I'm happy to announce my company, DNBmedia, is looking for a new team member! DNBmedia is based in Amsterdam, where we build lot's of cool stuff! Papervision3D, Paperworld3D, Red5, AIR, all the stuff you read here and a lot's of other cool technologies. Since our commercial work has multiplied we are in need of a new team member.

Have a look at the full description here: http://www.dnbmedia.com/jobs/actionscript3-papervision3d-expert.html
I hope receiving lot’s of impressive resumes soon.

Don’t live nearby Amsterdam? No problem, housing will be arranged!

Tags: General by Paul Tondeur
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A couple of months ago I accidentally found a demo of a AS 3D engine, called Alternativa. Alternativa is a project founded by the Russian company called “GRTOV Studio". Basically it is a full AS3 3D engine, with future multiplayer support.

They described Alternativa as:
Alternativa is a platform for creating, implementing and supporting multi-user browser media over the Internet. It consists of server core (data store and exchange, synchronizing, managing hardware load), clients part (3D-engine, GUI and other client apps), administrating part (integrated payment services, through user registration, statistics), documentation (”how to create and to manage projects” guide, public classes and methods description etc.), support system (developers portal, forum, FAQs etc.), and the applications made on a platform themself.

Alternativa Platform — simple and useful integrated development tools, world editors, free to use resources (game objects logic modules, textures, sounds etc.). Platform takes care of data storing and user data synchronizations, gives development methodology and hosting, shares its community, supports projects at all their stages.

Every company or end-user will be able to create personal 3D-world and to fine tune it according to own goals and preferences. We aim to give talents an opportunity to develop, to give developers tools to create great projects, to let business to market their goods and services through their own innovative personalized multy-user media.

Once in a while they post a new demo online, to show the world their progress. All of those demo's are pretty amazing, but their last demo (called Alternativa3D 5.0 (Milestone 1) ) which is posted today really rocks! It has a great performance and a good level of detail for this size of the scene!

Unfortunatly nothing can be found if the source code will go public soon, or if it will be open sourced at all. For now we just have to wait and see and be blown away by their impressing examples.

Tags: Actionscript, General by Paul Tondeur
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Recently we (DNBmedia) delivered in cooperation with the Dutch marketing agency Ubachs Wisbrun/JWT a campaign site for Vodafone/TNF. TNF offers IP based data communication solutions. Since this might be difficult to handle you'll need TNF to get the overview and manage it all for you. This is visualized by a labyrinth with an overview map, so you know exactly what to do on each intersection (like you know exactly what to do with TNF's support).

I personlly really liked this project, since we combined 3D with flash. In this case the flash part is not real 3D, since it was a requirement to display objects in a way which isn't possible with any 3D flash engine yet. Our in-house 3D developers rendered their scenes to a video output which we converted in flash. These video's can be played forwards and backwards, depending on the users arrow key input.
One of my personal features I liked was to build in the ability to go each possible direction on the intersections. This would have given it an extremely cool result. I already figured out how to do this and wrote the first parts for a smart loading engine, since you don't want to preload all possible choices. Unfortunately this feature isn't implemented in the final release, because we had a strict time schedule and off course it all needs to be kept on budget.

There where two big challenges for this project:

1. Keep the download as small as possible while having the best quality on a high resolution. Although the site is a little over 25MB I think we've taken the best out of it!
2. Get a smooth performance. I've faced a lot of performance issues when I started up the project. The memory usages raised very fast when walking through the labyrinth. Beside this, when we walked backwards we where moving with just a few frames per second. I'm sure we came with some good solutions for this.

I really think you should check out this website. It's completely in Dutch, including the instructions at the beginning. The most important thing to know is that you can move forwards and backwards using your arrow keys, you can click on the 4 objects you'll find on your way and you can click on the hotspots on the map to warp to an object.

I would like to hear your impression about this website!

Tags: General by Paul Tondeur
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Go check out yourself: http://www.paperworld3d.com

Later on this weekend, I'll post my thoughts and examples about this very promising project!

[Update 2008-04-06]
During this weekend I've been looking into the source code. It's all well organized and Trevor Burton did an excellent job!
Since it's a first release, without any tutorials yet, it is kind of hard to get it all running right now. Errors found in the project could mean that I've misconfigured something, or that I've found a bug.
Trevor showed his will to help me out which I really appreciate. As soon as I have some working examples I'll write down my experiences on this blog.

Tags: Actionscript, General, Papervision3D, Paperworld 3D, Red5 by Paul Tondeur
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Yesterday was the last and second day of FITC Amsterdam. Based on the program titles and descriptions I expected the first day being the most interested for me. But that's not true at all.

The second session of the day was called "The circle" by Jared Tarbell. It should teach in a creative session about getting a better understanding of why the circle is considered as the most perfect geometric object. I'd expected this to be a designer session, but in fact it could be inspiration for a designer, but to get all his examples done you really should be a genius mathematician and coder like Jared Tarbell is. Hopefully he'll post his examples online very soon to see and try to understand how he made those fantastic examples!

The other session that surprised me was Ralph Hauwert's session about 2D and 3D effects. I'd expected this would be a papervision talk, but it was more than that. Ralph shared in a enthusiastic and motivating way his thoughts about dealing with the limitations we have with actionscript. I'll soon post some video's I made during this session.

I didn't joined Koen De Weggheleire's session about playing with bitmaps, because I already saw this session at Adobe Max last year, but I heard some positive feedback about his session. Off course I didn't expected something else since he's a good presenter with a great topic to talk about.

Tags: Events, General by Paul Tondeur
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I just woke up after FITC's first conference day which was a great day full off inspirational sessions!

Some sessions really amazed me, cause I didn't knew about all the details for example about Kaboom!!! by Seb Lee-Delisle. I just knew it existed but I've never used it before. For those who've never heard about kaboom!!!, it's a really great particle system. Within just a few lines of code you're able to create some great effects! You should check it out yourself.

Another session which was quite inspiring was Samuel Agesilas Pastel's one about Saffron, an UML tool build in AIR. I've never heard about this application before, but it sounds verry usefull to me! Let's check this out as soon the first release will come out!

Offcourse the sessions about Paperworld3d, Papervision3d, Actionscript4 and Red5 where good as well, but the above surprised me, not knowing they existed or what was possible in such an easy way.

I'm planning to post some video's I made during the conference early next week, this week I won't have the possibility in my schedule...

Tags: Events, General by Paul Tondeur
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Finally I found time to set up my blog. From now on I’ll write on a regular base about my findings about Flash, Flex, Air, PHP and everything else that got my interest.

Tags: General by Paul Tondeur
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