I spent three really nice days in Kortrijk, Belgium in the Multi-Mania 2012 event in the beginning of this week. My own presentation about bringing Angry Birds to Facebook was on Tuesday. Since I already had one Angry Birds presention in Adobe MAX last year you might not expect me to have been too nervous about having another for audience consisting mostly of students but the catch here was that there was more than 1000 people in the fully booked main room. Anyways I believe that it went pretty well after all even if I still have a lot to improve with my (English) speaker skills. The keynote Aral Balkan had certainly gave a lot to think about also about how to present things. I’m awful singer so can’t beat Aral’s opening act but I’ll try to have 1% of that energy next time I’m in front of an audience.
It was also really nice to meet lots of other speakers both before and after the presentions. It was especially nice talking with you Michael, all the best with the Delta-Strike release coming in couple of months! And then the fans. It seems that Howest university has some of the most hardcore Angry Birds fans on this planet. I’m really happy having had the possibily to be talking with so many of you and also getting the chance to eat best Pitta in whole Kortrijk. 😉
Finally it’s time to thank Koen and Angelo. Thank you for inviting me to Multi-Mania. The event you are organizing is simply amazing. It was wonderful being there and if anyhow possible I’ll try to be back. No, I’ll rephrase that: I’ll be back.
villekoskela 
Comments
Aral may be a better singer, but your content was a lot more enjoyable ;).
Thanks! 🙂
Your presentation was very enjoyable. I have also been working on the Starling framework for the past 2 months, your tips are very useful.
A while back you were open for suggestions, I’m not sure if this is still the case, or time allows you to, but I’ll give it a shot! I’m wondering if Angry Birds has pixel collision detection. Things could get really ugly on Starling, as BitmapData conflicts with the original datatype.
I have seen solutions, but I’m not satisfied and they snoop your performance down really badly. Would you mind giving me a head start on how to handle pixel collisions without all too many performance loss? I’m mainly focused on mobile development with Air.
Best regards.
Thank you!
We don’t use pixel collisions but shapes that are built in to Box2D because of the performance. For pixel collisions I’d suggest using downscaled (2, 4, or even more times) versions of the bitmaps since it’s a really rare case that the player will notice the one or two pixels errors happening and this will be a lot faster.
Triggering an event based on what shape has had collisions with another b2Body object works pretty well, especially when down-scaled as you suggested. Hopefully I can enjoy your presence at Multimania 2013.
Nice to hear you have a working solution now!