The Less Rain London office is now looking for a Full Time AS3 Developer to complete the team!

You will be developing interactive environments in Actionscript 3.0, ranging from consumer & corporate websites to Rich Internet Applications. Here are some examples of the level of coding we expect:

• www.redbullsoapboxracer.com
• www.redbull.com/flightlab
• www.neoderma.com

Your role involves working with our front-end designers, back-end developers and Flash Developer team. Every project we do has a great concept / idea behind it and pushes the boundaries of what is possible, so you will never get bored doing the same website over and over again.

As a person you are quick, accurate and stress tolerant, a problem solver with good communication skills. You are self-motivated; flash development is a passion, not just a job. You like to try out new things and are willing to pass your knowledge to others.

You have a wide knowledge of Flash development and in-depth experience in web development.

Skills

• Solid Actionscript 3 Development (OOP)
• Experience with architecture/design patterns (MVC)
• Experience with Data integration (XML, SOAP, Remoting, etc)
• Experience with Papervision3D and/or other 3D Flash open library
• Strong Math and Physics capabilities
• Game development experience appreciated
• High level understanding of Flash, Flex, AIR and other core Flash Platform
• Basic third-party 3D software knowledge appreciated (such as 3ds, maya, cinema4D, unity3D, Shiva)
• Understanding of Back-end and Database technologies, but not necessarily having the ability to implement.
• Community awareness with new technologies, frameworks, resources and open source libraries
• Programmatic motion appreciated
• Eye for detail, performance and optimization
• Experience with video and audio
• Low-Level development appreciated (bytes level)
• Eclipse/FDT, Flex Builder and SVN appreciated
• Basic graphic design and motion graphics skills
• Basic Photoshop and Illustrator skills
• Basic understanding of HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Initial salaries are comparable to the market level and there will be a chance to negotiate as you develop.

Send your resume, references and portfolio to vassilios-at-lessrain.com.

Please include salary expectations.

There’s a new feature in the Red Bull Soapbox Racer, that allows you to connect your Soapbox Racer account with your Facebook account. It allows for easy login as well as challenging your Facebook friends, sharing your cars, tracks and race results in your Facebook feed.

Connect yourself on www.redbullsoapboxracer.com.

Last year during the development of a project where blur filters were used extensively we put into practice several tips and tricks to be able to render this visual effects quicker.

What caught my attention on top of everything was something really obviuos, in fact it is mentioned in the Flash documentation (I never read every single line), values that are a power of 2 (such as 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32) are optimized to render more quickly than other values.

Having this into account, the problem (a fairly common problem in systems programming) was to locate the "next highest power of 2", whenever I need the value to be dynamic.

Here there are a few AS3 algorithms to find the next highest power of 2:

We've just completed the development of the One Race Wear microsite for our friends Bionic Systems and their client One Industries.

Bionic Systems were responsible for the project and art direction, we added our Flash treatment:

As a little homage to our most popular and seemingly helpful blog post about the Nasty XML load bug in Internet Explorer I created an app that tests the caching behavior of the browser it's running in.

To recap - Loading XML files in Flash over an SSL Connection in Internet Explorer fails if the "Pragma: no-cache" or "Cache-Control: no-cache" HTTP headers are set in the server's response.
In AS2 the loading failed silently, in AS3 we at least get an IO Error #2032, which has been discussed several times (see below)

If you want to keep the browser from caching your dynamic content you'll have to use other means.
Judging from my tests, the best headers to prevent caching without causing errors in IE are: "Cache-Control: no-store" and/or "Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 GMT".

You can access the test suite here:

• Loading over an SSL connection
• Loading over a normal connection

Set the headers that you'd like the server-script to return and find out what happens when the same request is sent twice after each other.
Use the Live HTTP Headers Plugin for Firefox if you'd like to see what the server actually returns.

Other interesting insights

• The problem still exists in Internet Explorer 7! Don't know about Vista...
• Here it's suggested that "Cache-Control: must-revalidate" and "Cache-Control: max-age=0" also work. While that's true in the sense that they don't cause an error IE, they don't seem to prevent caching 100% - there is a timeout.
• "Pragma: no-cache" causes the error in IE, but doesn't actually prevent it from caching at all when it's set on a non-ssh connection.
• Firefox internally sets the expiry date of script files to the past - so unless you set the "Expires" header to the future it'll never cache the content.
• Safari and Firefox change their caching behavior when the "Last Modified" header is set. If it's in the past they seem to be happy to cache the file for you.

PHP sessions

Note that in PHP, as soon as you use sessions with session_start() the no-cache headers are added automatically. You'll have to replace those headers or turn the default behavior off in php.ini. To replace the headers (found in the comments of the original post, see also the session-cache-limiter function and comments):

session_cache_limiter(’public’);
session_start();
header (”Cache-Control: cache, must-revalidate”);
// or if you still want to prevent caching
header (”Cache-Control: no-store”);
header (”Pragma: public”);

Related links:

• Adobe TechNote
• Related Microsoft bug
• More on Error #2032
• Microsoft article - How to prevent caching in Internet Explorer. Especially "The Pragma: No-Cache Header" section
• Even more trouble with gzip compression
• And the Microsoft bug report for that

As a practical add-on for our loyal Flight Lab users we created a mini hangar widget that users can embed on their blog, social platform profile etc.

