NxtGen Media - The Freeman View

Flash 10 Player - A big step

I don’t care much about the rest of the suite. Not that I don’t like it. It’s just that for the most part, all I care about is Flash. If I can get Flash to do what I envision, then the rest of the suite will fall into place. I want the power of a desktop app in a rich Internet Application. That’s not asking too much, because it is entirely possible. It will happen eventually. For the last year or so, I have been waiting for this upgrade. I have been playing around with the beta player and am quite impressed with it.

Player 9 was an incredible upgrade last year, and it certainly did wonders for youtube and myspace in the way of video, but it needed more power if it was going to be used for games and online interactive experiences. If used wisely, Flash player 10 could be power up.

-3D Effects – now all the objects in Flash have x, y, and z! Before we could only move in  x and y  in terms of their location in space. We used to have to fake the z in code, which was just ok.  Now it’s native. This translates into decently fast 2.5D effects. Does not sound like much, but with a little imagination, this can go a long way.

-Custom Filters and Effects – okay, perhaps you played with Photoshop a bit and got to messing around with the filters and graphic effects on images. These were not available in Flash. Now that Adobe owns Flash, they are.  To make it even better, they can be controlled from code in real time! Combine that with the 3D effects and you have some serious effects potential.

-Advanced Text Layout – text in Flash had been pretty ugly over the years. That’s why you don’t see a full web page done in flash if it has a lot of text in it. That day is over. Now I can build entire websites in Flash without fear of having ugly jaggy text.

-Enhanced Drawing API – The API now has support for 3D data structures. With the 3D effects part listed above, and the ability to “draw” perspective based real-time graphics, we have the tools to build 3d-like applications.

-Visual Performance Improvements – basically flash now off loads some of the drawing and rendering task to the video card taking some of the load off the CPU. Again, used cleverly this could make for some really fast multimedia.

-Enhanced Sound APIs – Enhanced sound is good.

-RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) /Speex Audio Codec – P2P applications like serverless voice over IP become possible from a Flash client.  A Flash based multiplayer game deployed from a website could become a reality.

This all may sound great, and for the most part it is.  As  Arthur C. Clarke put it in one of his three laws of prediction,

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

We’ll only see the magic when it gets in the hands of the very skilled. I shudder to think of the early days of Flash when everyone had an “Intro”and a skip button. This trend of ‘gratuitous Flash’ could very well happen again. I am excited with this upgrade, but I also see the potential for abuse as we try to figure out how best to use our new toys. There’s a lot of potential here. I hope the “skip” button phenomenon does not occur again. I really hope we start to see truly Rich Internet Applications. God knows I’m gonna try to do my part

DCF

Alternative Developments: Casual Gaming

What is a casual game?

According to WikiPedia:

“A casual game is a video game targeted at a mass audience of casual gamers. Casual games can have any type of gameplay, and fit in any genre. They are typically distinguished by their simple rules, in contrast to more complex hardcore games. They require no long-term time commitment or special skills to play, and there are comparatively low production and distribution costs for the producer. Casual games typically are played on a personal computer online in web browsers, although they now are starting to become popular on game consoles, too. Casual gaming demographics also vary greatly from those of traditional computer games, as the typical casual gamer is older and more predominantly female, with over 74% of those purchasing casual games being women.”

Whatever they are, they are becoming more popular and hardcore developers are starting to leave their hardcore development positions to pursue creating them. I have often thought that the gaming industry of late seemed kind of stagnant. PC games seem to be going the way of the dinosaur, and consoles definitely rule. It appears that we have not innovated very much in game play and concepts (Wii excluded), and there are certainly untapped audiences that are put off by the available genre, or the investment required in time and money to participate in our current gaming offering.

With the new tools and technologies that are becoming available, things may start to change a bit in terms of the types of games that are available. Where in the past creating a best selling title required an entire team of developers, artist, producers, musicians, and marketers to get out the door, today it is quite possible to once again produce a quality piece with a small team. I mentioned earlier in previous post tools that are very well suited for casual game development. Obviously, I’m most interested in what is happening with Flash.

In a matter of weeks, Flash 10 is going to be released and a new development paradigm will be upon us. What excites me most about this release is that the upgrade to the Flash player is fairly extensive. The addition of 3D Effects, Drawing API Enhancements, RTMFP, and GPU compositing and blitting are all very exciting to a multimedia developer interested in game development. So much will now be possible in Flash and hopefully Flash will explode in popularity again. More developers will be able to “casually” release their games without all the associated overhead of the past. More people will be able to “casually” access a game.  Certainly, there is much development work ahead as developers decipher and apply this upgraded API, but from where I’m looking, it feels like at the very least some very nice casual games will be possible with this environment. I suspect that the Flash player 10 penetration will be rapid.

