Truly the most exiting project I have ever worked on. Let's see, to start of with, a Papervision 3D Monster Truck racing game... excuse me while I take a minute to consolidate myself....

Challenging it was yes, but working on such a project with such a awesome team at HelloComputer (were I work) was a hard yet fulfilling start to 2009. The site was build for the PlayUk Lottery as a mechanism to distribute vouchers and support the overall campaign.

The truck was modeled in Maya, exported as Collada and and used in PV3D. To achieve the great looking textures for the truck, they were baked in Maya, this allowed us to have great detail without using dynamic lighting materials which uses much more processor power than normal BitMapMatererials.

Have fun playing the game, racing, drifting and jumping corners.... Space is for jumping.NumPad 1-9 does some cool view changes. It's a shame we could not use some of the F keys.. ;-) 

http://www.ownthemud.com/

Another little game site I worked on in early 2009. Coffee is a critical part of my day and I had great fun working on a game were you had to build your own types of coffee. Including Cappuccino's, Cafe Latte's, Filter Coffee's and Espresso's. The most interesting part was to create mechanisms to simulate each process in the making of a coffee. Selecting the blend is the first one, were you have to select your blend according to the order you have received. Adding coffee, just stop the moving bean in the middle. Adding milk, balance to poor and fill your cup. Frothing, mmm, those frothing cups can be quite tricky to manage. TIP! slow mouse moments...

This game was build to promote the different types of Blends that House of Coffees have to offer.

Check out this unique tool, used for making mockups in seconds. I have used the online demo version and am definitely getting my hands on a copy of this. The tool allows you to create mockups of website layouts, application and so much more. It has a very easy to use components panel. Just drag and drop and save. The best feature of this tool is the way it auto aligns the components when dropped on the stage. Once you have a layout, just save and edit whenever you want.

"Never waste a minute

Mockups For Desktop allows you to work on your UI wherever you are, regardless of your Internet connection. It works on planes, at coffee shops, and wherever you like to do uninterrupted work. Import and Export features ensure seamless integration with all the other versions of Mockups, for when you get back online. Plus you can load and save multiple mockups files, use all keyboard shortcuts and lots more."

read more..

Checkout this awesome post on Adobe AIR resources. The post lists everything from AIR applications, tutorials, code resources, articles, getting started pages and third party integrations.

101 Adobe AIR Resources to Add to Your Toolbelt of Awesomeness

Just read this on RockOnFlash, amaaaaazing.

"PaperWorld3D is a Realtime 3D Multi-User Application Framework built for the Flash Platform."

and.....it's opensource

* Creating modular game components which can be created, shared, edited, updated and extended by anyone with some knowledge of flash.

* Skinning mechanism allows designers to create new or replace exisiting graphical assets wihout touching any code.

* Multi-lingual content, allows users to choose a language to view the game in and switch languages at run-time.

* Connecting to and communicating with Red5 to allow multiplayer interaction and communication, database access or connection to any other application running on your server.

* AI - Steering Behaviours, Decision Making etc. etc. allow you to create complex behaviours for NPCs.

Damm... It's here people. Adobe have released the official version of AIR. Check it out at: http://www.adobe.com/products/air

I am a bit disappointed that the runtime's size has increased by 3mb, but never mind what is a few seconds (depending on your speed) download time between friends.

This is a simple app (just an experiment), that makes use of SystemTrayIcon and NativeMenu (some of the new features in AIR Beta2). It doesn't do anything, just demonstrates some of the new functionality of AIR Beta 2.

I have 3 movieclips on stage, one contains a textfield that updates (counts), one is a vector animation, and one is a sequence of images. I use setInterval to create bitmapdata evey 40 millisenconds, and then update the SystemTrayIcon, so it animates.

I have also implemented NativeMenu, that creates a contextmenu when you right click on the tray icon. The menu item that you select, gets checked, and disabled, and changes the animation accordingly.

Note: you will need the AIR Beta 2 Runtime. I have only tested it on PC.

Here is a the AIR file, and well as the source code. Hope someone finds it handy.

Hi

UPDATE: I've added a close button, MICON V1.1 is avaliable, same link as before.

In case you get bored reading this, download the app first :). I've called it MICON, and its a application that allows you to extract system icons used for a file/folder, and save them as a transparent png. Download it here.

Screenshot:

I've used this application as an opportunity to cover aspects of AIR I was interested in. I've implemented custom chrome(transparent), resizing, drag n drop (to and from desktop), fileSystem access amongst other things. I've also implemented multiple windows, just to test performance, and it is amazingly easy, fast, and light on system resources. (I've taken this out, since it's not needed in MICON). I have only tested the app in Windows, so I would be interested to get feedback from Macintosh users.

This is my first official ascoza post, as well as my first AIR application. I've been postponing getting my hands dirty in AS3, mainly because it looked like a massive jump from AS2. It is a big jump, but not as radical as I expected. For those of you out there, contemplating migrating to AS3, I can definitely recommend it. If you are used to implementing 3rd party libraries, it will be easy to pick up AS3. A lot has changed yes, but the documentation is very good, and there are decent samples to work from.

Once I've cleaned up the code, I will release the source. I also plan on updating the application, to add more functionality to it (post suggestions - even it's just related to the current version [1.0] ). I am not sure how hardcore the .ico file format it, but if it's something I can get my head around, I would like to the ablility to package icon files from png's. I don't have much experience with binary data, so I'm not sure how long this will take me. Maybe there is allready a kind of iconEncoder actionscript library (pls let me know if you know of one).

You will need to install Adobe AIR beta.