soon to PS3 and PSP. It is very reminiscent of Eschers work, the difference here is that you must complete the illusion yourself by rotating the 3D-space to allow the inhabitants of the world to complete the puzzles.
Below is a video of the engine that forms the basis of this game… it’s called Objective Locative Environment System:
02 April 2008
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on April 2nd, 2008 @ 11:38:20 am, using 119 words, 420 views
Quick warning regarding loading images using the Loader class in Flash Player 9…
Image files that are saved with a CMYK profile will appear with inverted colours, this includes JPEGs. It might sound a random thing to encounter but it can happen if you are allowing users to upload images. So it’s probably best to re-save the images on the server using an RGB profile and also check for things like a high DPI, which is likely to also be the case with CMYK images that have been designed for print originally.
Should you want to do this in Flash after loading the CMYK image here’s an excellent resource to get you started:
http://www.nicknettleton.com/zine/php/cmyk-rgb-and-php
01 April 2008
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on April 1st, 2008 @ 09:26:36 am, using 214 words, 470 views
I’m a big fan of Unity3D, great for cross-platform 3D games. So I was glad to find out from my colleague James that Unity is coming to iPhone, a platform I have also invested a good amount of my time in recently.
Typically Flash has formed the basis of my work over the last 7 or 8 years, but I’m finding now that the technologies are all so similar, it’s just syntax (and more often than not those are nigh-on the same). We are also more able to apply our learnings in say Papervision, to OpenGL ES for iPhone or Unity without too much of a learning curve, and more importantly, we have many more options for spreading our ideas across a wide variety of media without incurring the enormous costs that multi-skilling in those areas could have meant before.
On a similar note we now have a new version of Director to play with, which adds yet another possibility to the mix. Previously bandwidth and the cost of being online put a spanner in the works, now it looks like it is time to realise some of the things we used to suggest.
So it’s a very exciting time and hopefully I’ll have more to say (and share) regarding these technologies so stay tuned. 
28 March 2008
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on March 28th, 2008 @ 04:46:30 pm, using 166 words, 1090 views
Quote:
“Move Media Player and Microsoft’s Silverlight To Create The Most Flexible, High Quality Streaming Video Platform”
Here’s a strange one. Move Networks is offering a HD video player “powered by Silverlight” that comes in the form of a Firefox extension. Once installed you are redirected to a page that shows a HD video, but a look at the source shows the video player header and controls/progress bar are all made in Flash, it just overlays a block, streaming in a QMX file (doesn’t open in Windows Media Player when renamed asx).
It seems a lot of effort to go to, cross communicating between Flash, JavaScript, Silverlight and Firefox, when you could have made the whole player using just one technology. I don’t get the point of the Firefox extension in the first place, the video controls require Flash Player anyway, and if they had used Silverlight for them you’d need that plugin so why bother with this extension at all?
Try it here.
19 March 2008
Written by
Richard Leggett (
)
Published on March 19th, 2008 @ 11:02:47 am, using 286 words, 510 views
There are a few posts out there relating to Shantanu’s disclosure of a standalone Flash Player being developed for the iPhone using the newly released SDK, but of course that doesn’t answer the question as to whether people will be able to browse the web and view Flash content in-line, given that Flash makes up a huge chunk of the web, and also provides the revenue for a great many sites through advertisements (fallback GIFs are not what advertisers are paying so much money for).
I’ve been learning Objective-C and the iPhone SDK over the past week and it seems to me there might be an alternative option in using the WebKit engine, available in the SDK. Potentially identifying SWF embeds in web pages and replacing them with a Flash Player control. One thing I’m not clear on is whether this violates the agreement put forth by the SDK. In particular…
“No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s).”
As a side-note, the iPhone SDK is a pretty well made package. If it weren’t for the possible confusion between the various frameworks and component parts that have arisen over the years, Carbon, Cocoa, QuickTime, Core Graphics, Core Animation (Leopard and iPhone/iPodTouch only) it would have been even better. But overall the video tutorials, reams of documentation and samples make learning these things fairly easy when compared with what you might have to go through; considering Objective-C is only a very thin layer on top of C, and for me had a much stranger syntax than C++ (when you assume Java, C#, ActionScript are all strikingly similar).
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