Rostislav added a sample for his excellent SWFAddress kit using the new YouTubeAPI and deep linking to parts of the video. Part of the YouTubeAPI is by Geoff Stearns (the creator of SWFObject who works at YouTube now) and allows much more script control and embedding of the youtube player (chromeless with just the video canvas).

The sample Rostislav at Asual has, shows how you can incorporate SWFAddress now that the youtube player can be embedded by script, and thus how it can have deep-linking to sections of the video from the url.

So, today I spent some time trying to integrate SWFAddress with the sample YouTube video and the result is now available online. There were some tricky parts and probably the code can be encapsulated better, but overall I’m satisfied with the result. Every pause action or significant jump in the playback produces a deep link which will definitely make sense for long videos or specific scenarios. If you want to automatically start the video from the second verve just try this deep link. For this case I decided that it will be better to disable the generation of browser history and the SWFAddress strict mode.

The sample is available in the SWFAddress repository and will become a part of the upcoming 2.1 release.

The cool part about all this is is makes it extremely easy to add commenting at moments in time throughout youtube videos, enables deep-linking, allows snapshots of not just the flash application but also the video that might be playing in that chapter. This is done on services like viddler and others but now you can do it for youtube videos and this will also possibly start a standard way to do this across media players so that a platform of video commenting emerges.

The integration of SWFAddress is simple, on the normal onSWFAddressChange you just pass in the value to the seekTo call:

function onSWFAddressChange(event) {
  time = seek = parseInt(event.value);
  ytplayer = document.getElementById('myytplayer');
  ytplayer.seekTo(time, true);
 }

Google video always had jump to time params like:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5830318882717959520#01m30s (this is a classic/hilarious Erlang video)

…but this is not very workable with the google video player, also you can always add this to other players but having this ability for youtube is a great leap in allowing a more integrated commenting, chapter and community like feel to video.

Since youtube is so big finally having some more control with the YouTubeAPI will allow much more great additions to the capabilities of using youtube video in many more ways and integration of more great javascript kits like SWFAddress.

The YouTube API is really quite useful. Here are some links of interest:

• Sample Javascript Chromeless Player
• Actionscript Sample Code Loading Chromeless Player

Just got word of this great isometric engine similar to the Alternativa engine or zenbullets but with plans for open source. I checked out the demos and it looks well done and is pretty responsive. Once you get to heavy lighting it can draw a little slow (the cowboy becomes more John Wayne like with slow drawls) but this seems like a great base for an isometric AS3 engine.

The author, who is currently anonymous, describes it as:

The FFilmation Engine is an AS3 isometric programing engine, focused mainly on game development. The aim of the project is providing a robust development platform, where game designers can work on the game’s details and forget about the render engine. It is intended to be really usable from a “real production scenario” point of view.

Unfortunately there is no name associated with the project yet, I think it would be wise to let that be known. The author has some info on the level structure of files and 3 great demos.

Here are some features and plans for the engine:

• Have a programming interface as small and easy as possible, no matter how complex the internal code is. From a software engineering point of view, the OO structure may not be as correct and clean as it could have been. It is not messy, but several decisions where made that improved performance and simplicity at the cost of breaking some “good OO programming” conventions.
• Rendering performance is a major concern when designing all the algorythms. Some of them have been rewritten 4 o 5 times from scratch until one fastest enought was found. If it doesn’t perform well, it is not usable. We’ve all seen several impressive actionscript demos that look really cool and invite to be used in your next project. But then if the effect takes 90% of your CPU, you can’t build anything on top of that.
• Graphic designers should be able to work on the application’s ( game or not ) environments without any programming skills, visually, and with almost immediate previews of what they are doing. Using the engine should be fun to some degree. If you have this terrific engine and adding a wall to your dungeon means you have to write 10 lines of OO gibberish, lazyness will eventually win you over. If art directors can draw and place the walls and lights an floors and enemies and see them appearing onscreen, you have more chances of reaching your deadline.
• Flash has built-in drawing and animation tools. You should be able to take advantage of them !!

All this is important because in reality projects depend on limited resources. Resources are money and time, but also the enthusiasm of indie developers or single individuals doing stuff “for fun” in their bedrooms. Projects, specially the “for fun” ones, have more chances of completion if the production process is gratifying to some degree.

