Today : 3D Girl freaking me out, isometric engine & Gnash beta.
Ok, so I wanted to post this one earlier; an extremely realistic looking 3D interactive portrait of a girl....it's kind of weird looking and a bit spooky, don't look at her too long 
It's impressive though.
So, what is this ? Well, a bit of simple research (read, firebug) led me too motionportrait.com. Unfortunately, that's in japanese. That site has the same girl on it, as well as links to several other implementations of the technology...including this hilarious one : hige-chen (love that tune). But also, to the still very cool Rec-You campaign. I'm betting we'll see a couple of more implementations of this in the near future.
Another thing that caught my attention today was a mail from the creator of the isometric engine ffilmation. Very nice work indeed! The name is derived from the old-skool filmation engine, used to create various gaming titles for the old 8-bit platforms. Looking forward to see progress on it. Related : also, make sure you check out the Alternativa3D engine which was previously isometric only also, but now "full 3D"..impressive stuff.
A bit late, but I didn't see any MXNA post on this; the first beta for Gnash is out. From the release post : "Gnash is a GPL'd SWF movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript 2 classes.".
Gnash already made the news last year, but this time they've got a beta...
Honestly, I'm not really impressed. One of the goals for this release seems to be to make youtube work on it. I don't think this means that good to the Flash community. Even if Gnash grows up (and eventually supports SWF9 / AS3), I don't really like the idea of "another" player. In my opinion, if it becomes a broader supported version of the player, it will just cause rips in the ubiquity and cross-platform nature of Flash....something which is undeniably one of the biggest strenghts of the platform.
What Gnash might provide is a deeper insight of the workings of the Flash Player, which might eventually enable us to optimize our code for it more and more. It might also inspire Adobe to make the Flash Player available on more os'es ? Let's hope so. Maybe someone will port it to the Iphone
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9 Comments, Comment or Ping
chromatic
Flash is *barely* cross-platform. Try running something more exotic than Firefox on 32-bit x86 GNU/Linux, and Adobe’s binary blob will do you no good.
Mar 10th, 2008
Josh
I doubt we’ll see Gnash get much traction outside the open source community. Adobe has pretty solid installation pathways and since they’re the ones innovating with new features, they’re leading the charge with Gnash always playing catchup. Most users who install Gnash will know that it’s not the official Flash Player, and sites behaving badly will be attributed to that fact.
One might argue that it might lead to bad feelings toward Adobe when they see Gnash’s bugs, but I think most people installing Gnash are already a little biased in this regard anyway.
Mar 11th, 2008
UnitZeroOne
@chromatic…Agreed. It isn’t VERY cross platform…but it does support the major platforms (except for 64 bit lin, agreed). I think code portability vs binary deliverable is the problem here. Since the FP is so highly optimized for size, I’m guessing porting it is a bit harder then any other app.
Mar 11th, 2008
UnitZeroOne
@josh I totally agree with you. If Gnash would gain more footing in the main stream (it has about 0 right now), this would become an issue. Let’s hope it inspires Adobe for some more Player-openes, though. They seem to be on the right direction with Flex and Blaze heading OS.
I’m just thinking how they might avoid mutilated versions of the player becoming mainstream…even if they would open source the player….(I doubt they will).
Mar 11th, 2008
Michiel van der Ros
Any news on whether they will fix the disappearance of the SOUND_COMPLETE event?
André Michelle’s sound projects are the coolest project to ever get broken by a dot update of the Flash player!
Petition at http://blog.andre-michelle.com/2007/198/
Mar 13th, 2008
UnitZeroOne
I’m pretty sure that’s Andre & Joa scored with their “Adobe Make Some Noise” shirts at FITC. Let’s see what they do,
Mar 14th, 2008
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