Prior to the start of the London run of my 3 day workshop, Flash MX 2004 Enterprise Development, I will be doing a talk at the May 20th London MMUG meeting on:

Playing God: Simulating Nature in Flash

Simulating complex autonomous behaviours in Flash can achieved effectively by using tolerance / potential methodology. Combined with grid based proximity management, interactions between autonomous organisms can be simulated, including food seeking, predation, reproduction, and even basic genetics/evolution. In this session, Grant will explain the concepts behind grid based proximity checking and tolerance / potential systems, including stepping through the code used to create his simulation of Malaysian Firefly bioluminescent communication.

I can’t wait to check out the London Flash scene.

Also, we still have some seats left for the workshop, so if you’re an intermediate Flash developer looking to learn OOP, analysis and design, code architecture and proper development processes (increasing your value, and hopefully your salary in the process), you should check out the workshop’s website. The early bird discount ends on April 24!

If you are contemplating the development of a complex Flash application or eLearning solution, operate a design firm, or wish you had access to professional expertise when you find yourself in a jam, you may want to read on…

Phil Chung AKA Philter (PhilterBlog) has just joined gskinner.com full-time, creating one of the most technically capable Flash development teams in North America. Phil lends his superb understanding of e-learning implementation and Flash development to my extensive knowledge of Flash application architecture, development and business logic.

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Firefly communication through bioluminescence is a beautiful thing to watch, and I felt it could be easily modeled using my ProximityManager class, and a simple tolerance/potential system. I tried to make this system mimic the real interaction of Fireflies in nature, and was inspired by an article I found about an artist’s video of Fireflies in a Malaysian rain forest.

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I’ve always been interested in mimicing organic systems in Flash, and tolerance based behaviours in particular. When I built out my ProximityManager class, the first thing I thought of building with it was a simple aquatic ecosystem, here’s my first attempt….

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Often, in games or visual experiments, you have to track the proximity of a large number of MCs relative to one another, and carry out actions when they are within a certain distance of one another.

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I’m really happy to announce that I will be instructing my Flash MX 2004 Enterprise Development course will be running in London on May 24-26. It is being organized in cooperation with the extremely capable Aral Balkan of Bits and Pixels. This is a highly comprehensive 3 day workshop dealing with:

• the new developer features of Flash MX 2004
• code standards and efficiency
• Object-Oriented Programming and theory
• Object-Oriented analyis and design
• Design patterns
• Team coordination
• Usability and user-experience
• Application architecture
• Development process

You can get full information on the course, and register online at https://secure.bitsandpixels.co.uk/training/grant/.

If you have any questions about the workshop, feel free to email me (contact button above), or comment below.

Wow, this is awesome! I was just directed to the Flash In The Can 2004 Awards Finalists page, and am really excited to see that I’m one of the three finalist for Best Canadian Flash Developer. I’m up against two other great developers: John Iocaviello (developer of Fresh Media Interactive, Gum Blondes, etc) and someone (Jeff Vermeersch, perhaps?) from Unplugged Studio. I’m thrilled, eh! 🙂

Click on over, take a look at the great work vying for the can openers this year, and vote for your favourite site.

FitC is going to be a great conference, so be sure to check out the conference site. Also, a quick reminder that I am going to be teaching an intensive workshop on “Flash MX 2004 Enterprise Development” immediately before the conference that we still have a few seats left for.

Following my previous post on the Flash MX 2004 EULA update, there was some interesting discussion in the comments about the changes, which I thought was worth moving into a proper post, because the content seems valuable. I’ll try not to misrepresent anyone with my inexpert editing.

If you have your own thoughts and ideas about this issue, please post them in the comments at the end.

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