Hehehe, this thingie end up being quite fun! Didn't expected it to be that dificult for everyone!!

First of all, a bit of theory... The GIF format was the shit years ago. 256 colours (8bits)! You could do a lot with that!! Unfortunatelly, gfxzone is down now so I cannot show a lot of graphics done with Deluxe Paint pixel per pixel (no wacoms!).

So yeah, as I said, using a GIF you can have up to 256 colours, and, now listen carefully, 2 colours of those 256 could be the same, you can customise the palette however you want, in fact, with good old programs you could even move the colours in the palette. Quite a lot of games used the trick of using the first colour in the palette as transparent colour, so the graphician had to setuop the palette of the graphic like that.

So yeah, the trick was that 2 colours (even 3) where black (I added a transparent one because a "bug" with irfanview). So, in order to show the text, you have to change one of those colours to any other colour :D That trick was very used by graphicians long time ago, they used to add hidden text (greetings to other graphicians) in the empty parts of their graphics. Isn't it cool?!

So, here you have the steps:



Select the first colour:



Change it to white, and that's it!



Now you should see this:



#permalink

I sent an email (by mistake, as I was going to do it on Friday) to the Spring designers with this image, well, it wasn't actually a file called "byebye" without extension. So they had to figure out that it was a GIF, then they had to learn a bit about the format and find the text inside it and ready it. It's a message for them. One of them saw the text but was because a Irfanview bug (?). I've amended the image so irfanview doesn't show it. By now, nobody was able to read the text, even the Dev guys :/



I guess some of the readers of this blog already know what it is, as it's an old pixelling scene trick :D



#permalink

No words.. just links:
Super Mario MOD Player
AS3-Audiocyclebuffer

This guy is alwasy going 6 months forward!

#permalink

If you find yourself browsing and you find one website that opens in a pop up, and also resizes the window to get fullscreen, so it's on top of everything else you had, close the window! don't let it load or anything. Just close it and go away.

If you want to compare to something, is like buying sweets to your kid because he is crying for some sweets. If you buy him sweets, everytime he wants sweets he will cry again, and this is bad, isn't it? So, don't let the website developers use childish tricks like that to gain your attention, let them know that it's annoying just closing the window.

If we all do this the world will become better! :D

#permalink

6:23, Monday morning, I just woke up at 5:05 this morning, tho yesterday I went to sleep at.. uhmm.. 16:00? Hehe.. I really had to be tired :) However, it's time to do the Day 3 report.. tho It was 2 days ago, so let's pretend that today is yesterday..  :P

As on thursday I went to sleep at 5:00 or so, I wasn't going able to watch the 2 speeches before the lunch time (Granatta and Dr. Woohoo / Jürg Lehni)... I had a lunch with my parents and my brother instead (one of those things that happens once a year now.. So at 15:40 I was ready to go back to the festival...

Syrup (web)
I arrived when this one was going on.. Didn't see too much of them, but was again one of those conferences where the guys just browse their site a little bit a show projects and explain a bit of what they do for each one. I took some pictures meanwhile that one and I realized how many people was sleeping (probably the siesta thing)..

Rob Chiu (web)
After checking what was going on in the other rooms I sit down in the main room and Rob Chiu prepared for his speech. Nando Costa was suposed to do the speech following the timetable but looks like he wasn't able to come and also Rob Chiu (the ronin) didn't do the speech on Thursday because someone stolen his laptop in Barcelona (great! uh?!).
Again this one was about showing the work he did and explaining some facts about it. However, as it was motiongraphics it was somehow more easy to see. I really liked how each piece was musicalized, the audio was great in each one, well, anything he does have always a great audio ambient.

Erik Natzke (web)
Meanwhile Rob Chiu and Erik was swaping the stage I met Wences from DMSTK (a cool digitalart focused spanish forum I'm in) to see if they had any spare XL t-shirt for me :) So they had and I went to get some money to pay for it :P As soon as I came to my place (just in front of the stage I saw that was super full and was quite hard to sit down again there.
Erik Natzke was showing his work and his progress, at that moment I didn't know who he was but after being there a bit I remembered all their works. This guy is the inventor of the "book effect" done in flash. Respect! :D He showed great stuff done with Actionscript and ended up showing his latest stuff which reminds me a bit to Doobscii but done with ribbons, I was very impressed and very motivated after this speech.

