Day 2: FlashForum Konferenz 2007

I got in a little delayed for Jens Franke's Papervision3D presentation since we finished the party a little late yesterday. There was no sponsored party, but it was arranged that attendees could meet at the bar in the Komed conference center. No sponsored beer, giveaways or bands playing and despite everyone had to pay their own beer, more than 1/4th of the attendees were there.

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Jens did a great job on presenting Papervision3D for those that want to get started with it. Apparently there is quite a few that are interested as this presentation had people sitting between chairs and along the walls.

Jens pointed out that the Papervision3D API is still changing, so one should be prepared to do some extra work if it is used on larger projects. It just keeps getting better though, so these changes are all for the better. The next version of Papervision3D will include advanced features such as bumpmapping / normalmapping, cell shading, phong shading and Zflat shading. This will make it possible to create even better looking examples.

My next session was on interactive entertainment. Fabian Roser presented a project for the sports division of Electronic Arts that put forth a "terrible" look at the future - Holland winning the World Cup. The site promoted the German version of the FIFA football game. The campaign was based around a TV spot showing Holland soccer supporters celebrating their victory over Germany at famous German landmarks. At the end of the spot, you see the URL http://www.hollandstoppen.de. Once you get to the site, supporters will walk in front of the content (green-screened) and you have to stop them by clicking a button all the time. The site features sections based on humor such as the "Book of condolances" (guestbook), Make a song for Holland (competition) and more (almost) clean soccer fun/mocking. Fabian presented ten lessons learned while working on this project under severe time pressure. Kind of a brave project for EA as well since they risk offending their buyers from Holland. He had a little extra time since he had some network problems, so he also talked about the Get The Glass project and how they developed that.

Thomas Wagner from Design Assembly was up next and the title of his presentation really tells how far Flash has come but also uses some nice, classic tricks. 3DFLA is a set of extensions for 3D Studio Max and Flash that will let you export filesize-effective 3D animations from Max to Flash. The set consists of two products 3DFLA Textures for exporting textured 3D geometry and 3DFLA Bones for use with Motion Capture. Both consists of a 3DS Max renderer and a Flash import module. Thomas showed how 3DFLA was used to create the sweet navigation at the top of Coffe-Break-Games.com using Triangle based texture mapping.

This is really not a 3D animation when it reaches Flash. It's rather a series of frames that each consist of a bunch of triangle movieclips that performs masking and distorting of the textures. So this is what we'd usually call "fake 3D", but it looks extremly good since you more or less have a WYSIWYG relation to what you see in 3D Studio Max. Since the textures are distorted to fit and the rest of the file is just vectors and masks, this will produce extremely rich looking graphics that have next to no filesize and is even Flash 4 compatible! Since it's all premade, it's also extremely light on the CPU so this is a perfect match for mobile games. Thomas showed a couple examples where he was able to display a Doom 2-alike game and a Water Jet race game on a Nokia N70 with really smooth motion and rich graphics. This just cannot be done with tools such as Papervision3D because the CPU just would not be powerful enough.

If you do mobile games and are going to the (now sold out) MAX, be sure to check out Thomas as he also presents there. His "tricks" will make your game look much, much better!

Next up was Alex Uhlmann from Adobe Consulting. The last time I saw Alex presenting, his topic was slightly more "attendee friendly", but the room was packed for this presentation. Unit testing and test driven development is just about as unsexy as it can get, but it's powerful tools if you do larger Actionscript projects. Though a dry subject, Alex was able to make the audience laugh and pay attention.

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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