Tech Blog

Jamming is always on our mind, we thought, why can’t we jam online? Therefore, we created a site called Tjoon.com. At Tjoon.com you can record split screen videos. Maybe you have seen such videos on YouTube. You need special video edit software, to create these splitscreen jams, but now there’s Tjoon! The only thing you have to do to make a video is plugin your webcam, go to the site and start recording. After that other people see your Tjoon with 1 track, and they can add another track, up to 4 tracks.

Tjoon is a fun project, we did it in our spare time. We had a lot of fun when Wobbo did his funny moves, Nico his burbs and Jeroen his great guitar solo’s. Well check it out and spread the word! Here is a little example of the Tjoon widget. Have fun.

Technically speaking Tjoon is a combination of Ruby on Rails and as media server Red 5, for if you wanted to know

http://www.tjoon.com/

APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) is a free AS3 open source 2D physics engine for use in Flash and Flex, released under the MIT License. APE is written and maintained by Alec Cove.

Manuel Bua created a Magic Carpet using Papervison3D and APE. Best of all: source included!

Check the video Manuel made:

I’m happy to introduce ascollada, a AS3 library for reading Collada files.

The library is geared towards Papervision3D but should work with any 3D-engine like Away3D or Sandy.

The library currently features:

1. simple models
2. material loading (watch your paths!)
3. biped animation

Please note that the library is still in its very early stages and most likely will contain bugs.

So, get the code and try it out! And… please report bugs!

You can get the code using SVN:

http://ascollada.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/as3/trunk/

Papervision3D users can opt to use the ascollada branch of PV3D’s svn:

http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/branches/ascollada/

There are some examples in the examples directory to get you going.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m very proud to announce I’m now part of the core development team of Papervision3D. In mafia terms: i was made.

I’ll be working mainly on integrating Collada into Papervision3D. Recently I added my first contribution. Its a branch which incorporates the use of a so called frustum.

So. my thanks to Carlos Ulloa, John Grden and Ralph Hauwert!

After reading the chapter Layout and Style of the (very good) book Code Complete 2nd Edition Steve McConnell convinced me to change the way I write my functions. Before I wrote functions like this:

function functionName()
{
    ...
}

This way you have a nice line of white space between the function declaration and the inside of the function. I thought this line of white space improved the readability of the code. Steve McConnell learned me that although that may be true, it cripples the most important thing of code layout: the layout has to follow logical structure of the code. So I’m back to using this style:

function functionName() {
    ...
}

If you want to know more about this subject or anything else regarding software construction I can certainly recommend you to read Code Complete 2nd Edition.