News, Information and reports for the Flash Forward Conference.


Friday, July 12, 2002

Star Wars in Flash: Developing for the Playstation 2 : Fred Sharples

I came in a little late.

orangedesign created the menus for lucasart's starfighter games (2) for ps2. All of the menus were created within macromedia flash, and played back within a Flash player included with the game.

Have to conisder localization. They do the German version first since the german words tend to be the longest.

Memory considerations, only 32 megs of ram on ps2. compressed sizes of images doesn't matter, it is the uncompressed size. reducing the number of colors. the butterflyed the images (symetrical, so they only have to load half of each image (and then flip it)).

design process

fred is showing some of the images they presented to the lucas arts to get an idea of the type of imagery they were looking for in the jedi starfigter menus. (just regular images they found on the web).

originally, they had a more dirty, mechaninal interface, but in the end it became more modern, clean look.

showed series of drawings of early menu prototypes. really cool.

tips and tricks

memory issues

  • use ntsc or pal on a television to determine how far you can compress bitmaps.
  • watch memory. major issue.
  • butterfly symetrical bitmaps whenever possible.
  • concern yourself with the unpacked size of images, not the file size.
  • Optimize your bitmaps before they are brough in.

framerate issues

  • try breaking text if it doesnt animate fast enough.
  • avoid using more that a paragraph of type on one screen.
  • build all of your alpha effects into your bitmaps.
  • give life to your art by animating smaller screen areas.
  • with vectors, try finding shapes that use the fewsest number of triangles.
  • don't use a lot of thin vector lines.

Localization

  • design with plenty of space for copy. 150%.
  • localize early in german (long words, design issues)
  • test doubel byte comparison.
  • work with native speaker to avoid embarressment.
  • have experienced designer do the final layout.

Sony Requirements

  • memory cards stuff is more than half of the work. (what happens when the user pulls a card out, inserts it, etc...).
  • sony design documentation manual. very big.

card issues, example:

  • is card full
  • formatted?
  • saved data?
  • ps2 card or ps1?
  • damage?
  • is it being formatted?
  • being read?
  • did you tell the user how much space is required?
  • does the user want to format or save the data?
  • etc...

these all have to be asked and considered within the flash movie.

Middleware layer. the layer of scripting between the hardware / game and flash.

  • written by game programmer.
  • a simple script layer
  • communicates between game, flash and hardware.
  • almost all UI logic resideds in the flash later.
  • middleware never drives the flash movie.

example of setting something in the game's middleware. this tells the game to play in stereo mode:

getURL("callback://SetStereoStatus", 2);

getURL("callback://GetStereoStatus", "variableName");

this tells the middleware what variable name to use when it passed the data back to flash. you have to wait one frame in flash before you can reference the data.

Why should flash be on Playstation 2?

Currently not avaliable. playstation 2 is very popular platform.

three versions of flash player for ps2

  • generation one, used on starfighter. only supported flash 4. built by secret level. software only, very slow. doesn't support loadmovie, so memory issues cause problems.
  • strobe : (gen 2) - used by lucasarts for some other games (they have in house flash team). supports flash 5, working on MX version. hardware enabled. also ported to xBox and Directx8. supports loadmovie command.
  • internet version for ps2 : developed by macromedia and sony. deomonstrated at E3 in may 2001. may be related to to linux os and network adaptor kit released by sony. did not play in browser.

showing pictures on ps2 linux kit. pretty cool. comes with harddrive and ethernet port.

website:

Fred wrote a chapter on Flash for the PS2 in Flash Enabled : Flash Design and Development for Devices.

orangedesign.com

secretlevel.com

lucasarts.com

future they want to be able to use the flash player within the games, overlaying the action and even showing video.

testing. worked on pc. they had firewire connection into test unit that they used to upload the entire game into the ps2, and then test it on the console.

orange did not do the sound.

end of session.

3:10:07 PM    comment []  Google It!  

Wearable Technology : Wireless Fashion : Phillip Torrone

Phillip started with an overview of the Pocket PC platform, and show some accessories for the Pocket PC (keyboards, cameras, storage, etc)...

Can you make money with Flash on the Pocket PC? Yes.

  • Microsoft Enterprise Platform : Phillip show a really nice application they did for Microsoft, that deomnstrated and gave information on their enterprise platform. They initially made it for the web, and then took the same assets, and a little tweaking and created it for the Pocket PC platform.
  • EDS : Portable Pocket PC Based Kiosk : made for executives so they could carry it around and show information. it contained video of some of the EDS ads (cat herding).
  • Showed a fantasy football application that had data integrated with video sports highlights and ads.
  • BWM films : showed bmw film on device.

