ricardocabellov5.5

Right, a bit of an update... They have updated the site:

http://www.intel-demoscene.de/2007/flash/
'Press' will be always the same. Mistakes here and there, too many people to move the information 'mouth to mouth' I guess... The worst thing is that the video of Tokyo got desyncronised and I think they recompressed the .mpg video version that crest did that doesn't show properly the refractions of the balls.

Well, I'm used to this kind of things already, mistakes like that always happen and based on my experience about this... the best thing to do is ignore them :)

Regarding work done... not too much, at least not from my side tho. I've been testing some tools that blackpawn is developing but I'm not having much luck, they keep crashing for one reason or another. The music is already selected, so neurokin will be on the music side again :) We should start working this weekend a bit more seriously.

Took a while... but it's finally there. I still want to add some extra stuff to be completely happy with it (swfObject and swfAddress) but the base is done finally.

There are some bits of the making of that I wanted to mention...

As you will see there are a lot of images, so the first thing I wanted to do is optimise the loading of images as best as possible so there isn't too much bandwidth consumption for the iikki and neither for the user. I wanted to do a cache of each image, so the user doesn't have to load the same image twice if he goes back to a section he has been before. For doing this, I found the ImageLoader class from Zeh Fernando that helped a lot. This class creates a bitmapData with each image loaded, so if you have to load the same url again, it will check it and if it was loaded already it will reuse the bitmapData one. It also let me have the images with smooth = true, so every image, even the one in the background should look great ;)

While using the ImageLoader class I found the loadingQueue class which lets you create a list of stuff that needs to be loaded with a priority number. In instance, if you go to the print section, all the images will be loading with priority 3, but if you click in a project to see the details, those images will load with priority 1, so they won't have to wait until all the projects images are loaded to start loading. Just so you get it better, the big background image has priority 5. However, I found a 'bug' on this class and had to spend a bit of time understanding how it worked to fix it. If you deleted any of the containers in the queue list, the system stopped completely. I did an small fix and yesterday I sent it to Zeh, seems like he will update official class with the fix.

Talking about the background, the pixelled image is a 10x7 .gif image, it gets generated automatically with the CMS system using the php GD library when iikki uploads a new background image :) That reminds me, I also did the CMS for the site, and I think I finally got it to the point that it is really easy for me to reuse with any other project :) It's a shame I can't show this part of my work tho :P

And, as last thing to mention... as always, I really wanted to optimise the size of the .swf, in fact the original background for the videoplayer was something like 50kb when iikki sent it to me, I managed to get it down to 500bytes. But there was nothing I can do if the fonts that the site were using were THAT big. If the .swf is 160kb, I think 130kb are only for the fonts. Never did a site where the fonts took that much space :)

Anyway, seems like I'm finally getting some projects done. Now I just hope that iikki can use it for a long time :D

EDIT: Forgot to mention something funny. Although I have a MacBook Pro and a Dell Inspiron 6000, I had to do this site with my iBook g4 which made the process a little bit slow (but it was cool to make sure it would go fast on any computer). I had to use the IBook mainly because I have the mbp at work, and this site was a project done overtime, and because the fonts weren't rendering properly under Windows when compiled.

Dear Mr Miguel,

Thank you for your secure e-message dated 11.05.2007.

The reason you were unable to make a transfer on the 11th was due to the credit paid in on the 09.05.2007 containing a cheque which was not cleared. Therefore on the 11th the funds were not available.

As of today the 12.05.2007 the funds are now available to transfer. If paying in a cheque please be aware that it takes four working days to become available for interest and withdrawal purposes, however, a cheque can be returned unpaid at any time.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact us on ***** ******, which is available 24 hours a day, or via the secure
e-messaging system.

Yours sincerely,

****** M*******
Premier Associate

Seriously, HSBC internet banking rocks. I can pay any bill from there, and I can do any transferm. The interface works really well and I usually have no problems at all. And if I do, I can send an email from the system to ask for help and in the same day or the next day I got the answer. I only have to go to the bank if I have a cheque, but that's it... Oh, they got my surname wrong, but... who cares :)

Using BBVA internet banking is totally different, I'm losing my access to the system because I forget one of the multiple codes and imagine having to call from london to spain to resetup the password. Luckily I don't have to.

