I must admit that’s a pleasure to work with Flash and to be able to produce multi-screens games (Facebook, iPhone and Air) without redeveloping from scratch.
I’ll be back later with a more detailed article about development and distribution process, so stay tuned!

Thanks to Adobe guys for tips, help and feedback: Aditya Bansod, David Knight, Mark Silverman, Arno Gourdol, Adrian Ludwig, Mike Chambers.
Thanks to testers: Virginie Pain, Alex Aigret, Olivier Costes, François Meunier, Benjamin Guillotte, Pierre-Louis Gonon, Jonas Monnier, Germain Lecourtois, Frédéric MagicFred Smyczynski, Cédric Néhémie, Matthieu Huguet, Julien Faure…
Special thanks to Virginie Pain for bonus items and girl design.

To finish, here’s a teaser that showcases some gameplay, music and sound.

Are you smarter than your friends ?

So I followed these steps to reach my goal:
- Dynamic sound generation: Audio tracks (volume and pan) with insertion of basic dsps.
- Implement time based sound generation: Midi tracks (tempo and steps with mp3 samples assignedon each).
- Create some randomness based on received events: Midi tracks content can be controlled by any event source.

As you can imagine, the possibilities are endless to use this approach in real cases. You could easily imagine to plug a dynamical sound loop with user interactions on a website, generate interactive music loop from game actions to rythm a gameplay, or synchronize any soundscape with screen transitions…

More features and demos to come !

Here’s a basic code example made with a draft implementation of this concept.

var tempo : Number = 120.0;

// Create midi patterns defining tempo and steps (quarter notes count) for each
var loopPattern : Pattern = new Pattern( tempo, 32 );
loopPattern.addStep( 0 );

var kickPattern : Pattern = new Pattern( tempo/2, 16 );
kickPattern.addSteps( 0, 3, 6, 8, 11, 15 );

var snarePattern : Pattern = new Pattern( tempo/2, 16 );
snarePattern.addSteps( 2, 4, 12, 14 );

var hhPattern : Pattern = new Pattern( tempo, 16 );
hhPattern.addSteps( 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14 );

var randomPattern : Pattern = new Pattern( tempo );
randomPattern.addSteps( 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15 );

// build core audio station and add audio tracks defining volume and pan
_audioStation = new AudioStation( );
_audioStation.addAudioTrack( new Track(new SoundSequencer( Loop1, loopPattern ), 1, 0 ) );
_audioStation.addAudioTrack( new Track( new SoundSequencer( Kick1, kickPattern ), 0.3, 0 ) );
_audioStation.addAudioTrack( new Track( new SoundSequencer( Snare1, snarePattern ), 0.3, 0 ) );
_audioStation.addAudioTrack( new Track( new SoundSequencer( HH3, hhPattern ), 0.3, 0 ) );

// create some randomness trigged by keyboard events.
var soundList : Vector. = new Vector.();
soundList.push(Kick1, Snare1, HH1, HH2, HH3);
var interactiveSequencer : RandomSoundSequencer = new RandomSoundSequencer( soundList, randomPattern );
textfield.addEventListener( KeyboardEvent.KEY_UP, interactiveSequencer.eventTrigger );
_audioStation.addAudioTrack( new Track( interactiveSequencer, 0.3 ) );

Now, here is a quick demo of the concept.
Drums fills and bells notes arpeggios are trigged by keyboard events.
First, get the focus in the flash animation by clicking with your mouse. The music starts!
Now, you can hit some keys on your keyboard to interact with the music loop in realtime.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.tweenpix.net/files/pixfm.swf" width="400" height="300"/]

Final note: Special thanks to Andre Michelle and his Audio Sandbox for giving to me some light to begin this project.

So let me introduce the first one.
I needed a multi-users game server. So after some googling to browse OS projects, I decided to build a new one from scratch with Apache Mina 2.0 using my R&D xp.
I choosed to install Ubuntu with Parallels to have an easy workflow with a local test workstation.

