Busy Days

I've been busy lately with a number of new developments:

Video Work!

At work we have been talking about incorporating more video into our e-learning and marketing products. In some cases we are supplied content. In other cases we need to produce big content, so we will be outsourcing much of that for sake of scale, resources and quality. But there seems to be a number of opportunities to take on small to medium-sized video work.

About a year ago I investing in a nice Canon XH-A1 HD (1080i) 24f pro-sumer camcorder. I love it. The images from this piece of equipment are amazing. But, if I am going to use my camera for these projects, I have decided that getting the "film" look is important.

Recently I purchased a glidecam, which is an in-hand stabilizing device that makes your shots appear to have been taken from a dolly rig.

Secondly, I just purchased a Letus device which allows me to attach my Canon XT Digital SLR lens onto my XH-A1. This allows the camera to shoot with an extremely shallow depth of field (which means that your subject stays in focus while everything closely in front and behind the subject falls out of focus.)

A while back I had already invested in an XLR field condenser microphone and rode boom for the purpose of capturing higher quality audio while on the run.


Click the above image to check out a larger pic!

This next week is the first shoot. Unfortunately I do not have any light gear and investing in a basic low-quality 3-pointing kit (for film) costs around $2k!!! So, if anyone knows of some place with a better price, let me know, so I can get my boss to make the investment.

Updating My Resume!

Specifically, I've been thinking about revamping my website http://enginpost.com for the purpose of "simplification." The current site is quite busy and filled with a level of detail that is, well, distracting.

I am pondering taking on more side work in my free time, so revamping the site might be the way to go. Here is a shot of the new site.


You can checkout prototype (which does nothing yet) at:

http://enginpost.com/cs

Mobile Games!

Lastly, this one here is a completely new venture for me. At work we are talking about building playable games for mobile devices, but rather than learning proprietary languages for each device we are targeting, we have been looking into both browser-based javascript-driven games as well as flash CS5 mobile game development.

For my first javascript-browser-based game, I decided to attempt to reinvent a classic old-console game. I am not done yet, but so far I have been able to master animating a few bits using HTML, DHTML, CSS and JavaScript, and it works on my iPhone!


If you want to check this out in your browser (or on an iPhone) go to...

http://enginpost.com/bomber/bomber-drop.html

When I complete any games I will be sure and post them here.

iPhone Game Project

My first iPhone game project is underway...



(click the image to make it larger)

Step one is learning all about basic physics and how to pull off physics in Flash. I have so far tackled basic velocity and trajectory along with some collision math (when two or more object bump into each other.)

In the above screen shot you can see an iPhone sized screen with 100 objects bouncing around the screen at random velocity, spinning at random rates, all random sizes and one of three random shapes. Next notice the colors. That is only helpful to me at the moment while I am programming but the color coding goes like this:

• Green: the object recently bounces off of the west wall.
• Yellow: the object recently bounced off of the north wall.
• Orange: the object recently bounced off of the east wall.
• Blue: the object recently bounced off of the south wall.
• Red: Two or more objects recently collided with the object.
• White: the object recently collided with another object but is currently not touching another object nor is it touching an outer wall.

Here is another screen shot with 400 objects all bouncing around the screen!


Almost nothing is anything other than red, meaning that flash is working hard to calculate a whole bunch of collisions. Technically, with 400 objects on the screen that means that Flash would potentially need to calculate 400 x 400 possible combinations of objects colliding. I recently learned a little trick about how to pull this off without demanding that amount of CPU power to collision detection. Basically, in short, I have divided the screen space into a grid and I am only testing for collision against objects that share reasonable proximity. This drastically cuts down on the number of tests. Next I can avoid testing similar converse cases meaning if I test if Object-A and Object-B are colliding then I don't have to test if Object-B and Object-A are colliding (that would be a valid test [permutation], but a redundant one.) That cuts the tests way back again. Finally, to keep track of objects I am sorting them into Vector (or data-type-based) Arrays which just cuts process time for lists of objects to test... in half!

Here is one more screen shot of the same view but with only 25 objects bouncing around...



