While at Unite2009, I had the opportunity to do 2 presentations on the Flash users day.  Both presentations went very well.  The response was great and the Unity people were fantastic – VERY genuine and completely cool people!

During one of my discussions, I was a little embarrassed to say I didn’t know how to retain properties that I was editing at runtime in the editor to objects I was rotating/moving etc.  I mentioned that there was likely some magic way of doing this, but I wasn’t aware of how, and that likely someone would show me after the talk.

Well, as it turns out Emil Johansen of the Unity team handed me an Editor script right after the talk was done!  The guy wrote it just as soon as I’d issued that statement in my talk, then proceeded to hand it to me while walking off the stage   EMIL – you get 4 rock on’s for that one!!

\m/ \m/ \m/ \m/

Get it here, love it there

And being a coder, he went on to perfect it and expand it for use with any component you might have in Unity.

And just to explain what it is I’m so happy about:  In Unity IDE, you can *run* your application and change the properties at runtime to debug/polish your settings.  But, there isn’t really a way built into Unity to say “save these settings”.  I wasn’t writing them down on paper though, I was taking snap shots with Jing and then typing them in

Emil’s Editor scripts extend the Unity IDE to add copy/paste options so you can easily run, set and save.  LOVE YOU EMIL!

I’m just about to leave San Francisco after have done 3 sessions over the past 2 days at Unite 2009. What an awesome event it was!

The people from Unity are unbelievably cool – every single one of them. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting them and the sessions were all excellent. I guess I’ve been to so many Flash conferences that this was a really nice change of pace.

The 3 Sessions I did went extremely well and the people that attended were awesome – we talked alot of star wars

I’ll post the Quicktime keynote exports when I get home, but these were the topics:

1. Flash3D to Unity3D – what’s the transition like?
2. Flashers doing the iPhone thing and why
3. Intro to Unity iPhone development: Case study on the Trench Run game

I’ll leave you with this slide from Session3

Well, its been a very VERY long time incoming, but it’s finally here – The Trench Run game!

This was something I’d story boarded some 6+yrs ago and thanks to some very good friends of mine (Chris Allen, Rebecca Smith Allen and Dominick Accattato) I was able to realize a goal that I’d set for myself along time ago.  Chris worked alot of hours for the past couple of years trying to sell the project and finally, it all just clicked.  So, I have to first say a big huge fat thankyou to he, Rebecca and Dominick for sticking their necks out for this project.   LOVE YOU GUYS VERY MUCH!

The game is released through THQ Wireless inc. and was created by Infrared5 with me, Todd Anderson, Keith Peters, Andy Zupko, Rebecca Smith Allen, Chris Allen, Dominic Accattato, Paul Gregoire, Kasey Jordan, Lizzie Martin and Ben Throop.  It should be showing up in Apple’s app store shortly.  It covers the battle of Yavin from the first Star Wars movie  (IV), including a dog fight portion of the game.  We added arcade modes for both dog fighting and the trench run so you can see how many levels you can stand before getting blasted into oblivion!

I really spent alot of time on attention to details for this game.  Things like the music – you’ll note that the music in the DogFight scene IS the music from that scene in the movie.  Same for the trench sections.  The cockpit views are literally taken from the original 1977 movie.  All colors of the lasers, markings on ships, details are all as close to the movie as possible.

My goal for this game from day one was simple:  Speed.  I was always REALLY disappointed in the speed of other Trench Run games.  You’d get into the trench, expect to feel what you saw in the movie, and then it was pathetically slow.  So, from nearly 1993 when they came out with X-Wing, I think I was already plotting this game out

I do hope the hardcore StarWars fans enjoy the game – it really was for them!  I know it’s an iPhone game on a small device, but I was seriously blown away with how much power it really has and what I was able to pull off with it.

The Trench

Dog Fight With Darth Vader

So, to wrap up, I’ve been silent on just about every social network app you can think of and haven’t blogged very much in the past 4 months – but it was all worth it.  I apologize for not putting much out here lately, but trust me when I say, I’ll be changing that with some insights, tricks/tips and stuff from this projects experience.  I’d dedicated myself to this project completely and I hope the final product reflects that dedication.

Now…what twitter app I using 4months ago…

Well, UNITE 2009 will be the first conference I’m speaking at that’s not about flash – kinda crazy!

Unity has devoted an entire day (October 27th) for Flash 3D people who are interested in checking out Unity3D.  So, they’ve lined me, Paul Tondeur ( co-author of Papervision3D essentials book ) and Mauricio Longoni to speak/teach.

I’ll be covering Papervision3D > Unity3D topics in my first session (which is right after the opening session).  I’m really looking forward to this session because I think people will be blown away at how easy it really is to adopt Unity3D into their toolset of options for 3D on the web.  I’ll be covering alot of the foundational stuff like scripting, Unity IDE, GameObject vs DisplayObject3D, 3D modeling and texture considerations vs both technologies etc.

I’ll then have the last hour of the day to unveil the latest game we’ve been developing for THQ wireless inc. and Lucas Films ltd.  I’ll be walking you through a bit of an over view from what it was in Flash as a prototype, how it translated in Unity3D for the iPhone and finally – porting it from a Unity iPhone app to a Unity web app.  It was an unbelievably awesome experience using Unity for this project!

Hope to see you guys there – and hey, leave a comment here if you’re going to be at the conference

Look I know you guys come here for Flash/Papervision/unity/3D/Music/StarWars stuff, but I’m adding football as a side note.

