UnitZeroOne

My favorite Adobe User Group does it again! And how! At the threshold of end of the year, on the 3rd December, the dutch AUG in co-operation with Adobe presents to you a full XL event. With the popularity of the normal meetings rising and rising and these event being of an exceptional level for any type of usergroup, this time, the lid is fully blown off!

The XL event will bring some great national and international speakers to the stage; Dave August of OOOii will talk about his use of Flash in JJ Abram's Star Trek, as well as his creative input to movies such as Fast & Furious. Tobias Mannewitz of Karakter will be there and with work on projects for Spellbound, EA Games and SCEE this promises to be a session not to miss! Anita and Geoff from Champagne Valentine will amongst other great things talk about an interactive music video they created for Placebo.  Adobe will give you insights in their products and tooling with such international renowned speakers / evangelists as Serge Jespers, Jason Levine and Paul Burnett. If that's not enough, Niko Stumpo of Hanazuki will be talking about the studio's new work together with Mark Barzinski of Barzinski and Jean Jean. Dirk Groten of Layar fame will be talking about the Layar platform, something I'm looking forward to find out more about. Last but hopefully not least, I was honored to get an invitation to speak, and I will be talking about my latest forays into realtime flash.

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Last week at Flash on the Beach I had an announcement regarding me and Papervision3D. While some people took that as a hint to the release of PapervisionX, the actual news was a bit more sad. After pondering on this for a while, I made the rather big and tough decision to leave the Papervision3D team. As many of you couldn't be in the session, since the room was packed and as I heard later, many, many people not being able to come in from the line outside. Next to that many of you not able to come out to FOTB, this post is to ellaborate on my decision and explain it to all of you.

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With the addition of the 2.5d API in Flash 10, lot's of developers now have even easier access to basic 2.5D environments. But with those new capabilities and API's new challenges for developers arise. Famously, Flash 10 doesn't do the Z-Sorting natively. When Lee Brimelow asked me if I could send him an easy solution for that, I sent him the SimpleZSorter. Which he in turn used to paste my profile picture on as much as possible planes, but more significantly, use for this tutorial.

Althought the name Simple would imply something a bit away from a PerfectZSorter (which, technically, has some challenges considering the 2.5D API and the player performance, don't ask), the thing which astounded me was the amount of feedback. Sure, more people had asked me for such a solution and this simple little tool did it for them most of the time.

But considering the simplicity of the SimpleZSorter and the amount of feedback I got on it (even if I didn't publish on it myself) made clear that although the 2.5D API of Flash 10 opened up loads of opportunities for developers and designers a like, some of the simpler issues aren't addressed by it, whist there is clearly a need for it. That need can be addressed and with this post I'm hoping to do a another small part.

The ArcBall

One of the questions which people have been asking me about for in relation to using the 2.5D API, is (loosely combined) "How do I rotate things in 3D correctly with the mouse".As this question came more and more, I've also realized how fundamental this is to our community. With Flash 10 we have native realtime (2.5D) 3D, but with realtime comes interactivity. And what use is it for users to have a 3D interface, while the controls are not intuitive ? At that point 3D becomes a worse experience, rather then a better. While this solution won't address every issue with that, it most certainly addresses one, 3D rotation dragging.

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