We happily used Clearspring as the platform for our widget, just click "Get this and Share" and take it away. If you enter the e-mail address you registered with at Flight Lab, the widget display your own planes to show off your flight machine building skills.

Related Posts:
Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab
Developing Flight Lab

We've recently completed the website for the German/Italian property investment firm Stofanel Investment AG.

A subtle use of Flash and Papervision 3D creates an abstract, dreamy and atmospheric paper space to reflect the company's vision of a harmonious relationship between nature, architecture, community and self.

The corporate identity we developed in collaboration with yippieyeah is based on botanic patterns (Phyllotaxy) as you would find in the growth patterns of sun flowers for example - it underlines the companies dedication to nature and community.

Regular readers will be pleased to find the site equipped with our usual technical treatment: fully dynamic, browser-button- and deeplink enabled (thanks to SWFAddress) and HTML-version for search engine optimization.

Last Friday we launched the first part of The Memory Project, an online 3D image bank (made with PV3D) of the 21st century 'cyclorama' created by artist Jason Bruges.

Inspired by Bluebook, the artist Jason Bruges has created The Memory Project - a 21st century 'cyclorama'. The structure camera-captures panoramic moments in time and stores them within its digital memory bank. Inside, visitors can explore the stored history of the installation and interact with the displayed 360 degree images.

The Memory Project tours in April 2008, collating the mass memory of London, Edinburgh and Liverpool en route. You can delve even deeper into these public memory banks at www.o2memoryproject.com from Friday 18th April 2008.

BBC NEWS: Life in London captured digitally

DESIGN WEEK: O2 to launch Bluebook installation by Bruges.

Bring on the wood and sheet metal! Break out your saw! Cut the pieces to size, assemble them, paint them and... voila! You've built your own airplane. Now it's time to get it off the ground... will it fly...?

As of today, Less Rain's new 3-D model application with integrated flight simulator, the Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab, will be online, a 3-part game based on Red Bull's Flugtag event.

Step One: The fuselage, wings and pitch elevator are cut out of Styrofoam, cardboard, wood or scrap metal. The pieces are then automatically assembled into a 3-D airplane. Material and shape will later play an important role in the machine's flying properties.

Step Two: Customizing the parts. This can be done by uploading your own photos, designs and patterns or, alternatively, using brushes to paint the machine 'by hand'. The results might be anything from a realistic looking airplane to an abstract flying artwork.

Step Three: The prospective pilot can test the quality of his custom-designed aircraft and its flying capabilities amidst stunning natural scenery in the 3-D flight simulator. The machine is launched from a floating launch pad using the arrow keys. First the wings beat softly then the plane takes off energetically into the big blue sky.

The goal now is to cover as much distance as possible. To achieve this, users may experiment with acrobatic maneuvers, collect cans of Red Bull to refuel and employ the thermal updrafts – but they must beware of the bumpy crosswinds!

Points are given after each flight for distance covered and piloting style. Loops, drifts, rolls, low-level flight and other maneuvers are rewarded. In addition, the other users rate the plane's design. A total score is calculated which, if it's good enough, may be included on a high score table.

Pilots can store their planes in a hangar where they can develop them further or try out new designs anytime. Another unique aspect of the game is that any user can take-off with any airplane and, what's more, can change and improve it to their own tastes.

The back-end and user administration part of Flight Lab has been developed by Signal7, our partner of choice when it comes to enterprise level, tailor-made database solutions.

Related Links:
Red Bull Flugtag Flight Lab
Pilot avatar motion capture demo and the original Paperdude post
Signal7

Update:
We're Site of the Day at the FWA! Cheers, Rob!

Update II:
We made it Site of the Month at the FWA! That's just fantastic, thanks everybody at the FWA!

Update III:
Thank you UltraShock, for the BombShock Award! And we are Adobe Site of the Day for March 4th!

Continue reading: Developing Flight Lab

Public Service Anouncement:
WordPress decided to delete the original post. This is a re-post, meaning the original comments got lost. We're sorry about that.

At the beginning it's always simple. "Everybody draw crazy airplanes and then fly them." We wanted a fun experience, no boring modeling session, no nerdy flight simulation.

Just draw an outline, booom!, airplane wing

Flight Lab uses Papervision3D to show 3-D models and these models have to be created in a very specific way. Drawing an arbitrary free hand line is the opposite of that, you can draw everything, in any way. That's why the Flight Lab builder has to do a lot of interpretations. Did you just draw a correction to an existing outline? Are there intersections? Can we simplify the outline while preserving its characteristic look so the Flash Player has less stuff to compute? Next, Flight Lab has to break up the shape into triangles because Papervision3D only understands models made out of triangles. At the end, we add thickness and create the final model by extruding the outline. We're done! Now let's head over to the game.

