Seb Lee-Delisle

I’ve left it rather late but of course I need to play the game! And it’s the last week for voting so if you’d like to see my session at SXSW please vote for me! I’ve never made it to SXSW before so it’d be great to have the chance to attend.

I think that the open web community has a lot to learn from the creative programming techniques we’ve all been working with in Flash for years, and it’s amazing how easy it is to transfer your knowledge.

So help me to show them how to Flash the open web, and who knows, I may just see you in Texas.

After a short stint back in my home town of Brighton, the seb_ly world tour continues! I’ll be in San Francisco for FITC and I’m really gonna have a hectic time! Here’s what I’ll be up to :

Monday :
10am Flash Games Programming workshop
Back with my full day of Flash games training – what’s not to like?
6pm San Flashcisco Meetup
At the Adobe offices, I’m really pleased I could squeeze in a presentation with my friends Donna and Patience who do a great job running the SF user group.

Tuesday
4pm Interview with Stacey Mulcahey (bitchwhocodes) at the Influxis Voodoo lounge.
Influxis are running they’re own unconference alongside FITC where they’ll have low key sessions from most of the speakers. And there’s free beer! Stacey asked if she could interview me for her session? Hell yeah! She’s such a cool person I love shooting the breeze with her. And I’m sure you’ll get some candid opinions from both of us…

Wednesday
11.15 Main session at FITC – Space Invading
This is my main presentation of the conference. Expect motion detection, previews of new projects and of course a few surprises.

1.10 Zero to Awesome in 30 minutes – Voodoo Lounge session
My plan is to just write some cool code from scratch in 30 minutes. Wanna come tell me what to program?

I’m leaving early on Thursday so I’m going to miss the second half of the day, which is a huge shame. But with so much squeezed in (not to mention the parties) it’s going to be a whistle-stop tour! Come say hi

No sooner than I’ve got back from Kansas City for the excellent D2W event (thanks Dee!), the official seb.ly tour continues! Transatlantic trip #5 of 6 is looming with my third trip to the west coast for FITC San Francisco. And it’s shaping up to be a very special one indeed.

I’m running my very enjoyable Flash games workshop, it’s so much fun and you’ll walk away will several game engines, including asteroids, space invaders, a platform game and a top down racer! And in my presentation I’ll be getting a hold of a drum kit to demo the latest development in my visual sampler experiments.

Legendary Flash superstars such as Yugo Nakamura, Colin Moock and Erik Natzke will be there. And also the best particle guy there is, Robert Hodgin. And as it’s in San Francisco you can be pretty sure that most of the Adobeans will be there, and Kevin Lynch will be presenting.

And now you can get 10% off! Although you have to work for it. You have to learn how to spell my surname – the discount code is Lee-Delisle Add it to the registration form here and I can’t wait to see you there!

What can I say about FlashBelt that hasn’t already been said? It’s such a great conference and Dave did an excellent job yet again.

Sadly I missed a lot of sessions as I had last minute changes to my own presentation, but managed to make it to the classic double act Richard Galvan and Mark Anders presenting the Adobe keynote.

Other notable sessions included Jared Tarbell, with beautiful and inspiring work (he’s laser cutting stone now!) and Jer Thorp sharing his early computing experiences that resonated with my own history. Despite the fact that I missed a lot of presentations, there was such a great vibe and I really enjoying hanging out with good friends, old and new.

As for my session, well not many conference organisers can get you a drum kit at a moment’s notice. Which was just what I needed for my visual sampler (full post coming soon).

I also introduced a new “anti-tween” engine, Tweaser and I’ve opened it up for beta testing. So keep an eye on the next post or two (and my twitter feed) if you’re interested in signing up.

I got some great feedback (thank you!) and I’m glad you enjoyed my new experiments.

The parties were as good as ever, and what FlashBelt would be complete without the obligatory drunk singing at the legendary Nyes piano Karaoke. The same pianist is there every year with the same bawdy humour, the same songs, and the same dodgy viagra jokes. I sometimes feel like his life must be like some crazy booze soaked groundhog day. But I would so miss him if he wasn’t there!