You can see more colors at work depicting bounce-state in this example since there are fewer collision opportunities.

So, currently there are over 75,000 iPhone apps out there which means there are likely not many more opportunities falling into the "completely unique" category. Whatever game idea this evolves into, well... there will likely already be "an app for that." So I am not worried about competition. I am in search of killer cool ideas. My first game might be something simple like rounds of flying a spaceship through an asteriod field (like this game here) and each new screen would get increasingly more complicated. I have a few ideas for interesting ways to make the effort more challenging using multitouch and the accelerometer (when you tilt the iPhone) , but we will see.

Below is a tweaked version of this for the blog here (only 50 objects set into motion with object collision turned off):

Google Andriod Mobile OS Moves to #2

Phones running on the Google Android operating system just got a promotion in device domination, PC World reports. Just as looming is the news that by 2012 industry analysts are saying that the Apple iPhone will lose market share. Don't obviously cash in your Apple stock yet. The iPhone surely seems to be the trend setting device at the moment and I believe it's a safe guess that we will see more innovations over the next two years.

What is interesting is the proliferation of available mobile software development kits that allow mobile device software developers the ability to more easily build games and applications for these devices.

Of course I would be remiss if I didn't mention the 2010 commitment of Adobe to put its final touches on the coming Flash 10.1 player. Flash 10.1 player will be the first majorly significant move by Adobe to unify the Flash player across desktop and mobile platforms. To the average person, this means, if your phone can see Flash then any Flash on a website you view from your desktop will be fully visible from your mobile device. No more stripped down version of Flash player (i.e. Flash Player Lite) for mobile devices. This also marks the first time Flash will show up on a number of Mobile Operating Systems.

What does this mean for Flash Developers? It means that it is time to get your creative hats on and be ready to invest in building your own mobile applications for sale. Apple has gotten the whole "there's an app for that" right from the beginning of their foray into phone devices. Now Adobe is following close behind with the development tool to end all mobile development tools... Flash CS5!

The web you hold in your hand is about to get a whole lot better!

Flash On The iPhone is (almost) Here!

My dream just arrived! Hot off the press, Adobe has announced that the next version of Flash, Flash Professional CS5, will compile ActionScript 3 Flash projects into iPhone applications distributable via the Apple Store!

Read the press release here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/

Before you jump to conclusions, there is still no Flash browser plugin for Safari in the iPhone. So all of the websites that display Flash are still not going to work on the iPhone (yet.)

So what does this mean for Flash Developers? Well, it simply means that we will be able to create ActionScript 3 projects that can run like iPhone applications. At the moment, we have no way of knowing how much of ActionScript 3 or what techniques outside of scripting will translate to the iPhone. For example, will timeline effects and tweens all translate? Do we have to do anything to optimize graphics for the iPhone? Are their new features that allow Flash for iPhone apps to save data to the iPhone? Can Flash for iPhone apps communicate with web services and retrieve external XML data? Can Flash for iPhone apps communicate with iPhone data and services (like GPS data, photos on the iPhone, the iPhones photo and video camera, phone lists, email, etc.) There are no answers yet. And even if there were, those answers would likely change since Flash CS5 isn't even in beta yet. But this is only going to get more fun.

Recently in the news, Adobe also made an announcement that the new HTC Hero Phone running the Google mobile operating system would have Flash built into it. According to Adobe, while that is only Flash Lite right now, they are throwing their weight behind getting a full Flash player for mobile devices this next year.

It seems that Adobe is completely poised to dominate as the development platform for cross OS mobile device development and that is great news for the many people who have invested in Flash for years. If you are simply someone who is geeked about your iPhone or interactive mobile device, just wait until the Flash development community has at it.

Now, we just need to see more people embrace cloud computing and the world will truly go mobile!

Note: For those of you who start spamming about where I found a picture a Flash for iPhone version of the all-powerful Adobe Kuler application, well... I didn't... it is a mock up I threw together assuming that would be one of the first apps that adobe will likely convert for use on the iPhone. Can you imagine it? Take a picture of something and launch the Kuler application so it can inspect it and create color schemes from the photo!?!?!?