Ben Fry & Casey Reas (web)
Ok, here started the down part of the day. It was cool to see the processing-script inventors, but was also very boring. Some bits and techniques of how Casey uses his script to creaty his illustrations were cool, but when Casey stop talking and changed to Ben Fry which was speaking about using processing and that style to visualize data information.. Well, I had to leave!!

Marius Watz (web)
During this one I was outside sharing some beers one of the guys behind CDMON (which hosts xplsv.tv), and also he introduced me to Yeoh Guan Hong. A guy that I didn't know anything about, and also he didn't know anything about me. However, we had a cool and long chat :) Then for some reason I thought I was missing the exposition room this year so I explored a little bit more the building and I found it (the orgos are always changing the rooms). Luckilly after finding the exposition room I saw there Joshua Davis just playing around with his "software", and leting the people play around with it too. I checked all the computers in the exhibition but 50% of them was already silly-fucked up (you know those people that try to reboot the machine or just go to other websites in exhibition computers, well I was one of those so, I should not complain :P). After that I went down to the main room again to see how the conference was going on and well, I wasn't interested at all. Instead of that I went to have some short chat with Rob Chiu and also with hahakid / Hi-Res which was more interesting than the speech going on :P

Tmema - Zach Lieberman & Golan Levin (web)
At this point I just wanted to leave the festival, the stuff that was going on was maybe to technical and not too creative (lack of concepts). However I stayed for the begining of this show, which was impressive on the beginning but boring after the 5th slide, so I left :)

After that I went to just walk throught Barcelona a bit, eixample, ramblas, sants.. the usual places but just to check the new things.. I think I spent 4hours doing a zig-zag walk until I arrived home. So that was the end of OFFF for me. See you all next year, let's see if I can meet more people!

#permalink

Heh! here is finally the post, it's quite late, 4:13am, I've just arrived home, but I still have some energies for writing this..

So, today was in fact my first day in the place. Went there just first time in the morning. I went by tube, and I realized that there are new kind of trains (more futuristic) in barcelona (just some), cool! Once there I went directly to the CDMON to complain about the crash of the server yesterday!! hehehe, just kidding, just went there to speak a bit with Marc Palau which gave me two t-shirts.. a CDMON one and a promsite one. After that, I checked the other stands (which were upstairs this year), bought the last Icons book "Web design: Flash sites" at the Loren Art stand and meanwhile had a super fast chat with Sergi of niubc.

So after that I went to the roots room to hear the conferences.To be honest I don't remember too much about some of them... The decoration this time was much cheaper than previous years (IKEA).. Anyway, let's say something about the  guys doing the conferences...
 
WIG-01 (web)
I didn't see too much from them, I just arrived when they were almost finishing, however the motions they where showing were pretty cool. Also, they looked like two young english guys with a nice attitude.

Waskman (web)
I had a personal problem with these guys. I tried to contact them in order to do some work together but after trying to contact them in some different ways they didn't get back to me. Having said that, I had to admit that some of the project they did were quite interesting, reminds me a bit of what my brother tried to do as a company, but heh.. these guys look more succesfull than my brother.

Then, it was lunch break, so I went to the restaurant we went the last year where I had very nice food for cheap prizes. I also did the mistake of all those british foreigners, asking for a 1liter sangria as it was very cheap. After drinking all of it, I had to go to rest a bit in some of the kinds-of-beds that they had in the same level of the stants. I was veery drunk :S!

Folkert Gorter (web)
I was still drunk, but I was still able to listen what the people said to me ;) IIt was very interesting to see one of the guys which is behing the super succesful newstoday.com. However, the guy was quite stressed because the public and had some troubles meanwhile speaking.. However, the stuff he was showing was quite interesting, a little bit too conceptual and weird sometimes but interesting..

Chuck Anderson (web)
I'd seen some illustrations from this guy before. And I'm sure you did too. Somehow he was able to create a nice style for images just adding some shines, particles and colours on the top of grey in the images. Pretty similar to the work I did for Stargazer but with better results. Pretty fun and relaxed guy being very honest and also doing a good speech, showing mainly his work.