See, i’m head coach for my son’s team this year (it’s his first year) and I’ve been loving every single minute of it!!  Seriously, it suits me just fine, the kids respond well, and we’re a good team.

Well, we’d been loosing some games here, and we finally got the kinks ironed out on offense and defense!  This week, we played the Colts again, and just ruined them.   They’d beat us 2 weeks ago so, I was ready to take what should have been ours 2 weeks ago:  a win

The score was 36-12, and Luke (my son) scored 3 of the touch down and caught a pass for 7yrds  -  That’s Right 5-6yr olds throwing passes – thats MY kind of offense   And I swear to you, we had a parent jokingly tell me we’d never throw at this age.  Well, this is 2 games in a row, we’ve thrown and caught a pass

Anyway, I do mean to gloat – its not very often and we worked our tails off in practice and it finally showed on the field.

And finally, this is a great picture of Luke   3 guys, all over him, and he’s pullin’ em down field – LOVE IT!!

There’s been a rather fun inside joke between me and Keith and Andy and John.   I don’t know if I’ve told many other people about it, maybe a handful more at some point because Keith thinks I’m off my rocker for it.

BUT I THINK I’M RIGHT!

So let’s have a little test and you guys vote, shall we?

Here’s the scenario:  Some guy emails you and says “Man, I’m under a massive deadline, I’ve been searching for an answer on how to do ‘X’, if you have ANY time at all, could you just point me in the right direction?

You, being me, decide to help a fellow flasher in need (someone you don’t know btw), and not only do you give him the answer, but you throw him an EXTRA saucy bone and include a code snippet of what he’s trying to accomplish, since you can certainly relate to what a deadline feels like.

The person who’d asked for help, simply writes back and says:

“  Thanks. “

“thanks” or “thanks man, LOVE YOU” would have been prefectly acceptable.  But in this case, it was just “thanks.”   See, the period is what gets me.  It’s like he’s saying “thanks for nothing asshole.”  Without the period, it’s more like he’s in a hurry or at least semi appreciative … ” thanks ” – I could accept that.  It’s still a little crappy considering I probably saved him hours of work.  I would at least expect an exclamation point… ” thanks! “

See?  how hard would that have been?  and THAT’S exactly my point.  I didn’t get a exclamation point (!), but I DID get punctuation.  Which means forthought.  He CHOSE the period.  Which means “Bite me.”

AM I WRONG?!?!  Does anyone else agree with me?!

I’ve just posted the latest version of the component for the Flash IDE:

http://code.google.com/p/papervision3d/downloads/list

It’s been a long long wait and I’ve been handing the component out at Flash conferences and classes that I’ve taught, but was waiting for Flash CS4 to be fixed to work with my component.  CS4 has alot of known issues with components, Adobe is well aware of the issues that cause my component not to work and I’m sure it’ll be fixed down the road sometime.

So for now, the component will only work in Flash CS3 IDE.

New Features and bug fixes:

1.  new Materials panel – now you can deal with your materials through this panel that Andy Zupko added oh so long ago

2.  Code Templates:  I’ve put in 2 templates for writing code against the component all flushed out with all the event listeners etc.

3.  Many bugs fixed

Thanks all, and enjoy!

John

Sorry for the hassle and broken links everyone!  Rockonflash is back up!  Links for xray and all other demo files should work just fine now. Please let me know if you have a problem

hey all, I just wanted to let everyone know that if you’re looking for demo files/videos/etc rom rockonflash or some of my links are broken, that’s because I’m trying to locate a new home for rockonflash.com url.

If anyone has a good provider suggestion, I’d love to hear about it.

also, i’ve been really busy with a current project I mentioned in an earlier post and that’s been going very well.  The great part is that while I have put in some extra hours here and there, I haven’t been burning the midnight oil so that’s good.  I’ve been able to stay on track without killing myself and that’s been huge.  Still, I *have* been exclusively putting my time and energy into that one project, so some others have really taken a back seat for now.

Anyway, please forgive the broken URL’s I’ll get them fixed as soon as I can.

In a bit of goodnews, I DID find time to model a new low poly xwing, and since I’d been using the other one for the past 3 yrs in all my demo’s here, I wanted to show you guys the results of the new one:

“]

[ New and original low poly xwings

Like is says in the image, this new one is nearly 400 polys smaller, the texturing is much much better and the model altogether is much closer to an actual XWing (… if one actually existed )

I just want to say thanks to the wolfpack for a great texture and hi poly xwing reference!

Flash on Tap was a GREAT conference – unbeleivably cool and laid back (at least for me it was).  It was truly great to see old friends again and hang out a bit.  Last time I went to a conference I was so stressed about about getting hours in on a project, I couldn’t enjoy Brighton.  It was a shame really.  But this time around, I really took the time to enjoy myself and just do what I wanted.  The class went great on Thursday, and the 3D panel discussion today was very cool.  I was nice to get to voice some opinions about about Flash, Unity and 3D in general.

Anyway, I rushed through my Papervision to Unity to iPhone session like mad at the end and promised I’d post the slides, so click on the image above or here.  I’d clearly planned to talk about way too much in my presentation, but I was at least able to do the sample demo app I’d put together of the obstacle course.  I was happy that people enjoyed seeing Unity in action and creating a simple game, but was bummed I didn’t even get the chance to show some scripting so they could see how very similar Unity’s Javascript is to ActionScript3.

There’s always next time!!