Here’s a list of highlited features:

• One engine capable of handling several isometric scenes of different complexities.
• Create scenes from human-readable XML definitions, allowing easy edition of the scene’s topology and contents
• Graphic media can be split into several external resources and loaded when an scene needs them
• Flat textures. Paint your grahics directly into flash. Walls, floors and celings are edited as 2D graphics and projected by the engine. Elements and animated characters can be animated via flash timeline, no need for complex programming.
• Dynamic lighting, global lighting, real-time shadow projection. Multiple lights from multiple sources affecting the same objects.
• Bump-mapped surfaces. Still somehow buggy and a serious performance killer, but already there.
• An extendable material interface. MovieClip materials, autotiled materials, procedural materials.
• Automatic zSorting of all surfaces and objects
• Built-in collision detection. No need to program complex coordinate comparisions, simple listen to COLLISION events generated by the engine.
• Basic AI API helpers such as “is character A visible from character B’s position ?”

I plan to make the engine open-source, but I’ll wait until I have a release “solid” and documented enough.

I am looking forward to more updates and to find out more about the author. We have some great engines underway in ’08 for AS3 and it looks to be a very fun year in that aspect.

Because it is an isometric engine is is not true 3d but sprite based animation. However with planes and objects other isometric 3d objects can be built such as walls, boxes, buildings, cubes, etc. I wonder if there are any toolkits being used or if this is all custom built?

Keep your eye on this space. It is very similar to the Alternative Engine.

Here are all the Demos:

• Example 1
• Example 2
• Example 3

And some docs on the architecture:

• Documentation
  • 1. Design
  • 2. Usage
    • Material How-To
    • Object How-to
    • XML Definitions
    • XML Scenes
  • 3. API

Check it out!

Colin Moock an actionscript brain since the great Flash 4 advances that brought all sorts of fun to flash, like games, has mentioned XFL an open format for flash from a discussion with Adobe product managers.

This would be a format that would be able to import, export and allow compile to SWF. MXML for Flex does this now but bringing the two together into one common format and allowing for all sorts of open source and third party contributions to making flash will let it literally explode in support.

I recently met with Flash authoring product-manager, Richard Galvan, to talk about Diesel, the next version of Flash (i.e., Flash CS4, or version 10 for those counting). Adobe has already demonstrated a bunch of high-impact features for Diesel, including inverse kinematics, a new tweening model, 3D “postcards in space”, and advanced text components (see MAX 07 keynote, FOTB 07 keynote, and FITC Amsterdam 08 keynote). But Richard was keen to talk about a lesser known feature quietly percolating behind the scenes: XFL.

Since its inception, the Flash authoring tool has stored documents in a binary source-file called .fla. Historically, interchanging source with the Flash authoring tool has been virtually impossible for third-party software because the specification for .fla has never been public. But things are changing in the next version of Flash. Flash CS4 will be able to export *and* import a new source format called XFL. An XFL file is a .zip file that contains the source material for a Flash document. Within the .zip file resides an XML file describing the structure of the document and a folder with the document’s assets (graphics, sounds, etc). The exact details of the XFL format are not yet available, but Richard assures me that Adobe intends to document them publicly, allowing third-party tools to import and export XFL.

If this is a market test or check of interest I think that everyone I know working with flash would be very excited about opening and unifying the flash format and allowing great IDEs and tools to help produce better flash content more quickly. Also, with the competition Silverlight using XAML (uncompressed) this also allows a competitive advantage maybe making Silverlight add better compression and loading tools beyond their downloader object.

I hope this is also in the plans for Director. If they used similar formats it could be very nice and something to watch as an emerging market to prepare for.

Read the full post at moock.org

Paul Spitzer has been updating the animasinteractive paradox FPS engine for flash with some great new additions and more about the engine capabilities. I think you will be blown away again by this engine.

Paul has added proximity objects which are key elements of online multiplayer games for networking (distance based messaging and events) as well as fun stuff like proximity mines as demoed. Get over there and check it out the best, quality FPS engine yet in flash continues.

The lighting, textures, effects, HUD, all look excellent.

This is in flash, a paradox indeed.

Wow. This new away3d demo of a temple and FPS movement in Flash9 AS3 rivals that of the paradox engine in pv3d.

