Seb Lee-Delisle

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!

As cool as bell-bottom pants according to Keith Peters! Which is pretty damn cool. And it can be really fiddly setting up the FLARToolkit, so I’ve finally released some of my AR code. Just in time for it to go out of fashion.

It uses the Alchemy branch of the FLARToolkit and includes everything you need to get up and running. It also has a very optimised automatic threshold adjustment system that takes virtually no extra processor time.

Here’s a quick intro :

It’s easy to use, there’s just one class. And I’ve also included swc files for the FLARToolkit Alchemy branch and the latest revision of Papervision2.1. You just need to extend the class and override the add3DObjects function.

package ly.seb.simplarexamples
{
	import ly.seb.simplar.SimplarBase;
	import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.Sphere;
 
	[SWF (width="640", height="480", backgroundColor="0x000000",frameRate="30")]	
 
	public class AR_Sphere extends SimplarBase
	{
 
		override public function initialise() : void
		{
 
			var sphere : Sphere = new Sphere(null, 40); 
			sphere.rotationX =  90; 
			sphere.z = -50; 
 
			//add it into the container that is updated 
			//relative to the pattern marker
			container.addChild(sphere); 
 
		}
 
	}
}

Check out the screencast below to see how to use a custom marker, handle when the pattern is lost and found, and load a 3D model in.

You can check out the project from my googlecode repository at : http://code.google.com/p/sebleedelisle/

There area couple of extra things I’d like to add to the code, at the moment the size is fixed at 640×480 and the image is not mirrored; both things I would like to fix in the future.

I’d like to thank thesven.com for his FLARToolkit Alchemy code that saved me masses of time! Thanks also to Jesse Freeman and Kyle Kellogg for helping me test this.

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!

On Tuesday night I did a last minute ad hoc presentation to FlashBrighton to share the experiments I’ve done with the microphone capabilities of FlashPlayer 10.1. You should be able to see the recording at live.flashbrighton.org (if it’s not there, bear with us while we try to get it working). Click “media” to see the available videos.

I had a lot of fun and there were actually 85 people watching the live stream and heckling me (including Lee Brimelow and John “Flash on the Beach” Davey), which I really enjoyed, despite my feigned irritation.

I explained exactly how audio works, what it means when we see a wave form, and how that gets turned into audio that we can hear. And then I showed that a waveform gets all jumbled up when you mix sounds, but our brain can still separate it all.

Then I showed how simple it was to make a sine wave tuned to concert A, 440 Hz. And then we mixed in the C above it to make a two note chord. Here’s the code for that :
Read the rest of this entry »

Original Photo : PhotoCapy

I’ve been playing with the Flash microphone input to record and playback multiple tracks. I thought it’d be really easy, but sadly it’s been really really tricky. The main problem is to do with knowing exactly when data from the microphone was recorded, particularly relative to when some audio was played!

I could write a lengthy blog post about it, but instead, I’ll just be presenting my findings, along with source code, at FlashBrighton tonight. If you’re not in Brighton you can watch at live.flashbrighton.org. Sorry for the short notice, I’m covering for someone who had to pull out at the last minute.

It should be recorded but I’m not sure how quickly we’ll be able to post it so I’d recommend you watch it live if you can. It starts at 7.15pm GMT.

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 written a post for Influxis explaining how we used their TVStation app, to broadcast Branden Hall’s remote Hype presentation last week.

Streaming a remote presentation with TVStation