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By Rich

Tags

aardman digital, tate movie project

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Aardman

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The Tate Movie Project goes live

15th Jul 2010

1

Today Aardman Digital (where I’m Technical Lead) put live one of the biggest site builds we’ve done yet. Called the Tate Movie Project, it’s all about children getting involved in the creation of a film, which will be shown on the BBC next year. They can create assets online using a suite of tools we’ve built, or visit one of the tour buses currently going around the UK, where they get real hands on experience of the film making process. Ultimately children will have created the bulk of the visuals used in the final film.

Due to other projects I didn’t contribute a great deal of coding personally, but the Sound Tool (which you can find in the Sound Studio part of the site) is mine! This is where the children can record themselves, apply special effects, and submit their creations to the film. I built the tool several months ago, knowing that the release of Flash Player 10.1 was imminent. I wanted to use 10.1 as it allowed us to get real-time access to the Microphone, and then apply special effects without the need for a media server back-end. However we also had to create an FMS version for users running older versions of Flash Player! So the site switches between the two tools based on your player. Thankfully Adobe released Flash Player 10.1 final a few weeks before launch. It will be interesting to see the change in traffic to our FMS servers as users migrate over to 10.1.

The other tools include the Script editor, an Animation tool and an area to upload your images for the film. The tools are aimed at 5 to 13 year old children, which is a very wide spectrum in terms of technical capability. We ran a lot of user testing sessions in schools, gauging how the children worked with the tools and tweaking them accordingly – so although they may seem a bit primitive to most readers of my blog, we know they’re bang-on for the target audience.

There are also loads of hidden features across the studio: for example when the director is talking you could try clicking the lights in the background, bang the spot lights with your mouse, drag down light switches, pull down the ladder and many more. In the Script room turn the fan on, then click on the paper that falls to the floor, then bounce it off your mouse cursor into the bin. In the music studio knock musical notes out of the composers head, drag them onto the wall, and play your tune! An awful lot of love and care went into the smallest details, all of which are aimed at rewarding kids natural curiosity.

It was an extremely exciting project to be involved with, using a lot of talented people. The bulk of Flash development was handled by Tom Milner, our resident Flash guru. With animations coming in from two of the best Flash animators out there: Robin Davey and Felix Massie. Awesome thanks also go to a big roster of Bristol’s finest web development talent including Craig Francis, Rick Hurst, James Spencer and Julian Guy, all of whom are superb and strongly recommended if you’re in need of site build ninjas.

We first began work on the site almost 2 years ago, when myself and Dan Efergan (our Creative Director) spent a long time coming up with the “virtual studio” concept, how the tools would work and interact together, and how the progression of the film production would be displayed (keeping the children interested for what is a year long process). So Tom and the other developers can blame a lot of the frantic deadline chomping work they had to do on us 🙂 But it was all worth it. The site is lovely to interact with. And the biggest kick of all is actually watching children use it. It truly makes it all worth while.

There’s a brilliant piece on the site over on Creative Review.

If you are in the UK (and have kids who are the right age for this) then I urge you to let them take part, or maybe visit the Tour Bus. Also keep an eye on Blue Peter and Newsround on CBBC.
By Rich

Tags

atari st, remake, robotz

Posted in

New Releases

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Robotz DX – A PC Remake of the Atari ST classic

9th Jul 2010

4

A long time ago I announced that I wanted to do a remake of a classic Atari ST game “Robotz” in Flash. Fast forward to today, and I still haven’t got around to it. However James Monkman (Heavy Stylus of RGCD) wasn’t as lazy as me, and set about creating this awesome re-imaging of the original.

Although it’s for Windows PCs only (as it was created in Game Maker 8) it’s a mighty fine game indeed! A lot of the limitations of the original have been removed, and the gameplay is faster, more frantic and basically more fun as a result. Check out this cool video to see what I mean:

The graphics are lovely, a faithful blend of rips from the ST original and some new pixel art. 505, Crazy_Q and Damo provide the stomping soundtrack.

If you remember the original, you’ve got to try this version of it.

Hell, if you just enjoy quality games – you’ve got to try Robotz DX 🙂

Loads more info and the download here: http://www.rgcd.co.uk/robotzdx/
By iLKke

Tags

skin, vst

Posted in

Pixel Art

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Kraken VST

8th Jul 2010

0

Another skin for another raw lo-fi VST plugin.
By iLKke

Tags

color, Flod, logo

Posted in

Pixel Art

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A couple of logos

7th Jul 2010

0

I often lend my skills to people making cool free software.

FLOD is a Flash-based player for various Amiga music formats, and Klystrack is an emerging chipmusic tracker.
By Rich

Tags

molehill, unity3d

Posted in

Cool Links

4 comments

@thibault_imbert drops a Flash 3D teaser bomb

7th Jul 2010

4

A few days ago Twitter exploded when someone noticed in the Adobe Max 2010 schedule a session called “Flash Player 3D Future”. Today Thibault Imbert (Product Manager for Adobe Flash Player) put up this blog post, teasing more on the subject:

“Now you may wonder, what does this means, what kind of 3D are we talking about ?

What kind of API ? True textured z-buffered triangles ? GPU acceleration ? Even better ? What I can say is forget what you have seen before, it is going to be big 🙂

When this will be available ?

We will share plans with you at Max during this session, I tell you, some serious stuff is coming for 3D developers.”

The key part of his post is “GPU acceleration”. The software renderer inside of Flash has long been its bottleneck. It is what stops Flash being a serious contender in the desktop gaming market. It is what makes Unity developers look at AS3 3D libraries and roll their eyes. It is what makes the limit on the amount of pixels we can push around so incredibly tiny, in comparison to what even low-end GPUs can do these days. Equally screen resolutions are constantly increasing, but still we have to cram our games into small areas because performance just isn’t good enough.

Most old-time Flash developers (hey Squize) don’t expect Adobe to announce anything useful. “It’ll be some half arsed gpu acceleration, only available if you set the wmode in the html, or something equally useless”, “does anyone remember the physics demo they showed last year? that never made it either”.

Adobe have a lot to live up to from previous Max hyperbole.

I’m slightly more optimistic, but I can appreciate their scepticism. Having been playing with Chrome’s HTML5/WebGL support a lot these past few weeks, I truly believe this is Adobe’s only shot at succeeding in the 3D web space. Because time is running out for them. GPU acceleration is going to have to work across the board, and accelerate all graphical elements: bitmap, vector, 3D. A cherry on the cake? Allow PixelBender shaders to run on the GPU too.

It’s about time they truly supported Flash game developers. This would be a significant step forward. It would open the desktop games market to us, it would allow proper 3D games to be made in Flash, and it has the opportunity to give an incredible speed boost to all of graphics operations in Flash.

Don’t drop the ball on this one Adobe. I beg of you.

Read the full blog entry here: http://www.bytearray.org/?p=1836