I was invited because the primary candidate for deployment was using Flash Media Server, which I had a intensive experience with in my final year of university. Primarily I was asked whether the project was feasible, achievable and did I feel using the FMS the right approach technologically, because no one else on our team had previous dealt with it. Although less than a year since my work at uni, it was quite apparent that the scale of the project was going to be significantly more demanding than anything I’d worked on before, but I figured I say yes anyway.

The project itself is deceptively complex, but stubbornly never so in explanation. Essentially, it’s a enriched online port of the infamous interactive game shows despised on late-night television – you know the ones with premium rate numbers and supposedly con viewers? They’ve all pretty much been scrapped now, so this idea was (and because it had to be) a completely new format – the idea of a game of skill, with straightforward general knowledge and trivia as opposed to frustratingly ambiguous questions; without the premium rate number to join a queue of callers, instead, an approx. 25p entry fee that goes to an accumulative pot entitling you to answer all questions posed. The eccentric presenter remains, the live video stream remains as-near-as-we-can-to-broadcast quality – the exception being the intended hundreds of players compete simultaneously, meaning every question and answer must be timed, recorded, logged and audited with a robust and secure system.

I only truly realised the scope of the thing after so eagerly agreeing to build it when I began to comprehend the vast difference between this project and that I’d previously built at uni. We had a substantial amount of R&D time to really consider whether FMS was our best option, it’s capabilities, limits, the licensing – and being the only member of the team with any experience with the FMS, we were cautious to commit if it could be achieved some other way we might feel more familiar with – an open socket model with Java or PHP maybe – but FMS eventually won through.

The project required was a standalone engine to run, load and dispatch data, make remote procedure calls to server-side scripts, all independent of any administrator control unless commandeered. At this point, looking back at Talkboards which stored all dynamic data in persistent shared objects the user simply subscribed to, its entirety was equal to the live chat ‘feature’ alone.

Building this engine immediately began to highlight Adobe’s lack of development with the Media Server since obtaining it. It’s still pretty much Actionscript 1.0 – or near enough, their API confesses ‘Server-side Actionscript’ is just their name for JavaScript 1.5. So OK, back-date the code – and no type declarations unless you want the app to silently unload, but there’s also no use of the Delegate or EventBroadcaster – arguably the backbone for Actionscript development. I also wanted to avoid using prototype functions where I could and try to divide the code into some kind pseudo-class system – not only to be more logical and readable, but for any later hand-over or joining of other developers to the process. But this could only really go so far to contextually separate ASC files that all load from the app’s main.asc anyway.

Problems with the absence of the Delegate and EventBroadcaster are obviously not uncommon. Peldi ported the classes to ASC files in his handy Flash comm server book, some hosting services, such as Influxis, bundle their own frameworks with hosting packages. But the more complex the objects and lengthy the extensions from the top-level Client and Application classes, the more scoping errors I encountered.

Jesse Warden wrote an interesting article concerning the Observer pattern experiencing the same problem developing Flex applications:

“With a little work… you can implement FMS server-side components into Cairngorm 2. For ever server-side component you create, you merely create a client side equivalent as an Observer. It listens for NetConnection or Remote SharedObject sync events and dispatches events. These events run Commands which in turn set data… just like normal. If your Views are bound to said data, boom, you’ve got a nice, clean separation.”

Ultimately we devised a model that essentially handles quite a complex (application) data object, passing itself around via prototype functions, making amendments and modifications and passing itself on. Each client has their own (client) instance (that extends the Client class), enabling their unique connection to call server-side methods – and vise-versa – without needing to loop around the application.clients array.

And finally, last Saturday was the pilot launch. Initially a beta test group of 100 competition winners and by and large, it went extremely well. Surprisingly, the biggest infringement was on behalf of our PHP/MySQL host, who happened to have hardware difficulties that day. So although all still proceeds to go well, I won’t count my money at the table, episode number two is tonight – with an increase to 300 users.

