It was the massive annual Assembly gathering last week. Traditionally its a place for the demo scene to gather and present their demos and to hack out new ones.
For those not in the know the demo scene or “scene” is where a team of people come together and compete to make a music video. Except that they arent videos in the traditional sense as its all generated using code and runs in realtime. This means that you have to be super efficient with your code. Some of the competitions are “64k” or even “4k” competitions which means that the whole demo must fit in 64kb or 4kb! The music is also produced by the groups and often excellent.
I have been checking out some of the demos produced by the teams this year and they are simply stunning. Every year they get better and better.
This one from CNCD and Fairlight particularly caught my eye as it has massive numbers of particles and a stunning soundtrack kinda reminiscent of glitchy Radiohead. Therefore I thought it essential I share it here.
Enjoy:
Oh while im at it check out this one from last year:
I know I have been posting alot of videos lately but this one caught my eye for a couple of reasons this morning.
Firstly its an impressive video showing how easy it is to intercept 80% of the worlds calls with just $1,500 worth of equipment. Also the source article over on Venture Beat says that he can also jam a band preventing calls just as easily which is quite scary.
The second reason why this video caught my eye is it appears that this brit-hacker is wearing high-heels throughout his presentation, check it out:
I, like many others have been eagerly anticipating the latest Blizzard release Starcraft 2. I have been looking forward to the game but more importantly I have been eagerly anticipating the custom maps from the community.
I used to spend hours and hours playing the custom maps released with Warcraft III, I still log in every now and then to check out how its going and am suprised every time to see people still making new maps. Some of the most popular game genres in existence today wouldn’t be around if it wasnt thanks to be map making community in WC3. Genres such as Tower Defence (TD) and Defence of The Ancients (DOTA) were born there.
So it made me extremely happy to see this video on YouTube showing that yes custom maps are possible in SC2 and yes you can make TDs with them, horaay!
Its no secret that im a sci-fi fan and The Fifth Element is my favourite film. Watched it again in epic 1080p BluRay quality last night. Went poking about on Youtube afterwards and found this little gem:
I didnt even know it was possible to reach notes like that let alone move between them so quickly.
I just realised the other day when I was trying to show someone some of my old projects that half of my old posts are broken.Videos are missing, download links gone, images half broken. Basically the thing is a shambles.
I can only assume that things have gone whoops during the various moves this site has had over the years.
So over the course of the next week or so im going to go back through and fix all my old posts and make sure everything is working again. I would greatly appreciate it if you could drop me a comment or an email if you see any post that is still broken and ill take a look at it. Cheers!
I have started by uploading a load of my old videos to Youtube and Vimeo (stupid YT 10min limit).
If you are interested I have included them all below the jump:
I have been meaning to post this one for a while, but only just got round to it. It was linked on the RobotLegs mailing list. Its an interestive watch if not just for the incredible artist animating it
Wow! This is pretty mental. I know a while back someone had managed to get a Linux kernel running on the iPhone, but there wasnt much to see and I soon forgot about it. It appears now however that PlanetBeing from the Dev-Team has managed to take an Android build and get it to run on the iPhone! Check out the video of it below:
Very cool stuff. I cant wait to see some Flash 10.1 running on that!
Thought id mention these videos as I have been watching them and really like the content. They are a series of video blog posts by one of the ‘celebrities’ of the Flash and Flex world, in which he talks about lots of stuff related to whats going on in the industry and the various frameworks he uses or recommends (or doesnt). He also has a few things to say about beer, which is a bonus!
Anyways theres three of them so far, and can be watched over on his blog:
Michael is a Professional Flash Developer currently based in Manchester UK. His passion is all things programming, particularly Games and Particle Systems.