Fly like birds do and crash like airplanes

Flight Lab gives you the real thing: It's a 6DOF (degrees of freedom) flight simulator modeled by a physics engine in 3D using rigid body dynamics. Real airplane wings can be described by specific lift and drag coefficients, depending on how quickly and from which angle the air flows over a wing section. That's what Flight Lab does.

On the other hand you're flying by flapping wings. The flying experience had to be as physical as possible using as few buttons as possible. So we put a bird into the simulator, added additional forces and offered the user the same control a bird has over its body – if it's not a chicken. 4 keys, 2 optional keys and one space bar (hint!) oughta be enough for everyone.

Flying Pigs

The flight behaviour depends on the material you choose and the shape of the airplane. But to be honest, we ended up limiting this influence a little bit. As an aviation engineer you just have to design some things exactly the right way or the airplane won't fly at all. Crazy airplanes can quickly become impossible to handle in a real flight simulator. However, we wanted people to create imaginative planes and fly them in our simulator even though they may never take off in the real world. So we decided on a compromise. Huge wings for example will do what you expect them to do but they can have any shape and any position. In the end though, a well engineered aircraft will still fly better and bring you more score points.

Hand-crafted, with a lot of love

The game itself has a lot of elements running at the same time and a lot of effort went into making this possible. Flight Lab is using Papervision3D 1.5 and builds on the efforts of a vivid open-source community. Nevertheless, there are limits when it comes to creating a game experience of this scale. Nearly every element you see in the game posed a significant problem of its own. Be it quality of graphics, a panorama, a water surface, airplane shadow, clouds, wind or general depth-sorting problems. And often something feasible turned out to be too slow in context. Game logic, stunt analysis, sound and physics simulation quickly add up.

Guest Star

PaperDude! Of course you know him and he's back big time. He will be acting as your avatar so treat him with respect. His body follows motion capture data from Lord of the Rings and Saturday Night Fever. Real time, baby!

Plus everything else

Next to all this fancy game and 3D stuff, Flight Lab is also a website which offers saving, browsing and sharing airplanes. It's a Rich Internet Application in the true sense of the word and a site that supports deep linking and browser history. If you want your friend to play the game directly using a specific airplane, just send him the link in the browser address bar.

Flight Lab is a prominent example of what you can do today with Flash Player 9. It was a fun ride and we learned a lot. Let's see what the future holds, the flying pigs are here to stay.

Update: This position has been filled. You are still invited to send us your CV, but please use the email address specified, and not the comments section.

We are looking for a versatile Flash developer for full-time employment in our Berlin office with a solid background in object oriented web development and experience in AS3. We are seeking a motivated and confident problem solver with an eye for interaction design and a passion for web technologies.

You will be working in an international team of experienced developers in Berlin, London and Tokyo. Your role involves working closely with our front-end designers and the developer team to implement projects ranging from mini-sites and virals to large scale consumer & corporate websites. You will be working on projects such as:

• http://www.redbull.com
• http://www.redbull.com/#page=MediaSectionPage
• http://www.haunchofvenison.com
• http://www.vw-eos.jp/special/popup1.html
• http://www.uliheckmann.com

Requirements

• 2+ years experience in Flash development
• Solid AS2 and AS3 Skills (OOP)
• Experience with Flash integration technologies (Dynamic content, XML, Webservices)
• Bandwidth and performance-friendly coding
• A feel for good interaction design and usability.
• Experience in related technologies and APIs is an advantage (i.e. Papervision 3D, Facebook API, Java, PHP)
• English speakers are welcome

Less Rain is a digital design agency based in London, Berlin and Tokyo. We work independently & across 3 offices, in a multicultural team. Our services are aimed at producing sophisticated, concept driven, tailor made solutions for online communication, ranging from corporate to consumer websites, interactive content creation and online games, from the local to the international. Our client list includes Red Bull, BBC, Getty Images, Stockland Martel, Nike, Mitsubishi, Sega, Panasonic, Volkswagen.

Salary is negotiable dependant on experience.

We're looking forward to your informative application via e-mail, including a CV and links to recent projects you developed. Please send your application to Thomas Meyer, bewerbung@lessrain.com

For further information about Less Rain visit:

http://www.lessrain.com

http://blog.lessrain.com

The FIVe3D initiative is an open source code for the conception of interactive vector-based 3D animations developed by Mathieu Badimon.

The classes are written in ActionScript 2.0 and based on the ActionScript 3.0 structure. The FIVe3D system imitates a classicActionScript 2.0 MovieClip organization and provides extra 3D functionnalities.

Worth to take a look.

Related Links:

• Tweening in FIVe3D (Zeh Fernando)