progress!

Maybe a bit too late, but here’s our post anyway.

Organising structure and workflow

After the very inspiring lecture from Carlos Ulloa, we took a bit of Carlos for some thoughts and help on our project. Basically, he gave us a lot of tips and tricks on how we should structure our 3D space. These tips were very helpful to keep the preformance up to the average of 30 fps. It is great to hear these things from the master, no-one would have given us any better advise. Also Carlos inspired us to rearrange our workflow. The next day we took some time to set up FlashDevelop or FDT for standalone flash publishing. No need to use flash anymore! only compile a swf and a swc. Things got quite a bit faster, and we don’t have to wait all the time for Flash to export the movie. This has been a real breather. Next we set up an SVN. We all have been dreaming about this, but never really knew the pro’s and con’s. It was a bit confusing to figure out how this thing called SVN completly worked (especially on the import/export/commit part). But the nice part is, everyone works together on the same project on the same server, no duplicate files. Every update committed by one is stored as a new revision. The older revisions are accessible if something went wrong or if you want to compare what has been changed over time. But your whole team always works with the newest revision (if they keep updated). It’s great, every change and every version is ccessible thus the fear of overwriting or messing stuff up is gone.

The results

So much for the workflow, which has become smooth as smör in the sun. Slowly we are getting to the results as well. Anton: Interaction Designer; is working hard on the navigation, getting to figure out the ins and outs of actionscript 3 and papervision. Tore: Chief of Optimization; has made the 3d cover display as sleek as possible with hardcore bitmap caching. The basic setup with all the embedded graphics works, with a staggering framerate of 28 fps. Kasper: Information Architect; has been working on a XMLHandler class that does all the dirty work for you. Even simpler than the current XML handeling in flash, getting requested content is easy as pie. Simone: Father of all Graphics; has done a great job in providing graphics and ideas for this project.

For now I can only tease you with a screenshot, the working version we keep hidden in our laboratory.

Watch out kids, coverbandit is going to kick some buns.

• April 29th, 2008