I also had a chance to explore Minneapolis, including the crazy Mall of America where I discovered this highly surreal seat stuck to the wall.

And on Tali’s instructions (whose session was excellent, so I hear), we also visited the architecturally wonderful Guthrie Theater.

There are rumours that this may have been the last FlashBelt, let’s hope not. Either way I’m coming to Minneapolis next year to continue the tradition

Current stop on my world tour is Kansas City for D2W.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’m running 2 days of training in Birmingham (UK) at the end of July, along with my friends at FlashMidlands. And if you book the Super Early Bird tickets (before June 15th), you’ll get both days for only £249! (saving £180 from the full price!) But I’d hurry, these courses usually sell out.

I’ll show you how to get started with Papervision3D and before you know it, you’ll be working with models, texture baking, depth of field particle effects (see image above) and of course, FLARToolkit using SimplAR. I’ll also be revealing many of the optimisation and production techniques behind high quality Papervision3D projects.

On the second day we’re going to look at making Flash games and programming animation, especially concentrating on interactivity, optimisation and making the games feel just right. And you’ll take away the base code for Space Invaders, Asteroids, a top down driving game, 3D soccer shootout, a platform game engine, a simple framework and more!

Naturally I’d encourage you to come to both days, but of course you are free to choose a single day if you prefer. The last course I ran in Brighton got a 97.78% approval rating and you can read more feedback here.

There are very limited super early bird tickets available (only so book now to ensure your space!

I’ve just come back from weeks of travelling, through Amsterdam, San Francisco, Cologne, LA, Stuttgart, New York, Boston, and Cape Cod.

And I’m barely back in the UK for a couple of weeks before going back to the US for FlashBelt in Minneapolis. And I can’t wait! This’ll be my fourth FlashBelt (I think?) and it could just change your life! Yes I know it sounds dramatic, but the truth is that last year, it inspired me to make some huge changes to my professional life, and I’ve benefited massively from it.

FlashBelt is just as big in scope as the large conferences like Flash on the Beach and FITC Toronto, it has 3 tracks, 3 days (plus 1 workshop day) and has all of the top speakers. Except that as there are only 400 or so attendees, it’s really welcoming and inclusive.

Our excellent host Dave Schroeder creates a warm and friendly atmosphere, and all the speakers and deligates happily mingle and share. It’s a genuine community event and Dave is offering a student discount and even a 75% discount to anyone adversely affected by the economic downturn. Get on over and buy yourself a ticket – they may well sell out.

Oh and I think there are still a couple of tickets left for my Flash Games programming workshop!

I’ll then be straight on to D2W – a designer developer workflow conference in Kansas. Every company I’ve ever worked with has massive problems integrating design and development, so it seems like a conference about this could be hugely beneficial.

So come along and find out how we’ve solved many of the problems to create a pretty smooth collaboration between artists and coders at Plug-in.

Later in the year : FITC San Francisco, Flash on the Beach, FlashPitt, Full Frontal, FlashCamps in Birmingham and Manchester

It’s on Thursday! And I’ve only got 4 tickets left! So I’m putting them on sale! YAY! Get your $50 discount by clicking here :

http://flashgamestrainingnyc.eventbrite.com/

And using the discount code “SALE”.

Unsure about whether this training is any good? Here’s what other people have said about it :

“The course was awesome, it was fun and informative. I found the actual code easy enough to understand and all the explanations were in simple plain terms and I left feeling like I learned a lot. Thank you!”

“Seb is a great teacher and somehow has the ablility to make complex concepts seemingly simple and easy to understand. The course is presented in a sociable and relaxed manner and covers a range of classic arcade game examples.”

“I really enjoyed it, the best bit being that it reinvigorated my initial interest in Flash as a platform – it’s great fun.”

