ricardocabellov5.5

What a name, uh? Well, after finding this tutorial/paper on friday I spent quite a lot of hours implementing it to my 3dengine in flash. I've to say that there are a couple of bugs on that tutorial (but I won't say which one are :D). Also I had to find a way to implementing 4Dmatrices and Vectors to the code (as Actionscript doesn't have them). So, yeah... 'Now with camera' may sound simple, but isn't (atleast for me).

Again, a bit of history. All this started when Gargaj sent me 2 years ago (?) a .fla with a 3D test he did. It was just a cube (kocka in hu) rotating, with circles on the dots. Starting from there I got interested on it, and learnt all the theory behind the 3dengines and wrote from scratch a new engine which I decided to call it kocka as a tribute to the original kocka.fla :)

So, well, now it has a camera... the controls aren't done properly yet, I'm trying to find the way of doing quake-like camera control, I guess it will take a bit more of time :)

However I guess I'll stop the dev of it with AS2 and move it to AS3... I'm really looking forward to see what's the improvement in this example :D

Unzipping a .RAR file from a network drive:

- -
Internet Explorer
This page has an unspecified potential security risk.
Would you like to continue?

Yes/No
- -

Exscuse me?! Ok, how do I uninstall this? I also go the felling that I lost 1 file because this.

Althought this is going to be one of those noise posts (as thousands of people will write one like this), I think the news is too good that I have to.

Adobe has finally released their Flash player for Linux. That means a lot of expansion (and also some people won't be able to complain whenever I try to show them my stuff done with flash9 :P)

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

PS: Oh, looks like M$ released IE7 too, but... who cares?

Tdsb (The demoscene savers bridage) doesn't rest! Meanwhile other people is trying to fuck the scene tdsb encourages the spanish sceners to release a good-enough production for bcnparty. In critical cases is when you can see what the people is really after, and this time we have finally a clear example. I can tell you that a lot of people is saying 'Finally! Now it's clear that I wasn't the bad one here'. So now, having the cancer finally out of the scene and playing games with people of his mental level, we can now concentrate and do good stuff again o/

The fist step for this new period starts with Timescratchers winning the demo compo. To be honest, the level of the compo wasn't actually great, but was good enough. One of tdsb members (sole) spent a lot of her free time developing the base for a new version of escena.org. As promised, just after the winners were announced at bcnparty, tdsb informed to the organisers that escena.org v2 was up! In a very basic form (news, people, forum, chat), but as a great base and very easy to update and improve.

Yesterday was a very important day for the spanish demoscene.

At this point most of you probably saw the demo, but just in case... oh well.. a little bit of background first ;) This weekend we went to sundown06. A tiny (but great) party held in Budleigh Salterton, a tiny town by the beach in the area of Devon (South West England). This is probably the longest travel we've done in UK by now, and it was absolutelly great. Everyone there was VERY polite and it felt like a normal town in Spain, where when you walk around the streets you say Hello to the people you met, doesn't matter if you know eachother or not.

I was working on a demo for it, but I had something like 6% of the demo, and I wasn't really going to finish it. So, I decided to do another one a little bit easier using a program that Jull showed me a couple of weeks ago (Mudbox). So I spent friday night, and Saturday working on it. It was a shame that I was that busy because I wasn't able to listen properly what Mark Shuttleworth (the guy behind Ubunu) was talking about. Yes, the guy behind Ubuntu ;), for some reason he was there proposing to the sceners to create demos for the login screen/loading bar of Ubuntu. If you take a look at Ubuntu screensavers you won't be that much surprised. As I said, it was a small party, but it was super cool to see Navis/asd, Smash/flt and Mark Shuttleworth having a chat just in front of you. Isn't it really cool? Again, a shame I was busy doing the demo... However, I think that all that unsocial time it was worth. Here it's the demo:

mudballs / xplsv



Download options:
Realtime (Win32) version
.MOV H264 video version
pouet.net profile
xplsv.tv profile

There was this guy on Domestika asking if it was possible to convert a .EXE (which is actually a Flash) to .FLA again.

I had a similar problem some time ago when doing Rolf Harris website. We didn't have any rules for storing the files at Spring by that time, and one of the results was losing the .FLA for the homepage flash. Luckily Sothink SWF Decompiler did the job well. It added a little bit of crap but it was quite reusable.

However, in this case, the guy was asking for an .EXE (Windows projector) decompiler, and I never saw that option with the program. So, I had a fast thought about how to fix the problem, and applying what I learnt with Madgoblin's steganography I had a little hack for it in a couple of minutes. So, in case anyone elses need it, here you have:

EXE2SWF

I've tried it with a couple of .EXEs and it works. Let me know if it doesn't with yours.

Hehehe, yep, finally moving to AS3. So, I didn't know a better way to start learning the new changes than porting one of the olschool effects that I did with AS2.

See it on movement here.