I was working on a project these days where I had to get a logo projected on a wall (3d illustration). Instead of asking the client to the logo I decided to try first looking on the internet, as the client/project name is quite famous it was easy to find something. So I had the logo in .SVG, cool! But I needed it on a big bitmap format. What was my surprise that Photoshop CS3 doesn't load .SVG files yet!

Oh well, then I remembered yomizmo talking very well of Inkscape. So, I downloaded it, installed it, no problems at all, and then did the easy task of loading an .SVG file and saving it again to .EPS, so I could load it with Photoshpo and create the big image. Everything worked really well. So, I'll keep it there, and see if I can avoid using Illustrator and using this opensource one instead :)

It took a while, mainly because I was doing 100 things at the same time too, but here we are.

Some links may not work, I've tried to fix all of them but probably I'm missing some, so, if you find a dead link somewhere, please, let me know :)

By now dreamhost seems like is behaving really well. I've heard a lot of people telling bad experiences and the same ammount of people saying that it was good. From my experience so far, is quite good.

As I'm under the Nanika influence daily, I was this weekend wondering if I could reproduce one of their old effects with AS3, I don't know if AS2 would be fast enough for it, but at least AS3 does the trick very well :D

http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/nanika/01/

As soon as I had the effect I tested a bit more and did some other variations:

http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/nanika/02/
http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/nanika/03/
http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/nanika/04/

So, for those with a webcam, here you have a new toy to play with for a while.

Also, if you want to check the source code out, here you have:

http://mrdoob.com/lab/webcam/nanika/ nanika_effect01.fla

Enjoy!

PS: I'm still moving my stuff to the new hosting, mrdoob.com index page should be up soon. Apologies for having everything a bit messed up now...

This is quality!
http://djhoffman.com/hoffandmod-breakinthecity.mp3

Track list
Noisa - Gutterpump : Passenger
Entity - Hell Below : Combat Wax
DJ Isy - No Limit (Hoffman Remix) : Tortured Breaks
Kulture - Right Now (Hoffman Remix) : iBreaks Bass
Grizzla - Conga Bounce : Unstable
Hoffman - Destiny : Unstable
Unknown - The Junglist : Dub Plate
ED209 vs Ken Mac - Wooyeah : Hardcore Beats
Unknown - Streetlife : Crisp Biscuit

I though that may be a nice touch to blog a bit about how's the demo progressing, but even more interesting to make it without spoiling anything, just talking abstract. Not because we think it's going to be the best demo ever, not at all, but because a couple of MSN contacts seem interested in how it's going. So, to save a couple of chatting sessions, here it goes...

We didn't started anything yet. Blackpawn has some effects in the works that may be cool to use here and develop a bit more. At least right now we have more or less decided the style of the prod. From my side I'm looking for a tune to use to fit with the style. I have a folder of tunes to use that the authors gave me the freedom of using them at some point.

There are tunes in that folder which are *really* old but I still want to do a demo with them... it's just lack of resources / time.

By the end of today I should have the tune selected and we should start producing something tomorrow (although I'm going out to a Border Community night today and may be wasted tomorrow...)

I like a couple of tunes for the style, one of them is a Neurokin's one, which would be cool to use as the demo that we used to enter in the competition was Tokyo which was a blackpawn/trace/neurokin prod. The other tunes, I won't say the author yet as the musics are released and won't like to spoil anything ;)  However, each one inspire me very different concepts. I may get a couple and start demos with them and then see which one got released at Intel / Euskal / Assembly ;)

I don't think I'll be able to do that many demos and also having some freelance work to do. Well, we'll see...

UPDATE: Oh! I just received the briefing for it. Deadline is July 1st. And there is some details that may change what we had in mind. Running time is 3 minutes, so this changes the music selection a bit now :P

http://intel-demoscene.de/

:S!

Now you know who will get the last position :P

Long time without doing any experiment with PV3D, right? Here we're back again... New experiment! with 4 variations.

*A webcam is needed this time*

http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/webcam/t1
http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/webcam/t2
http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/webcam/t3
http://mrdoob.com/lab/pv3d/webcam/t4

if you only see black and you have a webcam, right click anywhere in the flash, go to settings > webcam and make sure you are using there the correct one.

For the ones that doesn't have a webcam, here are some pics of what is all about (although a video would be better).







Thanks to Andreas Müller for the inspiration and to David Singleton for testing it.

Enjoy!