Supperstudio (web)
Ok, these ones are spanish ones, and as spaniards, they had to do something rude and with lack of respect. They had these chocolate tablets with they were going to give to the audience. At the beginning they were putting them on piles on the front, but then somehow they started to throw them very violently to the audience. It was pretty scare cos you didn't want one of those chocolate tablets hitting in your eye or something. However, the speech was interesting, they mainly do work for the supermarket EROSKI. Packaging, posters, motiongraphics.. everything with a nice end result.  They also mentioned some interesting tips of the sector like people using body cream instead of a soup to make the picture for the packaging of a soup, just because the texture of the body cream looks better than the real soup. Weird.

Ze Frank (web)
Oh! That one was one of my favourites. he don't know too much about design. He don't know too much about programming (well, he actually knows quite a bit..). Well, he knows a bit of all but it's not the best he can do. He is just a show-man, and he does great shows, it was a 1hour show were I didn't stop laughting. Some themes he was talking about were a little bit mixed, but in general was a great show. You should check his stuff.

Hi-Res (web) + Nanika (web)
Hi-Res! Finally I saw them! I always wanted to see them in live. Very nice guys again showing the works they did recently. One of the interesting things of Hi-Res is that usually the final "product" is quite ugly, but it does have a lot of meaning and the ideas on it are that good that the design doesn't really matter. The most impressive thing was when Andreas Muller showed his piece For All Seasons rendered in realtime in a webcam image, where he was showing a paper with a pattern on it. The engine detected the pattern, then detected the perspective of it, and rendered the worlds there, just fitting in the "real world". Nice!!

Kyle Cooper (web)
The last one was the idol of masses Kile Cooper. My first impression was that was just and old guy that was just blabling about endless stories losing the topic totally and after 20min of blabling stopping and thinking, what I was talking about?! nevermind, just put that video. Also I felt like he was still living about the credits he did for se7en. He showed some other credits he did, and the only ones that I quite liked where Wimbledon ones. Which I liked a lot the first time I saw them but didn't know that Kile did them. As some of the previous guys he was talking saying (or atleast the poor oldie guy was trying to)  "don't let the software define the result". I think that is a very interesting statement.

Once that one was finished I went to say hi to Vent'daval & co. Then we went to have some dinner and ended up at Fonfone where some guy was playing very good techno sometimes.

Well, 5:00 now, time to sleep! :D

#permalink

Ok, I'm still at home. I think my plane will arrive at 21:00 more or less. That means that I won't see anything!!

Things that I won't be able to see and I really wanted to:
Bradley Grosh (GMUNK)
WeWorkForThem
Scott Hansen (ISO 50)
Rob Chiu (The Ronin)
insert-coint.tv

:'(

#permalink

In no more than two hours I'll depart once again to BCN. Yeah I know "why you didn't say it earlier?", my mother said the same ;)

I'm going mainly for the OFFF festival where I did an speech the last year. I wanted to do an installation this year, but I didn't have time+motivation to produce it. Luckily, Spring Digital will pay me the flight+entrance thanks to the interesting "May: Make yourself more interesting" approach.

I'll try to do a little bit of report of the festival just in case I think it worth it :)

#permalink

I think this is cool enough to have a post here...

As some of you may know, Macromedia (fuck Adobe!) is already working on the next version of Flash (Flash 9) which will introduce ActionScript 3. The way of coding in ActionScript3 is totally different from ActionScript1, so I'll probably jump directly to ActionScript3. I'm right now still trying to move to program with Classes and stuff.

Anyway, you may think, so what's the new stuff in Flash9? Usually the people think that in each version they don't do too much.. Well, they do quite a lot, but mainly for Actionscript (which it what it needs). Now is turning to something similar to JAVA, which is cool. There is a lot of new functions and things you can do, but one of the coolest one is that with AS3 you'll be able to read binary files, parse them and stuff like that. So, don't be surprised if I tell you that people already did a C64 emulator.



(You will need Flash 9 player beta in order to see it.)

I wonder how my demoscene effects may look when moving to AS3.

Btw, If you want to read more about that C64 emulator done in flash, check out this blog.

#permalink

Hehehehe!!

Following the demoscene oldschool effects in Actionscript saga.. Here we go with the Tunnel! This time I had to render at 40x40 in order to reach atleast 23fps..



However, this time, in case you got a super machine as desktop, you got a "hi-res" (100x100) version too!



The texture used in this effect was done by a friend of mine (trace), which you can also download from here

#permalink