The first project of many with LamasaTech and it’s been an interesting challenge implementing content for multi-user interaction. For now, it’s an initial concept for interactive posters that would extend beyond the traditional websites and bringing the bonus content to the user, instead of them having to discover it.

It is brilliant working with the team, as they let me run wild with ideas to play with and implement. There’s definitely more exciting projects coming to life shortly and with new features being introduced to the multi-user platform.

ScaleForm Gfx has now grown more powerful with the upgraded support in its framework and optimized for the mobile platform. I guess it wouldn’t be long till it’s works directly with the other new 3D technologies in the market.

Its projected performance is between 2-10 times faster; though I guess that’s with the inclusion of ActionScript 3 for better data management (I kind of saw this coming when I was migrating from AS2). The new attributes of multi-touch support, hardware acceleration and various other features are clearly inherited from using Flash player 10.

There are so many benefits gained from to move on beyond the limitations of Flash 8, because if you ask me, it’s about time! The only presented challenge is existing users who mastered AS2 may need to AS3 to enjoy the fruits of these new features and future-proof their works further.

Omegame Menus Master is another interesting middleware GUI tool that certainly has its success story in Heavy Rain. Since sharing similar features, my only question I’m thinking now is will Omegame’s products range be as recognised?

Anyhow, the ScaleForm has already a strong present within the games industry with a growing catalogue of games in its back-pocket and especially numerous titles built on the Unreal 3 Engine.

GreenSock is a powerful toolset to dynamically generate smooth animations and user interface transitions. Very light-weight, battle-tested and well matched against other existing tweening engines.

Some solutions perform differently with various workloads, but the light-weight flexibility shouldn’t be reason enough be used excessively. Both Simultaneous and continuous use of tweening can affect runtime performance; as some background study suggested a coined phrase/term, “tweening syndrome”. This sums up the potential addiction amongst many designers and developers alike.

This was highly recommended by my colleagues; I too have grown much attached to it since first use only a couple of months ago.  I have to admit, this is my first introduction to tweening, as I’ve never done it before!  In the past, all visual transition affects were independently implemented. If I have started harnessing the power of tweens some years ago, my math skills wouldn’t be as sharp. A definite time saver, but still I’ll choose not to rely on it so much, or else I may get another lazy habit when coding.