ricardocabellov5.5

From here...

".xap" files (pronounced "zap") use the standard .zip compression algorithm to minimize client download size. A "hello world" .NET Silverlight application (built using VB or C#) is about 4KB in size.

If a "hello world" takes 4KB already, what a real application would take? A "hello world" in AS3 seems to be 400bytes btw, a 10%.

Lots to do M$, lots to do...

While chatting with Iq yesterday, he came up with what I think its the perfect explanation for the issue.

People that moan about the demoscene dying coincidentally haven't released a serious production for a while, which means that somehow they lost the interest or the energies. Whether it's because personal issues, lack of time, lack of ideas, or just laziness, doesn't matter.

So, basically, the demoscene isn't dying, neither will ever die. If you think the demoscene is dying you better start working on your next demo, otherwise don't annoy the others with your pesimistic view :)

End of the story.

And now... for something completely different, a personal post.

I have to travel from St James Park tube station to Old Street tube station every day. The trip is about 20 minutes or so.

I have tried to read books on the time but there is no way I can remember what was I was reading on the previous trip, so I gave up on that. Also got tired of playing java games on my mobile.

So, as there is always a newspaper on a seat or the floor, I end up checking out a bit the sensationalist news of the day. On the morning there are mainly 2 newspapers: Metro (which is nasty, focusing on dead people and gossip) and City A.M (which never find). On the afternoon there is another newspaper which I usually find more interesting: TheLondonPaper.

I usually don't care about the news in the world, don't watch TV at all, as doing this lets me easily focus on my stuff. However, there is something I like from newspapers and are the comic strips. The fact that there is someone on the background everyone trying to think about something funny is admirable. Unfortunately the ones at Metro aren't really outstanding, don't even remember any now.

BUT, there is one comic strip that amazes me everyday, and it's the Em one. I find it funny how the author makes fun of male/female behaviours (specially the female ones). So, as like everyone, what I want is to be happy, every afternoon, on my way home, the first thing I do is to check her new cartoon. Then read the news of the day, and at the end of the trip I read the cartoon again.

I even wrote her to ask if she had an archive online with all the cartoons, and... good news, she does :)

http://www.emcartoons.com/

So yeah... Thanks Em! Keep it up! :D

By the way, the Omnipresent (the one on the top of hers in the newspaper is simple rubbish, I don't understand how he come it is still on top).

It was already released 10 days ago, but I wasn't able until today to really use this:

Contextual generators (Ctrl+Shift+1) for getter/setter, event listeners, override methods, interface implementation, unknown var/method

I don't know how could I done anything in this world without that!! ;D

Thanks!

http://hangar18.campus.luth.se/bitjam/bitjam_21.mp3

It sounds a little bit like Borat speaking, but if you can get the thought out of your mind and concentrate on what he says, it is a good explanation.

http://www.kokoromi.org/fez/

"When those who are on the top look down, all they see is shit. When the people from the bottom look up, all they see is assholes."

Found it here.

The classic question on interviews lately is "What would you ask Adobe to improve on the Flash player?". Well, I finally have a real thing to ask the guys and is to give some love to graphics.beginBitmapFill.

Since the beginning there were 2 ways of rendering your 3d scene in flash.

1. Render everything in a single Sprite / MovieClip.
2. Create a Sprite / MovieClip for each triangle or Mesh.

The second option was the most useful because you had easily properties such as opacity and even blending as Sprite/MovieClip have already those properties, but, performance-wise, option 1 was the winner hands down. So, as people wants speed, some engines have gone through the option 1 and then spent time trying to find ways to hack the properties that you get for free with option 2.

If you take a look on the drawTriangle loop inside Papervision3d in instance you'll find this:

graphics.beginBitmapFill( altBitmap ? altBitmap : bitmap, _localMatrix, tiled, smooth);

I even had to do a hack for a project where in order to be able to change the opacity of one material dynamicaly I had to generate an array of bitmapDatas with the original texture with different levels of transparency... nasty!

Wouldn't it be great if you could tell the amount of opacity and which blending to use to the beginBitmapFill?

I'm finding this code.google thingie quite handy for handling all my open source stuff. Recently I've updated the videoplayer quite a bit and I was now updating the pv3d previewer...

So, keep an eye on the link cos it will be heavily updated (specially the svn repository) from now on:

http://code.google.com/p/mrdoob/

If there is something I hate from the daily work with AS3 is the annoying #1010. It makes the compiler sound arrogant, what?

To me it looks like:
"There is something wrong there, but I won't tell you what it is... cold cold cold warm warm super warm!"

It's like if it was in a constant puzzle game.

Well, to be fair, it kind of says WHERE, but it would be much helpful if it said WHAT was the term.