Both are extremely smooth movement and great looking textures, both of these efforts are amazing for Flash is at this level. I would say Paul Spitzer’s paradox papervision3d based engine is still a little more responsive and the textures have such good baked lighting that is is very smooth (he posted recently on some internals and usages of media in the engine). But from these two engines and iterations you can see that the FPS engine in Flash is not too far off.

Although there used to be crashes with away3d it has really improved and this is very smooth. My processor was actually quite chillin’ with all the software rendering carpet bombing from software rendered 3d in flash. But it really is starting to get much better with optimizations to flash this year and papervision, away3d and sandy getting more mature and further iterated to greatness.

The away3d sample if you walk through the rooms also has an interactive button, opening doors, room transitions (and if these are dynamic) a decent room engine with pretty sweet load times since the whole thing is under 300k.

This is a bit off the online games department (although Havok was part of Director previously) but they are offering Havok physics core engine, the one that runs many great games including Half-Life 2 family, free. This is truly amazing Havok was the best and probably still is the best 3d physics engine for so long but was so freaking expensive it made it unattainable to anyone without probably close to half a million for budget. I think they are either getting heat from competition or they realize the importance of allowing communities to see what they can do with something, then coming along for the ride rather than being a wall that they have to go around. (of course this leads to bigger license fees once someone is established and can afford it).

They say exactly this here:

Havok’s core platform, Havok Complete combines the industry-leading Havok Physics engine and Havok Animation, the company’s premier character animation solution. Havok Complete is already the most popular solution in the cross-platform AAA games market, featuring technology used in over 200 games. By making Havok Complete for the PC freely downloadable, Havok will further build on its leading position by completely removing the barriers to entry for the large number of independent developers, academic institutions and enthusiasts in the PC space.

I always encourage products and people making any sort of toolkit, engine, application or library to offer it free or a portion of it free to get people hooked, and then as skills are acquired, they are then completely sold in. It is a bit of a play on the old piracy market where applications become so rampant that everyone uses them for years, then they recommend them at work and the growth of this type of marketing is long-term. Windows and Photoshop both got their market shares this way, they will never admit this though but I digress.

I am so excited by this news. It is interesting that the next version of Director, Director 11 was recently announced and it NO LONGER uses the Havok 3d physics engine but the AGEIA PhysX due to it being free (although the source license is still 50k).

I currently use Irrlicht and AEGIS, or ODE (open source physics engine – open dynamics engine) for pc based game development and physics fun. I will have to read the Havok license carefully but just getting your hands on this will be beneficial to all aspiring game developers.

Now if only game companies like Epic, Artificial Studios, and others would do the same, hrm…

One item of note is that it won’t be available until May.  I can imagine that the developers are like “ok well give me a few months to clean up all the code and cuss words from the source” j/k.  Let’s hope this release is not on Valve Time.

Get your game on!

Here is a well done game based on the popular Line Rider phenomenon, only this one is Line Golf and it is using the APE AS3 2D Flash Physics Engine. I am sure game sites are just as excited as game developers like myself about the prospects of games that are more dynamic and fun and even 3d with the flash kits of today all thanks to the power of AS3.

Play Line Golf at Candy Stand

This was posted on the APE Google Group where onedayitwillmakeit explains more on how he modified APE for use in the game.

Just recently through the holidays Degrafa has made some great strides as a very cool SVG pathing and designers toolkit for Flex. I have to say some recent Flex apps have really looked good like Picnik and Buzzword but this kit looks to clean up the lack of design and default style-itis that has plagued most common Flex Apps.

This so far looking like a pretty strong kit for bringing the designer pipeline into Flex to provide some really nice looking web styled apps. It has a direct crossover to Silverlight and Path objects that are largely just a series of data created in Expression or exported from Illustrator into XAML. The one benefit of Flex/Flash is it compiles to a very small SWF where with Silverlight you have to package the XAML in a zip and use the downloader object to extract it out. These XAML files and Paths can get massive as I am sure the ones for Degrafa will for Flex but the compile option is nice as it is compressed heavily.

All about Degrafa

• Degrafa Samples
• Degrafa at Google Code
  
• Announcement of Code Availability (1/4/08)

Yes the launch includes shiny buttons…

Sphere Sample (right click for source)

Also, it appears it is a way to bridge the pathing and pipeline for flash or Silverlight. At one of the contributors blogs they mention this:

We have lot of interesting features planned for the coming releases. There is also a converter app that will be made available for converting the juicy Degrafa graphics to XAML.