Check out the article: The Rise of Casual Gaming

-DCF

Dark GDK Available for Free?

What in the world is going on? Truespace is free, and now Dark GDK is free? The company The Game Creators started out many moons ago with a package for developing video 2D/3D games in their own version of basic called Dark Basic. They moved on to create an SDK that worked with C++ and supported 3D. Now it seems that Microsoft has made a deal with The Game Creators and is now offering the SDK for free for use with their free Visual Studio C++ Express. What gives?

With Truespace, Dark GDK, and Visual Studio you have an incredible game development environment that any indie or hobbyist would drool over. The combination of these free tools are certainly enough for anyone who wants to try their hand at making games to get their feet wet. What I want to know is why, and why now? Why is Microsoft suddenly so benevolent?

Perhaps Microsoft is betting that 3D on the Internet is going to be big one of these days, and they are lowering the barrier to entry by offering tools that could one day become the more commonly used tools. While these tools are not quite industrial grade, they are very good, and in the right hands could produce some compelling content. Perhaps Microsoft is trying to spark innovation and foster the creation of more content by opening the way for developers who probably would never get the chance were it not for free tools. Uh, …yeah. Despite the motive, the tools are free and that opens the door for some interesting possibilities. either way it goes, I’m now going to be using Microsoft’s “free” software because frankly now it makes sense.

-DCF

Installing a desktop manager on Ubutu 8.04 Server

After doing everything that I could to get Wonderland working in Windows to no avail,  I decided that it was time to do what the most of the Wonderland community was doing. Run it in Linux! Hey I had a spare Windows box already set up and I did not particularly feel like melting down a server. Call me lazy, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time. Two days later, I’m melting down the server. <sigh>

Most folks don’t install Ubuntu all the time. It’s one of those fire and forget things. It’s so stable that you get it going, and you forget how you did everything. Such is the case with me. I don’t think I have ever had to re-install Linux for something it screwed up. Can’t say that about some other OS’s. The Ubuntu 8.04 server edition does not install with a desktop environment, so after a fairly quick install, and reboot, you are faced with a command line screen. At this point, I was at a loss of what the command was to install a desktop.

The commands are simply:

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude install ubuntu-desktop

The first is to update your local list of available packages. The second will go out and grab everything you need to run the desktop, plus a slew of apps. Takes about 30-60+ more minutes though (depending on how fast your connection is) for everything to install. Once installed you type:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

You should be greeted with the login screen. Now the next time you start the system, the login screen should be available.

Also, Check the Ununtu Guide for Hardy Heron

Give the Desktop version a try at ubuntu.com as it really is “Linux for humans”.

-DCF

Apache Tomcat 6 and Windows

I have a mixed environment setup that consist of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Windows.  We are slowly, but surely moving away from Windows on the backend, but I now have so many old servers running Windows, that it is sometimes easier to get an app up for prototyping on a Windows box that is already set up than to melt it down and install Linux. Such was the case for this application that I was testing.

Got everything I needed to to run. Apache Server was running fine. The application was running fine on the back end, but for the life of me I could not get Tomcat to start for anything.  Tried reinstall, disabling anything that might conflict etc., etc. to no avail. I searrched the Sun and Apache docs for anything that might shed some light on why the latest version of Tomcat won’t run on Windows. Finally, I came across a blog post by Michael Gobaco who had the same problem.  It breaks down to this:

http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9493825

- Tomcat 6 couldn’t find a file called msvcr71.dll

- Copy file from c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v1.1.4322

- Place file in c:\windows\system32

- Start Tomcat

That’s it. One silly little file seems to screw it up for all Windows versions. Such is the life of a developer. Thank God for blogs and people’s willingness to share when they have had a horrible problem.

DCF

TrueSpace Flash plug-in Easter Egg

One of the big concerns with the free availability of TrueSpace 7.6 is ‘what happened to all the plug-ins’? A few of the nicer plug-ins survived like True Particles, The Facial Animator, and the Luuv .OBJ model importer/exporter. The one I most obviously missed was the Flash exporter. I had found a way to get my older Flash plug-in to work, but have just found out that that was completely unnecessary. Surprisingly enough, The plug-in comes with the installer for TrueSpace.

