I wanted to state that the lack of recent posts in this site doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on the engine. In fact, I have worked a lot. It has been a lot of reading about new flash features, a lot of ol’ pencil and paper design and only recently a bit of programming.

I don’t expect to be able show anything “new” in a while but the engine is not by any means stoped.

For once I’m posting about something not related to the engine. Please read it anyway

My girlfriend is doing some very nice pictures using polymeric clay. Very lively. Magnificent attention to detail. Handcrafted with care and love. She started as a hobby but they have been slowly gaining popularity among our acquaintances ( does English have any word more difficult than this one ? ). Therefore she has started producing and selling them on demand as birthday and newborn presents.

After  much insisting I have convinced her to put up a website for the pictures because, as we all know, the internet is paved with gold and any serious business needs internet presence. I myself have raised no less than 20 bucks in donations.

I’m not asking that you purchase one, but can you please help me spread the link around a little ? Maybe digg it, or link it, or put it in your delicious or whatever. Here’s the link and thank you in advance.

http://www.picturesofclay.com/eng

I’m giving away the engine for free. Now you can give something back !

I have decided to release the source code for the FFilmation Editor. Originally I didn’t plan to do it because It is not finished, the code is shitty and I was afraid people would change the logo and sell it to some unsuspecting client of his.

However I have received lots of complains about the application not working in MACs, probably something about the charset or the method I use to resolve relative paths. Or both. I don’t have a MAC so there is no way I can fix this myself, so I hope releasing the sources will allow someone of you to fix the issues and hopefully send the updated sources back to me.

Also, I don’t foresee me putting time into the editor in the near future, so I’d better make it public and see if something nice happens. Before you download it, some warnings:

• The code is shitty. Really. When I started working on the editor I didn’t think of how to enginner the application and how to approach the development, and It shows. Expect duplicated code, stupid variable names, even some code in some frames in the timeline when I felt specially lazy and didn’t want to write a new class.
• Remember to comment out the autoupdate feature when you compile, otherwise it will keep on looking for the online version and prompt for an update.
• The source for the engine is not included. Make sure you add your engine’s classpath to the application.
• I know this would be better made into a Flex application, but as I use Flash, the sources are in FLA format. If someone ports this to Flex send the project to me and I’ll make it public too.

Ok, that said, here’s the download link. Have fun.

I have been quite silent lately because of my studio being swamped with work. Fortunately things are back to reasonable now.

I have decided to pause development of the FFilmation engine for a while (don’t panic ! keep reading ) and invest those hours in thinking about the project instead of programming.

Since I started the project I have learnt lots of things both from my personal experience and the tons of the feedback I have been receiving ( thanks everybody ! ). Also the flash player itself has evolved immensely and has included lots of stuff that I want to analyze properly and see if it can improve how I do things inside the engine.

I think it is a good moment to rethink everything again, as If I were to start creating the engine from scratch with current technology and my current knowledge. I don’t know if this will take me to a very different approach or I will decide it is already as good as it can be, I don’t know, but I want to pause and think about it.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be any updates in the engine: I will post maintenance releases and fix stuff in the editor when possible. Also I will keep updating the website about how are things going, so please don’t remove me from you RSS readers yet.

This is weird, I suppose it has something to do with the recent AIR runtime update. While I try to figure it out you will have to manually unistall the old application and install from the sidebar again.

Sorry about the inconvenience.