Live in Second Life

Yesterday evening at 11.00 pm CET Windows Vista was launched in Brussels with a concert from Praga Khan.
One Agency took care of the event in Second Life.

I was there and here are some screenshots:

Compile AS3 on OSX without FlexBuilder

A glorieus moment in time...

After 10 years it finally happend, I got myself a Mac.

I have always been very happy with my pc and spreaded the message that Mac's were used by girls or the more girlie type kinda guys...

Well now I have one myself. So yeah I am in touch with my feminin side!



I have to say that I enjoy working on this machine more and more. The keyboard lights up in the dark! How funky is that? That is actually the main reason why I got it really.

So one of the first things I had to do was setting up my development environment.
That includes playing around with AS3 yeah!

So here's a litle 'howto' on compiling AS3 on the Mac. Flexbuilder is a much more complete solution (codehinting, debugging, ...) but is not free and Flashdevelop which is great does not support Mac.

So I am using Eclipse, Ant and the Flex2 SDK.

You can download the tutorial and project files here: (project files are included)
www.seeingisbelieving.be/blog/as3onosx.zip

Thanks to Steve Nelson from BFPUG for setting up the project templates.

Yves Pauwels won an FWA (another one)!

I don't know Yves personally, but he has done some great stuff.

Today he won an FWA for this one:

http://www.pedro-verhue.be/

Very well done and congrats dude!

An old interview with Yves (2003) on the FWA:
http://www.thefwa.com/interviews/int85.html

Sticks ans stones

My good friend Steven passed me through 5 sticks. This means I have to reveal 5 things about myself most people don't know about me.

I know it's been a while since he asked me. Steven my deepest apologies for being so late but here they are.

* From the age of 10 till about 17 I played handball. I played with a club called Ajax in first division (at that time). I even got a national selection when I was 16. It seems they are in big trouble at the moment if you read the news at their website (dutch).

* I got my first computer at the age of 9. It was a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer model II. I sometimes cry in bed at night because I sold it...

* I played guitar for several years in a band called Janez Detd.

* I am more a Pearl Jam than a Nirvana kinda person.

* I care a lot about good hair...

Papervision3D: another flash 3D engine

Thanks to self proclaimed flash evangelist Nicolas who pushed me into the flash 3D engines I started playing around with Sandy (see previous post) and Papervision3D.

Papervision is an engine written for AS2 as well as AS3.
It is still in private beta but the results are stunning. I have been goofing around with the AS3 engine and it's really performing well.

You will need flash player 9 to view this:
Check it out in a new browser window :
http://www.seeingisbelieving.be/papervision/PaperTest.html

Download the source here:
http://www.seeingisbelieving.be/papervision/PaperVisionTest.as

This demo features around 300 objects on stage with 2 sided bitmap material and a moving camera. I have never seen 3D performing like this in Flash.

Sandy is performing slower and you need the pixlib framework too.
I know it is not really fair comparing an AS2 to AS3 application when it comes to performance.
But the AS2 version of Papervision seems to be performing better than Sandy as well. Feel free to comment :-)

Sandy however supports much more primitives and methods than Papervision3d. Papervision only has mesh, plane and point while Sandy implements box, hedra, plane, sphere, cylinder, line, etc..

Anyway all the guys and girls (it seems there are too few girls doing stuff like this) who are putting things like this online deserve a big cheerio!

CHEERIO!!! and thanks to the open source flash community!

Sandy: a flash AS2 3D engine

Here's a little test I did with the Sandy 3D engine.

You can find it here:
http://osflash.org/sandy

In the video you see Helena, my 2 year old daughter cheering 'pianisimokey'. She rules!

We are hiring senior flash developers!

Join us now or weep forever baby!