news from MAX:

-download lots of new stuff from adobe labs ( http://labs.adobe.com/ ) :

Adobe AIR SDK beta 2
Flex 3 beta 2
Adobe Media Player
Extensions/Updates for Dreamweaver CS3 and Flash CS3 (related to AIR dev)
Adobe Share
Spry Framework Prerelease 1.6

-flashlite 3 release:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/

-flash player 10 (astro) main features:
-better text handling
-custom filter creation possible (using adobe hydra language)
-simple 3d (no openGL or directX, right now just added new properties rotationX, rotationY and rotationZ and allows to perspectively distort bitmaps)

also since this morning there is a new flash 9 beta player version downloadable on labs, give it a try:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/

This is probably the first flash/physics related post on this blog, and I couldn’t have wished for a better first

The Fisix Engine has been under development for a good while now–since it’s release in December 2006–no new additions were released to the engine. As it stands, the engine has the following features (strictly physics-wise, not considering the actual library architecture):

• Circle/Circle collisions
• Circle/Line collisions
• Raycasting
• Spring/Stick/Angular constraints
• Simple friction model for dynamic vs. static collisions

But all of this is about to change.

We’re working on a new rigid-bodies solver that will use the stability of the verlet integrator presented in Jakobsen’s paper and some extra tricks borrowed from impulse-based methods, and others, for more accurate simulations. The main strengths of this solver are:

• The ability to create arbitrary polygonal (convex for now)/analytical (circle, capped cylinder)
• Improved Friction model (our next adventure…)
• Improved collision detection for faster simulations
• An incredible constraint system which can handle pretty much any type of constraint imaginable (demos to come )
• Also coming are special deformable shapes (like the blob demo in this blog’s header). These aren’t built from constraints, and can be inflated/deflated and in real time. Can also be used to simulate rigid bodies that can be dented and distorted on impact

I won’t get more technical right now, but I promise more detailed explanations as things evolve. We’re still prototyping so any demos you’ll see are probably unoptimized and will be made faster in the future.

I like the current state of the rigid body solver but I there are a lot more things to be polished up and fixed, as well as things to be added (like friction and bounce!)

So here’s a little demo, no friction, no bounce, and quite unoptimized… but hey it’s just a prototype (AS3, so Flash player 9 required):

View Demo

(Click to add boxes)

It was nice to see that a whole bunch of you were excited about J2AS3, and would like to use it in your own projects, so I’ve posted it up as a project on www.osflash.org.

You can get the source, and the driver application over at:

http://osflash.org/projects/j2as3

Please post here if you have any questions or comments

Yup, i guess you already had a quick glance at the photos and noticed that this won´t be your typical games convention coverage

Its more a rundown on things i felt were memorable, a view from the angle of an indy game developer attending a games convention as trade visitor for the first time. If you want detailed coverage on the games shown better go to kotaku.com or elsewhere

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always loved 2D physics.. and Graphics… and well, 2D in general. But although 2 dimensions can be great fun, 3 dimensions are sometimes, well, a whole lot cooler.

So here’s the idea:

Take the Fisix Engine ( an AS3 2D physics engine) and combine it with Papervision3D (an AS3 3D graphics engine) to make an ultra-cool 2d physics demo

You can see the results here:

http://www.fisixengine.com/demos/pv3d/

As cool as this demo is, I know that much, much more impressive applications can be created here, and I’m ready to explore these options

A look back to the past

Before Papervision, and even before Actionscript 3.0, I came to a point in the development of the Fisix Engine where the Flash player just wasn’t giving me enough power to make the simulations I wanted to run. So in my search for stronger platforms I found Blitz3D - A Basic-based programming language that leverages DirectX 9 to provide an accessible 3D engine for beginner to advanced developers.

You can see a brief video demo of the FisixEngine for blitz3D HERE.

Download it to play with it yourself

download the Bunnies demo

All in all, I’m glad that Flash is now approaching this kind of complexity where 3D + physics seem a lot more feasible to achieve. I’ve always enjoyed Actionscript coding, and hope to be able to make some more impressive things with it in the future

This is probably not really news to most of you out there, but wiiflash is freaking awesome!

I’ve been following it for a while now, but only recently had the chance to play around with it. I had some trouble getting it connected to my laptop, as the first two Bluetooth devices I tried didn’t seem to work too well with the remote. I then bought a Motorola dongle and it worked like a charm.

Though I kind of knew what too expect from videos I’ve seen before, I was very excited when I finally saw it working on my laptop. I immediately opened up the api docs, and in no time I had a little box which I could tilt by tilting the remote. Next I tried adding the Nunchuck, and then it hit me… why not use Fisix? So I did, and it turned out to be very cool

Right now I don’t have anything ready to show, but I’ll post some videos (and probably some working demos for those of you that can get the wiimote hooked up to your pc) soon

This shouldn´t become a philosophy session, just thought i´d introduce myself before starting to babble

I´m Ugur Ister, more known in the flash world as tomsamson. I´m Co-Founder and head of Stimunation, an independant game dev crew. I´m a lot into physics related things and also addicted to playing and creating games for ages

Since Oz and me work on some nice stuff for a while we thought it´d be cool to get a blog going and post about things we like, work on or just think they´re funny or interesting in some way.

Sadly we can´t post about all the things we work on right away due to NDA restrictions for client projects, but yeah, we´ll try to keep this interesting with some good stuff here and there

To make a start i´m posting an alpha demo Link for a non NDA restricted game i´m busy with in between.

Here you are: Play our Skater

Some Info on it:

Raigan (Metanet, one of the good fellas who worked on N) and me started working on this game ages (really) ago.

It wasn´t made for a single client (unlike most of our commercial games) so it was put on hold many times while deadline based client projects always took the lead.

A while back i showd the game to Iopred from the Stimunation gang (the coder of the heli attack series,you know) and he liked it a lot which motivated me to get back on it in my meanwhile even way fewer spare time.

I worked some on it and then saw Mando, the (two times) german Champion in Beatboxing on TV and thought it was pretty cool what he did so i contacted him to see whether he´d be into working on sound creation for one of our games.

He kinda liked the idea a lot and so we organized a day at the sound studio and he recorded sfx and tunes for the game.

You can already hear parts of the result in this built

I will post more on the dev and gameplay etc if someone is interested, any comments on the current state of the game are welcome, too, of course

Recently I found the need to convert a large amount of java code to AS3 for something I was experimenting with.

The only tool I found to do that was J2AS, an eclipse plugin, created specifically for AS2 code. The problem was that I needed AS3 code, and J2AS was giving me errors very early into the conversion process, which left me with only the first few lines converted.

I resorted to some old compiler/scanner code and wrote my own Java scanner in AS3. I then wrote some rules which convert function/class/package declarations, etc to Actionscript 3.0 Code.

Here is an app for you to convert your code (Flash player 9 required):

It’s not even close to perfect, but it definitely saved me hours of manual work

Click Here

If there’s enough interest in this, I’ll clean up the code a little and release it to the world!

This is a truely amazing little game i found online not too long ago.

It features a 3D/Physics engine and some biomechanical AI, all packaged in an 87kb file!

Download 

Site: http://web.t-online.hu/archee83/sumotori

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8KAUoW0Juo]

Physics Dev blog is the combined effort of flash developers and enthusiasts from around the web to blog about everything Flash, Actionscript, games, and physics. Stay tuned for more