NxtGen Media - The Freeman View

Caligari TrueSpace - When good software gets dumped

Just went to the Caligari site and read the letter from founder Roman Ormandy saying that due to the economy, Microsoft was going to phase out TS. Not surprising. I was kind of scared this would happen. Here is a post from the forum from a user named Steinie:

Approximately between September and October Caligari, this Web Site, trueSpace, tutorials, this Forum and all related downloads and ALL history will probably disappear!
As my last wish to all of you new to 3D software please do the following NOW before the plug is pulled.
FIRST:
Download trueSpace because after October you probably will not be able to get trueSpace ever again! (I’m not kidding)
http://www.caligari.com/downloads.html
SECOND:
Download “WorkSpace Organics Modeling 1 Course”
http://www.caligari.com/products/tru…te=Fundamental
THIRD:
Download any tutorial you might want to watch. All of them if possible.
FOURTH:
Join the New FREE trueSpace Forum “TSCommunity” where all the regulars will be moving to.
http://www.tscommunity.co.cc
FIFTH:
Support the Plug in Developers and any future enhancements.
http://www.yafaray4ts.org/download.html
http://truesourceshop.com/agoracart55/agora.cgi
http://www.truespaceplugins.com/store.html?vmcchk=1

Wow! That is kind of sobering. TS was my first 3D package. I came on board with it in version 2.0. I knew the company had struggled for years to keep up with the industry, but I thought the Microsoft acquisition would keep them around and infuse them with life. That of course, was before we had economic issues. If you want a good 3D and animation package, you might want to go get a copy of this while its available. Even has a Flash exporter. May not be as good as Maya or Lightwave, but it certainly can produce some decent stuff and definitely has its uses. Hope the community can get access to the code and keep it rolling.

-DCF

Where to from Here?

Great article on Jesse Warden’s blog , ‘Flash Player 11: Gaming Platform?’ There are lots of great (and needed) comments and discussion regarding this issue. I too have noticed industry Flash rock stars shifting focus to other platforms like the iPhone, or Unity. Makes me wonder if Adobe understands what is happening here.

I tried Unity. I loved it, but my money for the moment is made with the Flash platform. I pull the player penetration card, and stand on ‘when the Unity player has greater penetration, I’m in’. As for the iPhone, love the phenomenon, love what can be done with it, but loving the Flash platform more. That, and I don’t have an iPhone. Wife does though, she loves it, and is saying to me ‘hey, why don’t you make apps for the iPhone?’ Never has she cared about what platform I was coding for. Very telling indeed.

Flex was/is a wonderful paradigm shift for the Flash platform. I get it. RIAs are a huge deal, particularly for business apps, and the potential money that can be made is staggering. If everything really does move towards cloud computing, and RIAs become the way to go for apps, then it makes perfect sense for Adobe to concentrate on the business side of development rather than gaming. Or does it?

Back in the day, when Microsoft made most of its money off of corporate licenses, it made perfect sense for them to concentrate on business apps. Eventually, they saw the potential of gaming, and entered that arena first with DirectX, then later with Xbox. It took years for them to become a major player in those areas, but time was on their side. With the exponential growth of technology today, I don’t think that Adobe has the luxury of time that Microsoft had. There is a lot of potential here, and I hope Adobe is the one to address it. I hope they have been keeping a screaming demon of a player under raps and have been waiting for the right time to release it. Now would be a good time.

Making Flash The Console For The Web

-DCF

Flash in the Cloud

Great series of articles on cloud computing on the Technology Review by MIT site. In the companies to watch section, Adobe is listed for Flex and Air. The Aviary website, with its image editing RIA is cited in a case study. Whoda thunk it? Well, all us die hard Flash developers who could see the potential of Flash back in the day.

I remember back when I started using Flash in 2001 with Flash 5.0 and Actionscript 2.0. Those were the days. I remember moving from C/C++ to work in Flash and other developers saying that it was a crazy move. I remember the promise of Java, write once and run anywhere, and now quite a few years later, the Flash platform is the closest to making good on that promise. Kind of ironic when you think about it.