At this time, I’ve obtained something basic which works fine. That’s full AMF (using BlazeDS ) and it manages users and rooms.
That’s all based on simplicity. No events, no verbosed implementation or mess with abstract design…

My next step and goals:
- Have something robust.
- Build a graphical chat showcase with text to speech feature.
- Build a game showcase with realtime synchronicity. I read a lot of resources about it, and I’m looking forward to work on this.

But I’m wondering about few things at this time:
- Should I go to open source ?
- Should I mix this implementation with Darkstar project ?
- Should I work on a cheap product ?
Any advice would be welcome !

Here’s a basic echo demo to end this thread and showcase the concept:

import net.tweenpix.pixserver.amf.AMFClient;

	public class EchoAMFClient
	{
		protected var _client : AMFClient;

		public function EchoAMFClient()
		{
			_client = new AMFClient( );
			_client.registerClass( TestVO );
			_client.connect( "10.211.55.4", 9123 );

			_client.addEventListener( "EchoMessage",  onEchoMessage );
			_client.sendRequest( 	"EchoMessage",
								new TestVO( "francis", 38 ),
								new TestVO( "virginie", 35 ) );
		}

		public function onEchoMessage( vo1 : TestVO, vo2 : TestVO ) : void
		{
			// do something
		}
	}

A paraître dans les prochains jours, un article d’investigation qui devrait vous plaire. So stay tuned !

You have to make direct method calls on the client (as you would with JavaScript library). It returns a responder instance on each call:

var responder : EventDispatcher = client.Friends.get() as EventDispatcher;

To get some request results, you can suscribe listeners (as many as you want) to any responder:

responder.addEventListener(FacebookClientEvent.ON_RESULT, onFriends);
responder.addEventListener(FacebookClientEvent.ON_FAULT, onError);

And guess what, results are encapsulated in events passed as arguments to your callback methods:

public function onFriends( e : FacebookClientEvent ) : void
{
	trace ( e.methodName + " call: " + e.result.length );
}

Clean and easy as I like it.
Last but not least, you got some errors reporting. I had hard time on this part, coz the JS implementation was acting weird. I’m not even sure at this time to have understood the whole error process. I must finalize this part, few errors aren’t caught at this time but every transaction is logged in firebug with Debug.dump JS calls.

public function onError( e : FacebookClientEvent = null ) : void
{
	trace ( "onGetInfoError(" + "method:" + e.methodName
				+ ", error_code:" + e.result.error_code
				+ ", error_msg:" + e.result.error_msg + ")" );
}

Here’s a short demo to end the teasing around this project.
In this example, client retrieves all the name and profile photos urls of a user friends list through 2 API calls.

package
{
	import com.bourre.facebookflashapi.FacebookClient;
	import com.bourre.facebookflashapi.FacebookClientEvent;

	import flash.display.Sprite;
	import flash.events.EventDispatcher;

	public class FacebookClientTest
		extends Sprite
	{
		protected var client : FacebookClient;

		public function FacebookClientTest()
		{
			client = new FacebookClient();

			var responder : EventDispatcher = (client.Friends.get() as EventDispatcher);
			responder.addEventListener(FacebookClientEvent.ON_RESULT, onFriends);
			responder.addEventListener(FacebookClientEvent.ON_FAULT, onError);
		}

		public function onError( e : FacebookClientEvent = null ) : void
		{
			trace ( "onGetInfoError(" + "method:" + e.methodName
						+ ", error_code:" + e.result.error_code
						+ ", error_msg:" + e.result.error_msg + ")" );
		}

		public function onFriends( e : FacebookClientEvent ) : void
		{
			trace ( e.methodName + " call" );

			( client.users.getInfo( {uids:e.result, fields:["name", "pic_big"]} )
			as EventDispatcher).addEventListener(FacebookClientEvent.ON_RESULT, onGetInfo);
		}

		public function onGetInfo( e : FacebookClientEvent ) : void
		{
			for each ( var o : Object in e.result )
				trace ( "Nom:" + o.name + ", Image:" + o.pic_big );
		}
	}
}

I will release the source code under an open source licence when it’ll be a bit more polished for people who want to try it, and maybe I’ll make a video tutorial, who knows !

