Puki 3D made the front page of Digg…. cool! I think this is our first front page Digging, and I somehow missed it (it hit the front page 2 days ago). 50,000 visitors in one day, and as far as I can tell the server stayed up – kudos to Media Temple! Here’s a link to the Digg topic.

While I’m blogging about Puki, here’s a trick: Type “oldskool” before you start a game (make sure you’ve clicked to focus the game first), and you’ll get classic arcade graphics.

One day I’d like to revisit this game. Maybe with Papervision3D.

Victor Gaudioso has written a nice tutorial on “Setting up a Development Environment and Using gProject to Create Custom Classes” on ActionScript.org. It covers the basics of setting up a project, creating classes, and auto generating properties for on-stage interface elements.

You can check it out here.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the 360Flex conference at EBay’s North Campus in San Jose. My presentation was titled “Flex Loves Flash? Embed and Beyond.”, where I explored the different methods available to Flex developers to work with rich assets. I started by covering existing approaches like asset embed, and Flash symbol embed, and discussed strategies for organizing those assets. From there I looked at more advanced techniques for using Flash content, like “shake and bake SWFs” (embedding a SWF as a bytearray, then extracting full classes from it), and using classes/symbols from SWFs that are loaded at runtime. I finished off by looking at new integration techniques that will work with Flash CS3, and some of the approaches I am working with Adobe to develop that will help simplify this integration. I also touched on some related topics like font / svg embed issues, data embedding, and how to use bitmap fonts in Flex.

You can check out the session notes at gskinner.com/talks/.

Over the next few days I will release some of the code I showed, and blog about a couple of the more important topics, like Shake and Bake swfs. You’ll have to wait for some of the more advanced pieces until after Flash CS3 ships though.

Above all, I want to get people thinking about this topic. Flex applications are so much cooler when Flash is involved in the workflow. If you have any tips or ideas on enhancing this workflow, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Last week, I was hunting around for a compelling speed comparison demo that I could use to show how much faster AS3 execution was than AS2 for the MacWorld Flash Forward keynote. I wanted something exciting and very visual that ran in both AS2 and AS3. Remembering that the awesome open source Paper vision 3D project by Carlos Ulloa and John Grden had recently been updated to AS3, I pinged John to see whether he could put together a cool demo in the meager 4 days I had before the session. Let me tell you… the man came through with gusto! Not only did he throw together an amazing demo contrasting AS2 rendering 900 faces at 5fps versus AS3 rendering almost 8000 faces at 25fps, but he did it in only two days, while doing normal work and accommodating all of my anal retentive requests (admit it John, those requests were the cilantro in your salsa *grin*).

The demo totally blew away the audience at MacWorld. Not only is it an amazing speed demo, but it’s the coolest piece of 3D I have seen to date in Flash. 7 x-wing fighters, 7 tie fighters, 1 death star, and Endor all flying around a star field with a chase-plane style camera.

If you want to see a stunning example of AS3’s speed gains, or just want to check out where 3d in Flash is headed, you should click over to John’s blog. Then, head over the OSFlash page for the Papervision3D project for more great demos and info.

(btw – the demo runs beautifully in full screen mode on a MacBook – as John says, Flash doesn’t look like Flash anymore)

We recently had the pleasure of working with Tequila (TBWA \ Chiat \ Day‘s interactive arm) to build a very unique interactive piece to market Nissan’s new Sentra model. The concept was based on the interactive webcam systems I’ve been playing with at incomplet.org[Moved to incomplet.gskinner.com]. Media vans (trucks with big screens on the side) in seven US cities would act as mobile installations, and users could play on screen via camera input.

Users standing in front of a red screen are masked out and projected over a video running in the background. Users can play with any of five interactive “lessons”: Catching virtual leaves, controlling the volume of different tracks of music with their movements, wiping fog and water drops off the screen, being chased by a swarm of fireflies, and kicking around a beachball sized soccer ball.

We even rigged it so that the software could all be operated by the van operators using a wireless remote from in front of the screen.

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