Since then having seen a change of job, flat, quite literally the explosion of my previous computer (oh, dear poot ), an abound of blogging opportunities have gone amiss I won’t attempt to condense in a brief apologetic summary – instead only promise to try harder.

My new job – I say ‘new’, I’ve been there pretty much the length of this absence – alone has probably presented me with the most would-be blog posts not written – all things Actionscript 2, 3, Flex and AIR and recently reviving the challenges of FMS laid dormant since my final year of uni.. I’ll get round to these as and when.

Oh yeah – since Talkboards is now offline and my http://marchibbins.com domain redirects here, I guess it’s about time I developed some kind of real webspace.

So some actual blogging to follow. The only other regrettable omission was the chance to big up this year’s graduation show from the Interactive Media Production course at Bournemouth Uni – the course I graduated from last year. Pixel Pier was the name, showcasing this year’s IMPs at Richmix in Bethnal Green. Their site has a bit more content then our effort, seems the profile pages all link to their projects hosted online – have a look.

Arni Lochner has received a Top Talent Quality Seal from the Europrix Multimedia Top Talent Awards for his online interactive graphic novel The Eighth Day. The final nominations can be found here.

Secondly, Leo Lanksford has made it to the shortlisted final four in the Student category of the 2007 BIMA Awards with project Medialib, a portal for students to upload and share media they’ve produced in order to collaborate and discuss each others work.

Good Luck and well in.

So begins the job search/real work/actual grown-up non-student real stuff

I’ve been asked to put together some viral games in Flash that we can host and bombard forums with to create a little extra buzz and get a bit more exposure.

Anyway, I’ve adapted some very simple classic arcade games, basically just substituting sprites with iheartplay logos and with a bit of restyling hopefully they’ll do the trick.

Some very buggy demos are online as follows:

Space Invaders:

http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~mhibbins/iheartplay/invaders.html

Pac-Man:

http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~mhibbins/iheartplay/pacman.html

Asteroids:

http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/~mhibbins/iheartplay/asteroids.html

A few more tweaks and they’ll go live on the iheartplay site, but feel free to have a go now and get yourself on the scoreboard – the more the better!

It seems everyone is putting together new online portfolios in preparation for the show, considering mine still claims my current project is design for small screens I think it’s time I sort one out too.

Tunnelling is almost done – *so* close to having it fully ready to roll, kind of a necessity Meanwhile I’m trying to get hold of some machines to run it locally at the show, that’ll hopefully be smoother too, as well as guaranteeing I can actually show something.

Congrats to those who got into the Computer Arts Graduate Showcase, good to see some Bournemouth Uni representation – well, Bournemouth, at least.

Also: New Header Alert! It’s actually Talkboards related now. The previous showed Alan Reed’s ‘City Poem’, which was part of the Public Pages project.

Looking forward to the Grad Show to properly get to see everybody’s work, cheers to the people who tested Talkboards in Uni over the night before the deadline. Right now it’s behind the impserver firewall, so you can only play with it properly on campus – you’ll be able to connect alright outside of Uni but it just won’t work properly (and not actually tell you why )

When it’s been marked I’ll get back on it and use RTMPT (tunneling) to get it working from everywhere.

It’s purposely very blank, with the intention that the attention is only really ever on the Flash elements. More than that, the Flash itself begins completely blank and it’s the user group’s task of building and colouring their own interface, so the minimal web design I hope conveys this further more, that it’s only when the user enters their own environment do they feel they’ve truly ‘arrived’.

The problem is there may actually be quite a bit more interaction with the HTML-only/non-Flash parts of the site than I first expected. There’s obviously unavoidable processes – registering accounts, logging in, browsing for boards to then enter etc – but it seems that by being so blank and essentially text-only, it may not be so much of an engaging experience as could be possible, or I would like, before initiating the Flash environments.

Anyway, have a look:

Comments appreciated.

I’ve also got a session-based CSS selector which I’m not sure whether to implement in the final version or not. Basically the blue-coloured parts could be changed to other major colours used in the Flash elements, again, so show that the web-end really isn’t what the project is about and if anything, what it is about, is individuality and customisation – i.e. the ultimate conveyance of the Flash parts – and with these CSS choices it’s demonstrating it’s possible in the HTML too, that at least this bit is trying it’s best.

