something in the way

Adobe MAX is here, and we’ve got a lot of news to share. Today we’re releasing Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 — you can download the release starting at 9:00 PM Pacific today. As we announced previously, there are lots of new features in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, and one of the newest features that’s getting a lot of buzz is hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics rendering through Stage 3D, which will be available on Mac OS, Windows and connected televisions. It redefines what’s possible across the web. With up to 1,000 times faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10 and AIR 2, developers can animate millions of objects with smooth 60 frames per second rendering and deliver cinematic, console-quality games both in browsers and in apps. And a production release with support for Stage 3D for mobile platforms including Android, Apple iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS is expected in an upcoming release. For more information about Stage 3D and to see some sample apps, check out the Stage 3D games on the Adobe Developer Center.

Additionally, we’re excited that “Proscenium,” a 3D framework technology preview, is available on Adobe Labs. Proscenium will allow developers using Flash Builder to rapidly prototype experiences focused on simple content interaction and display, whether for simple games, visualization, or high-quality rendering of small object collections. Check it out and let us know what you think.

We previously announced the availability of the Starling 2D framework for stunning hardware accelerated, fluid 2D graphics, and you can check out a new game developed using the Starling framework, Whack! from BxyB. There’s also new information for available for developing using 3D frameworks like Alternativa3D, Away3D, Flare3D, Mixamo, and Minko.

And lastly, we want to extend a welcome to our newest developers and colleagues from Nitobi, makers of PhoneGap, which will soon become part of the Adobe family. With all of our announcements today, we believe developers will benefit from a workflow that allows them to choose the right tool for the right job, and we’ll continue to keep driving innovation in Flash so you can push the edge of the envelope for immersive experiences online.

We’ve already seen some early previews of games and apps that will be available in market soon, and there are now over 10,000 AIR apps in mobile markets.

We can’t wait to see what you’ll create. And there’s more news to come tomorrow, so stay tuned. You can watch the second day MAX keynote streamed live at 10am PDT, and be sure to check out the Flash Platform Blog for the latest updates.

Tom Nguyen
Sr. Product Manager, Flash Player & AIR / @tomng

Machinarium, an award-winning indie point-and-click adventure/puzzle game in Adobe Flash and AIR.

A few months ago I met the guys from Amanita Design in Brno, Czech Republic. We talked about the success of Machinarium for desktop (available for Windows, Mac and Linux). That was just around the time the Adobe AIR 2.7 for iOS, Android and PlayBook was made available – and after some time the guys decided to port the game for tablets.

And today September 8th 2011, the game is available on the iOS App Store!
*Note: I will be releasing an article about the making/porting of Machinarium for tablets soon covering all the technical details.

Watch the trailer:

Interview with Jakub Dvorský (game designer and director):

Me: You have just released the new iPad version of Machinarium, but tell me something more about the history of Amanita Design and how you started building puzzle/adventure games?

Jakub: Amanita Design started in 2003 when I released a free web-game Samorost which was my thesis project at the Academy of Art. Even before that, I had created a couple of adventure games while studying at grammar school. Since then I have found several excellent collaborators so now the studio is nine men strong. We are still completely independent and self funded, and we still make adventure games. Of course we are also trying to push that genre somewhere to make our games more funny, entertaining and challenging at the same time.

[Screenshot from Samorost 2]

Me: Where does the original idea for Machinarium come from?

Jakub: First we knew, we wanted to create a full-length adventure game and that it should be a bit different and more complex than our previous Flash games. Then we came out with an idea of a robot as the main hero who lives in a robotic world. My first idea and vision of a strange vertical city populated by robots came to me about ten years ago when I was on an exchange scholarship in Netherlands. I was influenced by the modern functional architecture and the flatness of the country.

[Machinarium - sketches]

Me: How long did it take from the first sketches to the release?

Jakub: It took us almost three years. It’s a very long time and it wasn’t easy to stay focused on only one project all the time. Of course the whole game also changed significantly over that time. The basic concept was much simpler and our idea was to create longer but quite simple looking game. We thought it will take us about one year to finish it. In the end I’m really glad we spent all that time on it, because the game is now much better and more polished than what was intended in the initial plan and it definitely paid off.