AS3 gave something like 5 more fps to the effect, but as you can see it's still slow. If you think you can make it faster:

Download the sources from here.
(You may want to delete anything fps related first)

PS: Should I have to say that the texture is from the demo Second Reality?

... but still logging.

After writting the last post and reading all the feedback/comments on it, I decided that I had to stop doing that. Writting about my ideas and what I think is hard in the way that I have to spend a lot of time writting and rewritting in order to make my point clear. And even spending all that time It doesn't end up clear nough and I've to spend more time trying to explain it on the comments.

Right, that fact made me think that it just doesn't worth it. And also I'm starting to hate the blogging thing seriously. So, forget about more posts about myself, or about how do I think about something, forget about posts doing a report about an event, forget the joke prods, also forget about the posts with demoscene gossips, even the ones telling you about something cool... none of those!

This is not a blog anymore, this is a work log. I'll post about anything I do, anything I create, and I'll keep the 3 egos, in fact I'll create a new one with my real name, and I'll move all those -personal- posts that I don't want to keep doing to this new 'ego'.

I'm sorry if someone thinks is a bad idea, but I just don't feel doing that anymore... the human part of me says bye :) If you ever want to know something personal. just ask, you know how.

Nice post title, isn't it? ;)

Since a couple of years ago I had the opportunity of having very interesting chats with very experienced people. I guess that's how I educated myself (as I didn't go to uni). When I was 18/19 for example I used to hang around with God/Ozone which was the first person that illustrated me how things can be different and he encouraged me to think about everything, Now I think that I really owe him a lot of how I am. Unfortunately I've no idea of where he is now.

And yesterday I had another opportunity like that one as I went to 'drink a couple' with Simon Whittaker (which, along Kerry Harper, is running Spring Digital) to a new pub/japanese bar around Marylebone (which btw is absolutely brilliant!!).

So, yeah, we were mainly trying to think -out of the box- about the business, which actually is a bit hard to do sometimes as you need to concentrate too much if you want to be up-to-date, and one of the most interesting things he said was that nowadays there is that hype about 'accessibility', following standards and blahblah... It was no more than a couple of sentences, which I'll extend a little bit now.

There is a lot of people defending it and always thinking about it. One of the problems of 'accessibility' is that it usually goes back 10years, in a way that if you wanted to do a COOL website, you would say, ok, let's see what we can do with flash... oh wait! flash is not accessible, right, let's do it in HTML then... oh, but now we can't have those nice panels moving anymore. Oh well, but it's accessible! thousands of people would be able to access it! even from a washing machine!

Thousands of people? Do you think that thousands of people would like to see a boring website like this one? Ok, let's create an hypothetic case and put some numbers to make it more clear.

We have 100 possible users, 75 of them have flash. The comparison would be something like that:

Accessible website
100 possible users, however only 25 users went to the site and they didn't told to their friends because it was just plain, and well... just another site...

Flash website
75 possible users, 65  users went to the site because a friend of them told them it was so cool.

Now, you have to think that if you do an e-shop for a client. The client ONLY WANTS TO SELL MORE. And using the numbers from the example, it's probably more likely that the client will sell more with the flash website than with the accessible website. So, as you can see, the accessible site ends up being the less accessible site :D (for the client)

Do you want an example now? I'll tell you one which isn't even done with Flash! Here you have!

It's not accessible, but, who cares? It's doing the business it's supposed to do, and a clear example is that I'm sharing the link with you ;)

What a silly bug made me lose quite a bit of time!!!

Ok, If you were planing of doing a game controled by the keyboard for Flash player 8 you'll find a little BIG issue. Using this code:

var keyListener:Object = new Object();
keyListener.onKeyDown = function() {
    trace("PRESSED -> Code: "+Key.getCode()+" ASCII: "+Key.getAscii()+" Key: "+chr(Key.getAscii()));
};
keyListener.onKeyUp = function() {
    trace("RELEASED -> Code: "+Key.getCode()+" ASCII: "+Key.getAscii()+" Key: "+chr(Key.getAscii()));
};
Key.addListener(keyListener);

Then, if you doing this sequence:
1. Press DOWN  (40)
2. Press RIGHT (39)
3. Release RIGHT (30)
4. Release DOWN (40)

You'll get this result exporting to with Flash player 7:
PRESSED -> Code: 40    ASCII: 0    Key:
PRESSED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:
RELEASED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:
RELEASED -> Code: 40    ASCII: 0    Key:

However, with Flash player 8 player you'll get this:
PRESSED -> Code: 40    ASCII: 0    Key:
PRESSED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:
RELEASED -> Code: 39    ASCII: 0    Key:

As you can see, Flash player 8 forgets which Keys you pressed as soon as you press another one, but without releasing the previous ones. Which may cause that your ship goes down automaticly.

Well, atleast looks like they've fixed this issue already in Flash player 9.