I’ve had a pretty busy week with the Flash on the Beach conference taking up Monday to Wednesday, then leaving drinks for the Technical Lead in my department and finally my girlfriend’s birthday lunch (which involved a fair bit of wine and ended up at a friend’s 30th birthday house party).
Flash on the Beach was, yet again, a most enjoyable event. The three days of networking with fellow Flash designers and developers and learning some new tips, tricks and techniques from the gurus who frequent these events left me with some ideas and directions that I’d very much like to pursue.
Of real note, for me, were sessions by Joa Ebert, Mario Klingemann and Ralph Hauwert. I picked up some good tips elsewhere but felt I already knew a lot of what I was hearing, whereas these three individuals continue to broaden the horizon of what flash is capable of.
Joa Ebert’s session was the first time I’ve seen a standing ovation at one of these events and the guy stands out as a true master of what he is doing. He knows flash and its compiler inside-out and has used that knowledge and a great deal of research into optimisation techniques to create TAAS a program that streamlines and optimises the bytecode of a flash movie. This allows use of the Alchemy memory codes that improve the speed of some operations in flash. These have only been available via Alchemy and Haxe up until now. Joa was getting some significant speed improvements thanks to the project but other features include automatic UML generation and compiling Java or C# in to flash. Check out Joa’s blog for more on his fantastic work.
Mario Klingemann gave a typical session proving that math experimentation and play can yield great results for experimental generative art work. It’s good stuff and he explains it well. Also, he doesn’t seem to fall into the sub-philosophical or spiritualist nonsense that surrounds a lot of art.
Ralph Hauwert gave a very interesting session on the state of 3D and real time graphics in Flash. With Joa’s TAAS and the improvements in speed brought about by the native 3D apis in Flash, examples from Ralph and the Away 3D team are starting to look half way decent. The triangle culling is much better, shading is becoming a realistic possibility and the number of polygons is reaching above a few thousand. Flash isn’t at the Unity3D standard and won’t get there until hardware rendering is supported but you can do more than in the past.
The other big news from Ralph was his departure from the Papervision team, this seems a big blow for that project and leaves open several questions as to what will happen to Papervision3D X.
Those sessions left me impressed as to the progress Flash and its community is making. Lets hope the upcoming Adobe MAX conference brings even more exciting news about the platform we work on and build for.