It makes perfect sense that Flash would be listed as a technology to watch in the move to cloud computing. I’m waiting for the day when my colleagues of old have to eat humble pie and learn to develop for the Flash platform because it became the tool of choice for RIA development. Of course, no one will remember that we told them so.

Cloud Computing

-DCF

Flash Builder and Catalyst Betas

Been playing around with the betas of Flash Builder and Catalyst. I must say that I am quite impressed. There are still some things to be worked out I guess for the final release, but for the most part both builds seem pretty solid and are quite workable.

Admittedly, Catalyst is going to take some getting used to just in terms of work flow. Once folks are over the hump, I’m sure it will become a power tool in most shops. Just for mock ups and demos alone, it is worth it. I do remember when Dreamweaver first had behaviors and wrote code for you. Used to produce some scary stuff that the developer never wanted to touch. Such is the case now with Catalyst. As I play with it more, I’ll post.

Flash Builder is really good. The profiling and debugging tools are a needed addition. The new components and help are great as well. Definitely starting to feel like the “Borland Builder” environment of years past. I love Flash Develop and the work flow I have developed between it and Flash Professional, but now using Flash Builder, I could be enticed to make a switch to Flash Builder. Now that I get how to build SWC files in Flash Pro, it is beginning to make more sense to work in Flash Builder.

My designer colleague made an observation. He wondered why Adobe just did not go the route of a Dreamweaver, and make Catalyst and Flash Builder one product with a design view and a code view? Or why don’t they just improve the Flash Pro code editor to be more robust so those of us that have to work in Flash Pro don’t have to resort to a Flash Develop. This present move means I will have to buy a whole lot more stuff to get a happy medium. He does have a point.

Check out the betas at Adobe Labs

-DCF

Moving Day, part 3

After much planning and configuration, I was finally able to get my multiple site environment moved from our local machines to a hosting company. In part 1 and 2, I talked about how my company could save money by using an external hosting company and dropping the T1 line cost. We chose 1and1 for the initial move. For $20 a month, we could have pretty much what we had been maintaining in house.
Seemed like a great idea, until we ran into the 1and1 database limitation. It seems that on their most robust package which is their Developer Package, 1and1 limits the size of a database structure files to be 100MB! That is just stupid! At the time of the move, my structure weighed in at 107MB. There was no way to up the database quota, so we had to get another host. This was after moving gigs of data up to 1and1. Painful indeed.
We then went to HostGator out of Texas. I have nothing but good to say about them. For a mere $15 per month, we have unlimited everything! The move had some minor bumps, but all were easily addressed in the forums and tech support. The whole process was just a really good experience all the way around. While not as polished as 1and1 in the way of online admin tools (took some getting used to, but what doesn’t?), I highly recommend them. I will be keeping my personal 1and1 account, as it is great for what I am doing development wise. A small business could do well with such a package, but if you have some serious data going on, you better go with a host that allows for such throughput. HostGator is just such a host.

-DCF

Elemental 4D

I have done my share of playing with the Flash 3D engines out there, and they are awesome and getting better with each passing day. Many will agree that while 3D in flash is very cool, it loses when it comes to making lossless vector graphics, in other words, I want my vector graphics to look the same no matter how I scale them. Enter Elemental 4D.

Elemental 4D was released last October by Bryan Grezeszak. Basically, Elemental 4D is a bill board or 2.5D engine. You can animate movie clips in 3D and they scale nicely and look pixel perfect. Doesn’t flash already do that? Not exactly. You can animate movieclips in 3D space, but Flash now converts the clip to a bitmap. As you scale the movieclip, it loses its graphic integrity. Not good when your artist wants to see exactly what he created in vector. There are some tricks that can be done to make Flash 3D work better, but why should you have to? Granted, Elemental 4D is not the fastest Flash 3D engine out there, but it makes Flash movie clips work like you would expect them to in 3D. If you have to have quality vector graphics in your presentation, and you’re simply animating movieclips in 3D, then it is really not a bad option.