To try it, just use your mouse and draw some 3D objects on screen.
Click from left to right to draw cubes or from right to left to draw spheres. Last but not least, you can drag any 3D object on screen if you want.

Maybe I’ll be back with a gameplay later this week if all is going well as I make some changes and optimizations.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.tweenpix.net/files/Box2DPV3D.swf" width="600" height="700"/]

Je vais passer en statut indépendant et proposer des travaux freelance, du consulting et de la formation.
A bon entendeur !

J’ai quitté periscope-créations début Mars. Ce fut deux années magnifiques, professionnellement et humainement parlant. J’ai eu la chance de travailler pour des clients prestigieux et de collaborer avec une équipe toujours inspirée et compétente. Je tiens à remercier Anto et Julien pour cette expérience extraordinaire ainsi que toute la confiance qu’ils m’ont accordée pendant mon séjour à bord du valeureux sous-marin, sans oublier Rosy, Delphine, François, Nico, Mike, Steph, Cécile, Imane, Bruno, Patrice, Kal, Vincent, Arnaud, Julien, Nadège, Toma, Ben, Guillaume, autant de prénoms qui résonnent dans mon coeur et marquent à jamais une véritable aventure humaine, avec ses joies, ses doutes et ses peines; en résumé, les richesses de la vie.

Aujourd’hui je travaille chez prizee (leader du casual gaming en France) sous le pompeux titre de chargé de recherche.
Cette nouvelle aventure démarre plutôt bien avec au rendez-vous, développements en team, travaux open-source (pixlib, pixioc et lowra), formations, création de prototypes de jeux, le tout en AS3, et ce, entouré une fois de plus par des personnes dont la richesse de coeur et la motivation n’ont peu d’égal. Une dédicace en passant à Olympe, Romain, Steve, Valériane, Géraud, Jérôme, Simon, Carine, Frantz, Gwendal, Jonathan, Alexandre, Asselin, Florence et Caro, sans oublier Cédric (man you rock!).

Jeudi matin, je suis revenu de Toronto épuisé (jetlag et quelques excès obligent). J’ai présenté une conférence intitulée: AS3 Game development in a nutshell. Au delà de la grande messe canadienne et de ses accents show-biz, (j’ai en effet préfèré zapper cette année la plupart des soirées officielles, même le religieux repas des speakers), ce fut pour moi l’occasion de partager de fabuleux moments avec des amis de longue date (mention toute particlulière pour la soirée passée chez Colin en compagnie de Valérie) et d’initier de très belles rencontres. Un grand merci à mes compagnons de voyage, Caro the wise girl (aka wonderwoman), Michel (keep the faith bro, you deserve!) et Martin (my sweet personal translator).

Some additional funky notes:
Hoss, you’re my spiritual bro.
Tim, you really rock, as one of the sweetest human being and greatest speaker.
Zameer, so bad that you coudn’t come, but thank you for sending Chta-Wei, a really smiling and attractive ambassador. See you next time in New-York!
Josh, let’s keep in touch.
Grant and Bobby, as you know, you’re very welcome to spend few days in my home during November.

Pour finir ce petit tour d’horizon, j’aimerais partager le fait que je me suis enfin remis à la musique et collabore en ce moment avec Sandrine, une petite grande âme, pour monter un spectacle musical sans étiquette. Nom de code: La muette. Un premier titre est en éprouvette, et l’alchimie semble plutôt fonctionner.

Je reviens vers vous dans la semaine prochaine avec quelques munitions plus concrètes (slides, vidéos, game teasers, formation, des news de lowra …).

En attendant keep fun, open mind and openware!
C’était francis, en direct du front, avec du soleil et des fleurs dans ses bagages.