After installing TS just go to:

C:\trueSpace7\tS

Once there, copy tSFlash.tsx to the C:\trueSpace7\tS\tsx folder.

Open TrueSpace and load this file from the Plug-in icon

Voila! You now have the latest Flash exporter for TrueSpace 7.6.  That is simply awesome. I am so amazed that all this stuff is free. The training videos are incredible.

I ran across another nice free little utility called Wink that does real-time screen capture to Flash swf format. Great for training videos and app demonstrations. Check it out at: DebugMode Wink.

DCF

A New Direction for Caligari

I have been very interested in 3D graphics for as long as I can remember. I remember seeing Tron back in the day (1982), or stuff done on Video Toaster (Commodore Amiga) and wished I knew how to do that. My first 3D drawing application was TrueSpace 2.0 (also written for the Amiga, 1985) and my first 2D animation package was Autodesk Animator Studio. This was around 1990 or so. At that time, I remember local news studios using those two applications to create effects for their broadcast. They were great packages, and allowed folks a cheap way of entry into computer graphics.

Today, TrueSpace (TS) is still around and in version 7.6. What is really interesting is that the company that created it, Caligari is now owned by Microsoft. To make things even more interesting, Microsoft has elected to release TS7.6 free of charge as of this past July. Some speculate that this may be in answer to Google’s SketchUp, and that TS7.6 exports directly to Virtual Earth. That’s all well and good, but all I know is that a 3D software package plus video tutorials, and plug-in SDK that ran about $600 is now free. Couple that with the Flash export plugin, and it becomes very compelling indeed. Kind of reminds me of a Swift3D by Electric Rain but on steroids.

Download the whole shebang at:  www.caligari.com

DCF

Google Chrome - The new kid on the block

Chrome is the name of the new browser, by Google. I imagine that if I were taken in by the hype, that I would be excited about the prospect of a new browser entering the web playing field. Chrome is said to be a “minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier”. I guess in some ways I am excited that Google is attempting to push the envelope and as they put it to, “Keep moving the web forward”.

Web real estate wise, Chrome has an uphill battle to fight against IE. Firefox has made a small dent, but the expectation that Chrome will be able to claim territory from IE is extremely optimistic.  I suspect that there is another motive up Google’s sleeve. The project is open source. The innovation fostered from this endeavor should replicate across the other existing browsers. Heck, look what tabbed browsing did. What I‘m really interested in is “Gears” and WebKit, because that is what all this innovation will be based on.

As someone who is intensely interested in Rich Internet Applications (a term coined by Macromedia, now Adobe), the prospect of a new paradigm for web application development piques my interest. At the moment, I am researching Flash AS3 extensively and have invested a lot of time into learning how to make the most of it. Flash 10 is on the horizon, and there is a good bet that with the success of flash video it will continue to be a popular download due to the success of YouTube, but I am curious as to how plugins and their functionality will factor into this possible new paradigm. As Flash stakes its claim on the web application development front, it will obviously be dependent on these new browsers and their ability to render its content. Let’s hope the plugins will also improve in  rendering and managing resources well in this race to web based applications. If not, guess I’m getting “geared” up.

DCF

The Local Shared Object (LSO)

I have had situations where I have a Flash application that needs to keep track of user data after the user has closed the application. The data is not really large enough to warrant using a database to track it. A cookie could be used, but if the user tosses them, then they lose their place in the application and have to start all over, which invariably ticks them off and puts them off the application.

Flash has this really nice code feature called the Local Shared Object (LSO). Basically, an LSO is like a super cookie, but it is extremely ‘Flash-centric’. They are a beautiful thing as they get stored on the client machine in a special Flash folder, they never expire, they hold lots of ActionScript datatypes, and they don’t require any extra software to implement. One caveat is that folks can disable them so that they can’t be stored on their machines, but for the moment few people know or care enough to know how to turn them off.

The Flash Player allows for about 100k for shared object storage, so you can’t get too carried away with it. Managed correctly, 100k is a decent amount. I’ve been playing around with the LSO in one of my applications and use it to manage the states of various objects in my application. I find that it really works well. For my case, it’s like having a persistent global object, that holds the applications state even after the application has been closed. I can definitely see using it for rpg or adventure type games and such where the user does not want to complete the activity in one sitting. Of course, the user would have to continue play on the same machine to get the same game state, so the LSO is not the end all solution for all cases, but it’s great one for many cases.

DCF