[The artist's studio - Adolf Lachman]

Me: Why have you chosen Flash/AIR for the game?
Jakub: We have a long time relationship and lots of experience with Flash (since the Macromedia days). We don’t know any other tool for making such rich and interactive animations like Flash. And AIR was for us the only way how to get the game on iPad and other tablets in a relatively short time. Also we are looking forward to trying upcoming features of AIR 3.0 including Stage3D.

[Black Cap Brotherhood from Machinarium]

Me: What about the music and sound effects?

Jakub: The music and sound effects are very important in all of our projects so we do care about the whole audio side a lot. Our ‘in-house’ composer Tomas ‘Floex’ Dvorak (who created also Samorost2 OST) has worked almost one year on the score. The style could be generally described as electroacoustic music with elements of ambient, soundtrack and classical music. Tomas is very interested in the fusion of the acoustic and electronic fields, and it is also noticeable on this work. The same goes for sound effects which were all recorded and edited in our studio.

[Music by Tomas 'Floex' Dvorak, Sound design by Tomas 'Pif' Dvorak]

Me: Where can people get Machinarium?

Jakub: Machinarium is available for PC, Mac and Linux on our own website (machinarium.net) and it’s also on Steam and Mac App Store. The iPad2 version is available on iOS App Store and the Android version for tablets is coming soon as well. In addition to that we are also working hard on PS3 version which should be available later on PSN.

[Level design]

Me: Are you planning any other games at the moment?

Jakub: Yes, right now we are working on two projects – the first is a light-hearted and funny adventure game called Botanicula. It’s about five friends – little tree creatures who set out for a journey to save the last seed from their home tree which is infested by evil parasites. The game itself is about exploration, solving little puzzles, meeting strange tree creatures and listening to the music. The other game is Samorost3 which is our main project. It will be our second full-length game and it will feature full HD graphics and a bit of a new approach to game design.

[Sketch of the five friends from Botanicula]

Last week at FITC, Lee Brimelow demoed Molehill running in AIR on a mobile platform (Android) for the first time. It seems like you guys liked it!

You guys will be able to leverage the Molehill APIs on mobile platforms for 2D and 3D rendering, for you guys who did not attend FITC, here is a little video demoing Molehill on Android through AIR. The same code is reused for the desktop version and then pushed to mobile :

Molehill - Tablet demo from Thibault Imbert on Vimeo.

This demo illustrates a common thing in 3D like cube map textures for reflections and is one of the demo from our test suite, so we have many little demos like this. I will be posting more complex examples soon!

Attention BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet developers! As a follow up to our BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet Webcast series, we’ve put together a video overview demonstrating how easy it is for developers to use the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK Beta2 for Adobe® AIR® and the BlackBerry PlayBook Simulator Beta to develop BlackBerry PlayBook applications.

In the above video, I walk through deploying your app to the BlackBerry PlayBook Simulator and the similarities between the Simulator and testing your app on an actual BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. I also demonstrate how the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK integrates directly into Adobe® Flash Builder 4 and the GUI builder in Flash Builder “Burrito”.

With the tools available to developers, practically anyone can create a BlackBerry PlayBook application, so start building! You might also be interested in learning that developers who create a qualifying application for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet prior to its initial North American release are eligible for a free BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

BlackBerry Tablet OS Development Resources (SDK, Simulator, Webcasts)

Don’t forget get to also check out my friend Matthew’s new BlackBerry PlayBook Web Fidelity video on the Inside BlackBerry blog, which demonstrates rich multimedia, Adobe Flash games and social networking websites like Facebook running in the BlackBerry Browser.

Thanks also to our friends at Universal Mind for providing the code and app used in the video! For more information, please visit http://www.universalmind.com/

More info and downloads on Koji’s site.

As you may have guessed it is Mac only. If you know of any similar projects for Windows or Linux don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!

Update: Here’s another AS3 library + socket server app for Mac.
Update 2: Also check out as3kinect.org.

It felt like the perfect time to refresh the blog and chronicle a new direction my work/play has taken. Over the past few months, I’ve been in the process of expanding my skill set to include the newer development platforms including iOS, Android, HTML5, and Windows Phone. Much like the current technology climate, my bag-of-tools is undergoing the largest retooling in years, and that experience has been extremely enjoyable, particularly when playing with the new HTML5 API’s. Javascript is about to undergo its third renaissance and will finally fill the gapping holes in browsers that Flash has diligently filled for the last decade.