In other news, a while ago I submitted my project for the Adobe Design Achievement Awards, today I got an e-mail through saying it’s made it into the semi-final stages of the competition. There’s 62 entries left, so I’m not too sure if it’s ‘made it through’ to the semi-finals or these are just all the entries that have been submitted in total.

Hopefully it’ll be well received.

Doing my part instead from home, I’ve made a fair amount of progress in various areas of the site. I’ve got a lot more PHP queried data being passed to Flash, those sections are now able to determine the environment initialisation based on who’s logging into what boards – essentially with regard to access levels, profile information, the admin’s specs and set up etc.

I’ve also established a linear log of chat history in the Flash interface, quite simple to create but I think necessary. Half of the brief I outlined intended the project to converge features of a number of ‘traditional’ communication platforms. This chat log not only offers a more straightforward means for returning visitors to catch up on activity during their time offline – similar to message boards or Facebook’s news-feed, for example – but it also introduces new users with a little familiarity, the non-linearity of the project could easily be confusing at first.

The ever-huge principal task of migrating all static Flash to shared objects via Flashcom continues but the majority is almost complete. Most of the shared objects are now persistently and remotely stored, organised and automatically sectioned by room instances. I’ve can now successfully query this info on re-entry to regenerate the rooms to their previous/continued states.

I’ve also combined some SSAS with multiple netConnections to handle the user’s data transfer – their connections in whole, rooms and connected user lists, webcams and now a centrally defined and independent server-time these all run by.

Plenty more to go, got to sort out image handling next. both inside and outside of Flash. For user profiles on the HTML sections and calculating some kind of pixel/size/quantity allocation for those uploading into communities.

I now have a better – working – webcam to test with, some prototyping with that has been successful so far. Unfortunately I’m not able to attend the 24hr Sponsored Work-a-thon tomorrow, but at least with the new cam I can be there visually if not physically.

Plus, I recently received an e-mail regarding my project’s proposal for a Rhizome commission and I’m pretty happy to say it’s made it into the final round of voting. Apparently it was very well received by the community and it’s now one of thirty-five projects subject to ranking and voting from Rhizome members and a special jury to work out the rest.

If anyone here is a member and susceptible to bribery and/or flattery I’d very much appreciate your vote

Last Friday I went to Matt Northam with some issues nesting repeat regions to achieve this, basically I had an SQL query returning the ‘boards’ of which user was part of, based on session variables, then needing to use those results in a second query matching other users who are also part of these user groups – the first post explains this a bit better. Anyway we couldn’t fix it, the first repeat region would execute but the ‘inner’ would go unrecognised.

Later on though, I tried again instead with completely creating the second recordset (the inner query) actually within the outer repeat region, meaning the SQL would be executed each time the loop is initialised, guaranteeing it being refreshed – and it worked. It was then an intricate case of appending and aggregating arrays of the recognised users into larger container arrays – essentially because one user could relate to another user through multiple connections – then looping through these to display them properly.

With some tweaking this was replicated for the Immediate Network based on finding users connecting to groups that you have created, then formatting everything so usernames and board names are links to relevant pages.

A lot of conditional statements and some hand-coded PHP and SQL were needed but the end result is quite useful.

Also on Friday I spoke to Matt about some problems passing PHP variables to Flash. With absolutely no reason that either of us could find, Flash was accepting some variables – static, sessions and POST variables – and completely ignoring those defined by the GET method, which was needed. In the end we used the <param> and <embed> tags to pass variables directly, rather than using the Actionscript of before to read an echo output from the PHP. GET variables worked fine this way.

This now means I have a complete communication between the SQL through PHP to Flash with a pretty clean retrieval from the database when I need it. The way in which Flash Media Server assigns instances to .swf visits means I can also handle the large majority of user authentication through the PHP/HTML that I’ve been developing so far, perhaps only to use further Actionscript authentication as additional verification.