Day 0: “Rent an idea” workshop

My first session at the FlashForum conference is a workshop featuring a team of 3 German "actionscript all-stars", namely Joa Ebert, Andre Michelle, Mario Klingemann. Workshops often follow a very structured path and they usually target novice users. This workshop is different. It is one of the few workshops I've attended where I really felt that I learned something.

by Jens C. Brynildsen Day 1 coverage

Marc Thiele, one of the two organizers wished welcome and the group of presenters started off with informal chatting and making sure the whole room had Flex Builder or FlashDevelop installed. For those not familiar with the presenters, Andre Michelle is known for experiments in 3D, audio as well as games. Joa for his WII-stuff, AS3 APIs and contributions to 3D engines. Mario for his experiments and contributions to the community.

Playing with 20000 particles

Joa started the workshop with a hands on example of creating your own particle system using Perlin noise and forcefields. All attendees had Flex Builder running and tried to keep up while Joa built a really sweet system pushing 20000 particles around the screen in a watery motion. This really looked like somebody had spilled petrol on water! The particles were positioned by looking up RGB values in a moving perlin noise pattern. This provided all the particles with unique values making the simulation extremely believable. The math was a little above my head, but the basics were well explained so you had a good idea of why things worked as they did. It was really fun seeing this growing from nothing but an empty class file!

While presenting, Joa kept pointing out small optimizations that will increase the speed of your code when doing things such as this particle system. Mario and Andre asked questions during the presentation to clarify and discuss solutions. This turned out great as the three of them had several discussions on subjects such as code readability, optimizations, tips and tricks. Some of the attendees also pitched in, making this not just a workshop, but also a very resourceful roundtable discussion on code as well.

Bitmap masking and keying

Mario Klingemann were up next and he showed some bitmap tricks when using Actionscript for keying (greenscreen) images. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to follow his code on your own machine as it was too complex and long to type in like we had done with Joa's particle system. He offered lot's of insights on how to work with and manipulate colors, keying out colors, extracting components, detecting edges and working with matrixes.

Not being a native german speaker is of course a drawback when attending a german conference, but since this was mainly about code, it was easy to follow these first two sessions. The next one left me kind of stumped though.

Creating audio with just code

After a decent and sizable lunch (served fresh from the kitchen to every attendee!), it was Andre Michelle's turn. He talks really fast and I just gave up on understanding it all. I got the juice though and the stuff he has done with audio is no less than impressive! (on FOTB, he will present in english)

Together with Joa Ebert, he's been working on PopForge, a project that enables you to generate extremely good sounding sound synthesis from nothing but Actionscript code. Andre has created several playback examples such as 8bitboy and the recreation of the FL-909 Rythm Composer. Keep in mind that there are no loading of samples when you listen to these examples - all sounds are produced from code! A swf producing a single sine tone is just 3Kb, including the required libraries.

Think about this for a little while - the first text to speech engines were actually produced using these techniques, so this really opens up possibilities beyond creating retro synthesizers. Andre also has a class built in that allows you to write WAV-files from the audio and there were quite a few laughs as the attendees in the room all started playing back the odd samples they were able to produce.

Andre also detailed the process of how to make instruments from scratch such as a Rhodes Hammond Organ, Flutes, Piano and more using parameters such as tune, cutoff, resonance, envelope, decay, accent and shape. After a quick break, Mario and Joa did some live experiments mixing their techniques so that Joa's particle system would attach to items moving in front of a webcam based on Mario's edge detection...

It's been a long time since I've heard this many Ohh's and Ahh's at a Flash conference and the presenters and attendees enjoyed this session so much that we all missed out on the scheduled pauses. Very impressive! (hehe... this workshop is now 45 minutes past the scheduled time and allmost all the attendees are still here)

Note that you cannot find the Popforge code in the Downloads section but rather in the SVN repository of the Google Code site. We're really looking forward to tomorrow when the conference really kicks off.

About Jens C Brynildsen

Jens has been working with Flash since version 3 came out. Since then, he's been an active member of the Flash community. He's created more than a hundred Flash games (thus the name of his blog) but he also creates web/standalone applications, does workshops and other consulting. He loves playing with new technology and he is convinced that the moment you stop learning you die (creatively speaking). Jens is also the Editor of this website.

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