Think I cherry-picked the best ones? Then read the FULL and unedited feedback here!

And I’ll see you on Thursday!

Photo : Ned Richards

If you were wondering why I’ve been a little quiet, it’s because I’ve been flying around like a nutter! First I was in Cologne for the brilliant FFK. It was my first time at this conference and I loved it. Marc and Sacha should be proud of their achievements – this was their 10th year and I was massively impressed. And thanks to the Icelandic volcano I was there a little longer than I expected!

Last week I was in LA for reasons that will become clear in a month or so (very exciting!). Then I’m off to Stuttgart tomorrow for the huge motion graphics conference FMX, and then straight of to NYC for Flash and the City, where I’m also running a Flash games programming workshop (only a few tickets left!).

And then I’ll be back for a couple of weeks before flying straight out to FlashBelt in Minneapolis, another fantastic conference where there’s another opportunity to attend my Flash games workshop. Last year, FlashBelt was such a great influence on me that it inspired me to completely change my life. And that’s partly why I’m doing so much travelling this year! Straight after that I’ll be heading off to Kansas City for D2WC where I’ll be sharing valuable information about how we manage the workflow between artists and programmers.

In July I’ll be running more training, this time in Birmingham. I’ll be posting the details here as I get them. Then in August, I’ll be flying out to San Francisco for the newly announced FITC, and that will be my fifth transatlantic flight this year (god help my carbon footprint)! If the Amsterdam event is anything to go by this is definitely worth a visit!

The Birmingham FlashCamp will be in September, followed by Flash on the Beach. If you’ve never been to FOTB before, it’s definitely worth checking out. It’s honestly been getting better and better every year. I’m really looking forward to attending Andre Michelle’s audio workshop. And I’m preparing something very special this year… I wonder if I’ll finally make it into the big room after 5 years?

So that’s how the next few months are looking for me. It’s pretty intense doing all this travelling, but I’m really really enjoying it. Of course it means that doing actual work is difficult, but perhaps that’s just overrated? Let me know if you’ll be at any of these events, it’ll be great to meet you!

I’ve just been told that there are only around 30 tickets left now for FFK in Cologne in three weeks time! It’s the conference from Marc and Sacha who also run the Flashforum; a user group with over 100,000 members! And I thought FlashBrighton was big!

This is my first FFK but I’ve heard great things about it, and there are certainly some incredible speakers there; Andre Michelle, Joa Ebert, Mario Klingemann, Joshua Davis, Chris Pelsor, Jesse Freeman, Ralph Hauwert and many, many more.

I’ll be teaching a day of Papervision training and a day of Flash game programming training, and there are very few tickets left for each of these. See the training page for more info – I’d love to see you there.

UPDATE – HTML 5 Canvas version now online

During my session at the Flash Gaming Summit, I showed a very simple 3D particle renderer to attempt to demystify the process of converting 3D into 2D.

The actual code that converts from 3D to 2D is easy! First you have to figure out how much you have to resize things depending on how far away they are. (ie what their z position is).

newscale = f/(f+z);

Where f is a notional field of view. Changing this will change how wide the (virtual) camera is. A good starting point would be 250. Then you multiply the 3D x and y positions by the newscale to get their 2D x and y positions.

x2d = x3d * newscale; 
y2d = y3d * newscale;

So that’s where we put our particle, in this case represented by a MovieClip that we also need to resize by our new scale :

clip.scaleX = clip.scaleY = newscale;

And then the final thing we need to do is sort by the z position so that particles in front appear above particles in the background.

particles.sortOn("z", Array.DESCENDING | Array.NUMERIC); 
for(var i:int = 0; i< particles.length;i++)
{
	particle = particles[i];
	particleClip.setChildIndex(particle.clip, i); 
}

There’s some other stuff in there too, to create the depth of field blur and also the bitmap trails, but have a look and see what you can do with it.

Download the source code for simple 3D engine.

* I haven’t actually counted the number of lines. I’m guessing it’s about 10.