Blockparty is an annual demo party held in the US, and 2010′s is about to hit in a few months time. As with all good demo parties there is usually an invitation demo to announce it, and to whet the appetite somewhat. This year EvoFlash created this little beauty, and of course it’s AS3 to the core:

I’ve not been to a demo party since 1999, but boy does this make me wish I could be there. Nice one guys, nice one.

There are some lovely effects as you’d expect. Evoflash have been at this for years now, and obviously have a highly streamlined demo pipeline going on. With impressive pre and post render effects; gorgeous blooms, radial blurs, reflections and shadowing. And what’s more – they have released it as open source, free for demo coding plebs like me to use!

Called evoTinyEngine it’s a small framework that offers you three core elements: Assets, the main Engine and Modifiers. The Modifiers can be stacked up on-top of each other. The Engine handles the construction and destruction of all the Modifiers for you, and there are some really nice things ready to use. Everything is based on 16th note beats, which allows for tight syncing with the audio in your demo.

I haven’t dug through the code much yet but I’d be willing to bet there are some insane routines in there, that would be well worth studying for game development as well as demos.

(Now let’s see if this blog post kicks off a 20+ comment flame war about “is it really a demo?” yadda yadda …

EvoFlash have released the first ever 64k intro for Flash Player 10 – “Proof of Concept”. It features some new to Flash effects such as a nice looking multi-ridged fractals voxel landscape and bezier curve tweened particles, with a lovely depth of field effect. This is supported by a thumping 36-voice soundtrack. Again remember it’s a 64KB SWF with no external media.

The intro is nicely put together, harking back to the yesteryear of demo style. It’s a bit “showing off” and self congratulatory, as if they are challenging other Flash demo crews to do better (which might be hard, because there virtually are none!). You are bombarded with the technical facts during the demo, rather than left to enjoy the aesthetics of it. But still, it’s great to see and a bit of a benchmark.

Watch it here: http://mediaerror.com/temp/proof_of_concept_by_evoflash/

Anthology of Flash Demo History Video

The coder behind this demo (Jalava) also gave a presentation at the recent Assembly Summer 2009 Convention entitled the “Anthology of Flash Demo History”. This is fascinating viewing and you can watch it online here. That link is to the h264 QuickTime MP4 file, which is just under 630MB. Don’t let that put you off as  it’s well worth the download or stream if your connection can handle it

I’m ashamed I didn’t pick this up since now as it happened back in August, but evoflash released their 99er demo at Assembly 2008 into the browser contest there and won. When you watch it, you’ll understand why! A truly amazing example of what can be done with Flash (and the Away3D engine). Click the picture to watch the demo.

Or go here: http://evo.bombsquad.org/99er/away3d/99er-evof.html

It’s stuff like this that makes me want to use Away3D instead of PV3D! But the new BSP enhancements I saw at FOTB08 in PV3D were very impressive.

Damn it’s great to have so much choice