Phillip brought out a pocket pc phone edition (very nice and sleek).

phillip talk about his animated today program. this is a prgram that allows you to run flash animations as your pocket pc today screen background. he showed some fish, a nyc subway map and a flash movie that displays current stock data.

phillip showed his store for animated today screens. he then looged onto handango.net to show how he is making money selling them. showed some new screens that he is going to releas (some really cool animations, some of garfield).

showed erricson t68 phone, and some of its accessories.

showed how to dial phone from flash. use fscommand and tellurl (supported by multiple phones).

phillip then showed some clothes made specifically to hold and work with devices.

he showed his wireless operation app. a flash interface of the classic operation game that controls a vest phillip wears. if you tuch the sides, it shocks whoever is wearing the vest (over the web). phillip keeps track of where people try to shock him (the crouch).

showed buddy lee challenge / staring contest. cobranded with television campaign.

phillip said that he has seen a watch with a flash interface (but he cant talk about it).

showed wearfi, gps bracelets for kids (lets you know where you kids are). he then showed a flash interface for a gps movie trailer tracker, as you walk near a movie theature it tells you what movies are avaliable.

then showed his gps walking stick. basically a pocket pc on top of a walking stick with a flash interface.

phillip is a co-author of flash enabled. his web site is flashenabled.com.

end of session

1:49:27 PM    comment []  Google It!  

Rich Application Development with Flash Remoting : Mike Chambers

This was my session on Flash Remoting (sorry, i couldn't blog it in real time). It was an advanced session, and i spent a lot of time talking about architeting Flash Remoting Applications.

I discussed Object Oriented Client / Server interfaces, which is a design patter where you encapsulte all of your client / server code within ActionScript objects. This makes the code more reusable, but also creates a simplified ActionScript API for the service. It also abstracts all of the complexity of the code, and client / server communications away from the developer / user.

I show some simple ActionScript examples that demonstrated this (i will upload them later). I then went through and showed some Applications that used some Client / Server Service Libraries (Email and Stock). I showed an stock charting app, and well as a Flash Email client i created (which has a sneak peak of some new components).

I then showed a simple flash application that called the google web service via Flash Remoting, and allowed you to search google from Flash.

Finally, i pulled up the stock application again, change one line of code (pointing to the server), and switched the back end code from ColdFusion to an .NET DLL written in c#. The Flash Remoting code was the same conencting to both. The server side code has no flash specific code in it, and I pulled up a windows app that used the DLL to deomstrate this.

I will try to post some more details and files later.

end of session

1:40:58 PM    comment []  Google It!  

Flash Remoting on ColdFusion MX QA Session

Christian Cantrell.

Christian started by covering some of his slides that he was not able to get to yesterday. He also showed some of his code for the Flash mp3 player that hooks up to his iPod, and finally he show a simple app that uses Flash Remoting to create a Flash console for OSX (allows him to run a pseudo console from a Flash app).

I just realized thay my session is at 10:15 and not 11:00, so I am going to have to cut these notes short.

9:14:38 AM    comment []  Google It!  

Video of Flash Forward Keynote?

I noticed a couple of people taping the Macromedia Keynote on Thursday. Does anyone plan on posting video online? If so, let me know.

9:09:13 AM    comment []  Google It!  

FlashForward Film Festival Winners

Josh Dura has posted the winner's of the FlashForward Film Festival.

You can view them here.

[via jdb]

9:00:10 AM    comment []  Google It!  

Flash Forward : Day 3

Last day of Flash Forward, and it looks like it will be as busy as the previous couple of days. I am going to go to the Flash Remoting QA for Christian Cantrell's session, I then have my session titled Rich Application Development with Flash Remoting. After that I have my QA session (I am going to miss Eric Natzke's session ; (). In the afternoon, i am going to phillip torrone's sessions, Fred Sharples (Star Wars in Flash: Developing for the Playstation 2), (i am not sure what session I will go to at the end.) Anyways, I am going to try to post my notes and comments. You can view them and all of my other FlashForward notes in my FlashForward section.

8:57:36 AM    comment []  Google It!  


© Copyright 2002 Mike Chambers.
 
July 2002
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31      
Jun   Aug


Macromedia MX

Resources

Flash MX

Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.

Subscribe to "FlashForward" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.