Degrafa has gone live.

Developing…

Here is an interesting look to start the new year at Google Trends for some common keywords to this blog audience. Comparing AS2, AS3, Silverlight and actionscript you can see that there is some pretty interesting things happening.

as3

as2

actionscript

silverlight

First off, AS2 and AS3 are clouded because they are also related to EDI and EDI-INT so they get a bit inflated. Silverlight though is pretty unique in the naming. So from this graph we can see this happening:

• Silverlight and AS3 are growing rapidly
• Silverlight is crossing over as3 or meeting it
• The market looking for Silverlight is about 8-10 times as large as actionscript/as3/as3
• Silverlight and AS3 are growing, AS2 has no growth left and is an EOL language (end of life)
• AS2 (even with crossover to EDI trends for “as2″) leveled out, where AS3 is starting to lift to a larger market. This is strongly due to it being a fun language based on ES4 and interests programmers.
• The as3 effect started right in March-April 2007 (hrm I started this blog in April 2007 coincidenc? j/k )

Another chart including Flex shows a better picture of the keyword wars between flex and silverlight.

as3

as2

actionscript

silverlight

flex

So from this graph we can see this happening:

• Flex has a large buzz
• Adobe’s marketing efforts are many while silverlight is more unique and focused
• Flex, as3 and Silverlight are popular, and growing in their support (the growth market for technology is in these areas, not in tech from Flash 8/as2)
• AS2 still taking a nosedive

Flash and Flex programmers and designers should know that with Silverlight 2.0 release coming and the capabilities of Silverlight 2.0 more competitive, flashers should be working on Flex, Flash9 or at least AS3 if not Flex. The RIA competition market will heat up immensely this year with Silverlight 2.0 and possibly Flex3 and coding and programming for Flash and Flex is becoming more involved. It also has a very strong competitor in Silverlight 2.0 coming that will drive this market.

This is all great news if you are ready for it, if you are still coding actionscript2 (AS2) and paying no mind to Silverlight, Flex or at least actionscript3 (AS3) then you will see your market slowly start to fade as things are ramped up and more of a programming focus in the vector wars. If you are a flash coder and ignoring Silverlight, your solutions will suffer. If you are a silverlight coder or .NET coder and ignoring the Flex and AS3 rise your solutions will suffer. I have been playing in AS3, Flex and Silverlight for over a year on both now and they are an entirely new platform with great programming models. The competition puts focus on this market so it is a great time to be skilled in these areas.

Great news! Polygonal Labs has released the long awaited Motor Physics engine. It is now called Motor2.

UPDATE: Now hosted at Google code

Project hosted at code.google.com/p/motor2
License: New BSD License

After the port of Box2DFlashAS3 appeared the fate of Motor Physics engine was unknown. But with time and just before the stroke of midnight on the final hour of 2007 Michael Baczynski released Motor2 2D physics engine on the world.

This now gives us, count them, FOUR AS3 Physics engines that were released in 2007 in order of release.

• APE
• FOAM
• Box2DFlashAS3
• Motor2 (based on Box2d as well)

Be sure to check the demos of Motor Physics:

• 200 stacked boxes
• polygon soup (this one flows like water)
• compound shapes

To get the source head on over to the blog and in the post it is in the first para.

Currently you can get the source for the preview here.

Polygonal always has such great information and demo write ups the source link gets lost in there. Hopefully this will be at Google code soon or a public SVN. The code looks great and there are optimizations in there but even those are elegant.

With 3 excellent flash as3 3d engines (papervision3d, away3d, sandy), 4 physics engines, lots of great utilities like FZip or ASZip, AlivePDF, Red5, haXe etc etc. 2008 is looking like it will be a great year for performance, optimization and gaming/app platforms on the web like never before seen. I am most looking forward to the coming gaming market for flash, lots of possibilities. With the added competition from Silverlight, much innovation will happen here.

It is great that Motor2, which has a great author and dedicated to performance has joined the physics engine scene, not only that posting on new years eve. Thanks to all that make the flash platform possible of creating excellent new fun and useful tools.

UPDATE: Now hosted at Google code

Project hosted at code.google.com/p/motor2
License: New BSD License