Elemental 4D

-DCF

30 hand picked flash and essential actionscript 3.0 tutorials

Nice little collection of AS3 tutorials from around the web.

- 30 hand picked Flash and essential actionscript 3.0 tutorials

-DCF

My Unity 3D Trial

Well, my Unity 3D Windows trial has come to an end. I am totally impressed with the quality of the engine. I am amazed at what the Unity team has accomplished. Unity has so much power, and development capability, all deliverable via browser. The platform is simply incredible. So, am I going right out and buying a license? Will I forsake Flash for the opportunity to develop “real games” in Unity? Nope, or at least not yet.

Why not you may ask? Well, simply put, for the very reason that Flash is great. The ubiquity and ease of installation of the Flash player and the UI capabilities of Flash far out shadow its short comings. I can’t justify the time split learning Unity, when I still have so much to learn in Flash/Flex, and that is where my money is being made.

I had some designer friends checking out the features of Unity, and some of the games out there done in Unity. Feature wise, they were very impressed. Unity player download is what they felt absolutely sucked. Not that it was a horrible ordeal, but that it took longer than expected and interrupted their experience. That is the attitude of the net: Don’t make me wait.

The general consensus:
‘No one but diehard gamers will take the time out for installing yet another player. If casual games are your aim, then you lose your audience, because the player is far from a “casual” download. Conversely, diehards will not be convinced that their time won’t be wasted on a browser based game.’

Ok, I could have argued with them, but they did have a point. There will have to be a huge culture shift in terms of the game platform being in the cloud and not the console. Until we nail down this broadband bandwidth thing, Flash is still going to look pretty good for the casual game dev simply in terms of ubiquity and scale. In other words, grandma can download the Flash player in no time flat, and play ‘Texas Hold Em’.

If all goes well, and the US infrastructure enrichment plans come to fruition, Flash will have to ante up in the game dev area (particularly 3d) to remain competitive in that area. Until then, Flash is sitting pretty, and will continue to do so. If it continues to target business apps and is adopted, then it becomes even more entrenched. Unity has to bide its time, keep building its following, and offer more UI features. If you can make a 3D game with it, then you can most certainly do Rich Internet Apps with it. When and if Unity hits 50% browser penetration, then I will be seriously looking at it. Flash better look out.

-DCF

Flash/Flex/Air Debuggers

I am always on the lookout for a good debugger for the Flash environment. Back with Flash 8, I used Xray written by John Grden of Papervision3D and Red5 fame. It does AS3 now and works very well. Xray is definitely one of the best in terms of functionality. For the longest, it was the ONLY way to go. Well, now there is a new debugger out there called De Monster Debugger.

De Monster is an open source debugger for Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR. De MonsterDebugger was created in Flex and AIR by design studio De Monsters. It is an Air application that you install on your system. It is so easy to get going, and does much of what Xray does. Like Xray, it will work with Flex, Flash and Air. I work with FlashDevelop which some have found difficult to get trace information out of. Using either one of these debuggers with Flash develop will solve your trace problems if you have not figured out the recommended way to do it.

Which will I use? Well, looks like Monster is a new kid on the block, and I’m kind of liking the whole setup. Not that one is better than the other. I kind of want to see where these guys are going to go with it. So for now, I am going to be debugging with De Monster just for the sheer novelty and the support it is getting.

-Xray
-De Monster Debugger
-Arthropod

-D

104 Free Opensource tools for the Flash Platform

My goodness have I been busy! Too much so to blog. Busy is good though. As soon as I finish these projects, I will be back into the blog. Here is a link that I found while looking up info on 2.5D engines (more on that later). Lot’s of good stuff:

The Flashchemist - 104 Free Opensource APIs, Libraries, and tools for the Flash Platform

-D