You can choose your pick for best of the Net by voting at the Webby People’s Voice site.

Hooray! Not much more to add to my previous post on the nominations, except to reiterate – well done to everyone involved at Euro and Sony.

It was the first time I’ve actually attended an AIMIA Awards night and I had a great time – caught up with some old friends, and met a few new acquaintances as well. Woke up with a spectacular hangover the next morning too.

Congratulations also to all the other award winners.

Update: Just added a few photos from the night.

The key codes for W and S (up and down) are 87 and 83, and the key codes for A and D (left and right) are 65 and 68. When a key is pressed, first I check if it is up/down, or left/right by testing whether its keycode is above 80 or not. If below, I subtract 66.5 from the key code, leaving either -1.5 or 1.5, which I use as the X velocity. If above 80, I subtract 85, leaving either -2 or 2, then multiply by .75 to ensure that the X and Y velocities match.

Of course, this means that other keys will also affect either the X or Y velocity at unpredictable speeds.

Number 12 – my attempt at creating a shaded 3D cube cheats on two levels – 1: it’s not correct perspective 3D but isometric 3D, and 2: the “shading” is achieved with simple parallel lines which converge to mimic a shading effect as each plane turns away from the camera. The isometric effect is simple to produce – just scale the parent sprite/clip (in this case stage/root) by around 50%, and then rotate the children.

Jellycube was a natural progression from my previous entry, but also inspired by Human Target by Melon Dezign. Melon’s style was always a big inspiration for my demogroup Reality, particularly with their de-emphasis on cutting-edge effects in favour of design and humour. However, once again I wasn’t able to achieve my desired outcome – instead of squashing & stretching the cube I was restricted to rotation only.

My 14th, and final entry is Headless Flasher, an attempt at creating a stick figure running across the screen. This one was originally inspired by my cat Lucy, but it became pretty obvious that the 140 character limit wouldn’t allow four legs and a tail, so I switched over to a human stick figure. Unfortunately there was no room to add code for his head (or blood spurting out of his neck for that matter).

Since reading that article I’ve always wanted to recreate the fur effect, and have now done so using Papervision3D. As I was hoping to use it on a recent project, instead of fur I decided to simulate grass:

The effect is achieved by drawing cross-sections of the fur/grass on a set of parallel layers – in this case I have 7 layers which, using 512×512 alpha-transparent textures with 4×4 segments, is pushing the limits of Flash/PV3D. However, because we’re only ever dealing with 7 textures, it can handle potentially infinite blades of grass – the example above has 3000. The grass is generated in real-time – I build the layers up by starting each blade of grass with a certain size & direction, and growing it out on subsequent layers. The effect looks fine when the camera is close to perpendicular or the normal of the planes, but things start to fall apart when the planes and camera approach parallel.

The grass highlights are created with simple gradients, and I’ve also rendered basic shadows to the dirt layer (although they’re barely noticeable with such dense grass). Each blade of grass has a random colour, weighted heavily towards green but straying towards blue/brown in rare cases. Creating the effect of the grass moving in the wind is a simple matter of moving each plane along the X & Z axis, with the motion increasing based on the distance from the base layer.

Being a huge fan of both Ico and SOTC, I’m really looking forward to seeing the next game from Fumito Ueda and Team ICO, and what they can do with the PS3 hardware.

Euro RSCG Australia has been nominated for five AIMIA awards for our work on “The Quantum Code” – the Quantum of Solace promotion for Sony. We entered the Bond promotion in the following five categories, and have been short-listed in all five:

• Best Advertising or Marketing
• Best Cross-Platform Content or Content Integration with an Offline Advertising Campaign
• Mobile Advertising or Marketing
• Best Use of Social Media
• Best Word of Mouth, Peer-to-peer or viral

The campaign was a cross-platform, cross-media alternate reality game (ARG) which utilised the web, online & mobile video, QR codes, social media sites (YouTube, Facebook), print and real-world locations. More info on Gizmodo and Euro’s website.

All up, there were 51 people who contributed towards the campaign across the agency. My involvement on the project was to manage development of all web & mobile content, and to develop the “Clue Confirmer” Flex/AIR application which was running in-store at the Sony Centre in Sydney, and allowed players to check their progress in the game.

I also led development of the 007 Bond Adventures site which the campaign promoted. However, credit must be shared with the rest of the UX Team, who worked tirelessly until the wee hours of the morning for several days in order to get everything over the line. Considering that this was the UX Team’s first exposure to Flex, it was a real accomplishment. Fingers crossed for the 13th March!

This is a week or two old now, but I’m throwing it up here for posterity. Euro just launched an online campaign for the Australian Democrats (yes, they’re still around), called Bastardwatch. Created to coincide with the Australia Day weekend, part of the campaign was an appropriately BBQ-themed Flash game called Grill a Bastard. Got a bit of publicity too – SMH and The Age.

The game was built as an AS3 project in Flex Builder, with all assets sitting in a SWF created in Flash and embedded at compile time. Despite having nearly three years experience with Flex/AS3, this was my first pure AS3 project. It came together pretty quickly in around two days, although I did get stuck on one particular issue with SimpleButton for a bit. If anyone out there is still using AS2 and has yet to move up to AS3, I really recommend doing so. The display list and event system make things so much easier.

Check it out here.