Of course that’s not to say the death of Flash is imminent. Far from it. The latest additions to the Player are very exciting, particularly hardware 3D access which will reinforce Flash’s dominance in browser based gaming. Also given how much faster and nimble Adobe is than the W3C and browser vendors at rolling out technology, Flash will patch future browser holes and likely shape the next HTML standard.

These are exciting times to be an interactive developer. Our industry is being reshaped before our eyes and the advancements are coming rapidly. I expect to participate fully with experiments and projects that explore the new landscape. Here are some personal projects I’ve worked on in the last few months.

jsTerm – JS Telnet terminal emulation done using Canvas2d and WebSockets (node.js on the server side).

BitmapData.js – JS implementation of the AS3 BitmapData class done using Canvas2d.

Particles – Java and C++ interactive 3D particle emitter for Android done using Android NDK.

The revolution is here and the world is never be the same!

Last couple months were just exciting like never before. We’ve been working with guys from Alternativa Platform and Mythos Labs on 3D racing demo with realtime multiplayer over P2P. The game is set to Los Angeles, where popular developers’ conference Adobe MAX takes place right now.

The game uses the new set of GPU-accelerated 3D APIs – currently codenamed Molehill (see Adobe Labs page). You will be able to get your hands on this API in the first half of 2011.

Multiplayer demo – controlling with three computers

MAX Racer Teaser by Alternativa

Check this video to see how it looks like, when playing with friends all over the world:

Implementing the P2P multiplayer

My role in this game was to implement realtime multiplayer over P2P API, which I have to say works just fluently. We have tried playing the game through internet over 2000 km (from Prague in Czech Republic to Perm in Russia) and I had the feeling like we were sitting next room and playing over LAN.

P2P = Getting the best latency possible
Direct connections in P2P is the best possible method to keep your latency as lowest as possible. With direct connections, you can be sure, that the data packets will be delivered, so the transmission is fully reliable. (Note: this is not the case of Posting, Directed Routing and Multicast, where it’s best effort delivery)

When we talk about the programming logic, you basically setup one outgoing stream and 2,3 or 5 (depends on the number of players) incoming streams.

Then you get something, what we call Full Mesh. This P2P architecture makes sure, that all data between the players is delivered in the smallest time possible.

We also ran into couple challenges in multiplayer, it’s not enough to transfer only direction changes (like forward, back, left, right), you also have to transfer a real position to sync on position. This will still make it a little bit choppy, because of massive use of physics and rendering speed. So the solution was to implementing interpolations, which is similar to smoothing. If you are at the Adobe MAX, make sure you drop on my session on Tuesday – Building P2P Multiplayer Games. I will also write more article in the future on how to solve this.

Hooking up Game Controllers
Yes, yes, yes, yes! We are working on adding the support of game controllers in Flash Player in the future. I hooked-up MAX Racer with a steering wheel USB controller and I have to say, it was pretty easy to do. I am pretty sure, you will love it and I can’t wait to see more Facebook realtime games with controllers online.

More info MAX Racer

If you want to check more info about the MAX Racer, watch this video by Thibault Imbert (PM for Flash Player).

Game Screenshots

Look at that details. Yeah, and we are rendering this in 60fps running 1920×1080.

Art was done by Mythos Labs. Kudos for the great job guys!

Credits
I just wanted to give a credit to Todd Wahoske and team from Mythos Labs for these great graphics and to Alternativa Platform guys – Vladimir Babushkin, Mikhail Fominykh, Anton Volkov and Alex Karpovich.
Finally I have to say that it was a great pleasure to work with guys on this game!

Flash on!

I am sure you guys have heard about what we just announced at the Max keynote this morning.

I am happy to share this with you guys

Molehill Introduction :

Another video from MaxRacer demoed at Max Keynote Day 1 built on top of Alternativa 8, leveraging the upcoming 3D Molehill APIs :

Tom demoes the Peer 2 Peer feature he developed for MaxRacer :

MAX Racer - 3D Flash Game with P2P Multiplayer from Tom Krcha on Vimeo.

Another one, with those beautiful islands, still with Molehill :

Another one from Frima Studio, who ported their engine used on the PSP for Zombie Tycoon to Molehill :

Another one from Away3D and EvoFlash using Molehill :

And again from Away3D :

For more details about implementation and how it works, check the Adobe labs Molehill page.

Update : For info, Molehill is also available in the browser, this is not limited to AIR or standalone player