dispatchEvent » OMGWTFBBQ

Hilarious frozen micro-atx mod

Mims Wright — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:31:20 +0000

If you want, this processor can make you a smoothie, and if you’re lucky, run Crysis.

Zamak’s blobby friends

Mims Wright — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:09:58 +0000

French 3d artist Zamak is totally amazing. If I wasn’t convinced that I suck at 3D modeling I would make stuff like this, but fortunately, i’m still good at looking at it.
Zamak Blog
Zamak’s Flash Site

Head Tracking VR Display with WiiMote

Mims Wright — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 03:58:07 +0000

Johnny Chung Lee is my nerd hero!

GTA 4 to use the Euphoria physics engine

Mims Wright — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:58:14 +0000

Well, apparently it’s been old news for about a year but Grand Theft Auto 4 is set to use the Euphoria physics engine developed by Natural Motion. If you haven’t seen the videos of this you should really check it out. The engine features real-time character animations based on the character’s AI and physiology and all of the materials in an environment have behave realistically, like splintering wood or buildings that fall apart when their structural integrity is comprimised. The same physics engine will be used in the upcoming Indiana Jones game.

I worry a bit this will cause the animations to look too real – while watching these videos I was wincing at each punch and I felt sorry when the storm troopers fell to their deaths.

Thanks to Jason S. for the links!

Superior Flash book titles by Babelfish

Mims Wright — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:05:26 +0000

Flash 4.0 应用指南 by 洪传华张宇崑编著
Approx Translation: Flash 4.0 applies a guideline
L:Chinese, Y:2000, S:Education, 279 pgs
Flash 4.0动画网页大制作 by 杜兴编著
Approx Translation: Webpage of Flash 4.0 animation is made greatly
L:Chinese, Y:1999, S:Education, 206 pgs
Flash 4.0精彩网页动画制作 by 李永青
Approx Translation: Wonderful webpage animation makes Flash 4.0
L:Chinese, Y:2000, S:Engineering, 282 pgs
Flash 4.0网页动画教室 by 李香敏
Approx Translation: Classroom of animation of Flash 4.0 webpage
L:Chinese, Y:2000, S:Education, 277 pgs
Flash 4多媒体网页制作教程 by 杨大庆
Approx Translation: Webpage of Flash 4 multimedia makes a tutorial
L:Chinese, Y:2000, S:Education, 263 pgs
Flash 4学习教程 by 赵键编著
Approx Translation: Flash 4 learns a tutorial
L:Chinese, Y:2000, S:Education, 314 pgs
Flash 4快闪劲爆网页 by 林友信
Approx Translation: Flash 4 fast Shan Jin explodes webpage
L:Chinese, Y:1999, S:Computer Science, 552 pgs

I like the last one particularly.

Thanks to Roger for this list.

Skrypt Kidz 3000 Podcast

Mims Wright — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:17:40 +0000

Update: We’re up on iTunes!

A few weeks ago we asked you what you would want to hear from a new Flash podcast. The votes came in with a tutorial based podcast in the lead with 44%, followed by a discussion by experts with 18% and a healthy chunk of you (16%) thought it was irresponsible for us to bring another new podcast soul into this cruel world.

You told us what you wanted to hear and we listened to you.

But then we decided to ignore your suggestions and do something completely different.

It’s my pleasure to present Skrypt Kidz 3000 — a new semi-regular podcast where a barbarous crew of Flash and Flex developers get together to spend our precious weekend hours yakking about Flash issues. In our inaugural episode we discuss the pros and cons of using Flex over Flash. We also talk about Flex and FDT pricing and Adobe’s new wireframing tool Thermo.

Thermo makes us all a little less dumber

Mims Wright — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:02:57 +0000

It’s the classic story in Flash development. A designer puts hours and hours of work into a Photoshop document or a Flash animation that ultimately gets thrown away and rebuilt when it comes time to develop the application. I’ve often wondered if this could be fixed by having information architects do their wireframes in FlexBuilder’s design view. Apparently, Adobe are on the same line of thinking and are taking a crack at solving this problem.

The solution they’ve come up with is a Dreamweaveresque WYSIWYG editor that can convert Photoshop elements directly into functioning Flex code. They call it Thermo and here is a sneaky video preview of it.

So We’ll Just Build Your Site in C++ Then, Thanks

Roger Braunstein — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:30:02 +0000

Check out Peter Elst’s collection of Sneek Peek sessions from MAX. I’m on the verge of tears looking at Scott Peterson’s C/C++ on Flash demonstration. What… the… hell. He seems to indicate that he’s written a C++ to AS3 translator, not a C++ compiler that targets ABC. Peterson mentions including scripting hosts for other languages into the AVM, so you could run PHP or Ruby or whatever inside a SWF. Why not? I’m really interested to see how one would implement multithreading in a performant way… you could always chunk up your translated AS3 code into equal sized blocks, managing your scope and running only one block per frame, but how would you tune this to the speed of your processor dynamically, doing more or less code per frame to fully utilize your available CPU time? No idea. Then he proceeds to shit everyone’s pants by showing his AS3 translation of Quake I. Now this baffles me. At some point he simply must have replaced one of the display libraries with a for-Flash-Player BitmapData adapter library. And the sound control seems even more improbable to have been ported automatically. Anyway, this seems completely outrageous. I thirst for more information. I’d love to read a much more detailed article on how Scott approached this; whether he really let the AS3 compiler do all that work, or how much he dug into the AVM itself. But for now, I have to pick up my jaw from the floor, please excuse me.

Are You Sitting Down? You’d Better Sit Down.

Roger Braunstein — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 03:51:59 +0000

Adobe demos new features of Astro/Flash Player 10 at MAX. Credit goes to Aral for the video.

DOF w/ PV3D FTW

Mims Wright — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 18:58:43 +0000

Looking at this makes me happy.

Depth of Field demo with Papervision

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