Earlier this week, around the same time that Adobe was getting all amendy with their Flash whitepaper, we published our updated roadmap for Away3D & The Away Foundation. If you’ve not yet read it and are interested in what 3D shenanigans to expect from us, nows the time to have a look!
With a schedule beginning to form, my attention is drawn back to the some of the upcoming events we’ll be attending over the next few months, and in some cases, speaking. The first in line looks to be Casual Connect Europe, a games conference hosted in Hamburg from 12th-14th Feb. I’ll be presenting a short talk in the Indie track on Wednesday called Cross-platform 3D to the Max, which will look into some of the savings we can make when balancing performance and quality on the GPU – something applicable to many of today’s games published on tablets and phones.
The 2 days following Casual Connect will be spent joining in with the Adobe Game Jam group in Hamburg, where I will be teaming up with Chris Benjaminsen of PlayerIO and seeing how far we can get creating a multiplayer 3D social game. 
The event promises to be a lot of fun, so if you’re around in Hamburg for the 15th & 16th and are interested in joining in or just coming along to observe, sign up for free attendance here.
After the jammin’, I’ll be heading over to the FITC conference in Amsterdam, where Richard Olsson of the Away3D Core Team will present a very exciting new talk called Away3D in The Open, with WebGL and Javascript. You can kind of imagine what that is going to be about, and the implications for us at Away3D are potentially very far reaching. However I’m not wanting to steal Richard’s thunder, so for more information you’ll just have to go to the talk.
Something to look out for almost directly after FITC, and especially if your a little less mobile, is the online Stage3D conference on Feb 22nd. check the website for details as things get closer, there’s already a strong lineup covering a very wide range of libraries. I’ll be talking about the cross-platform potential of Away3D & other Away Foundation projects, and there will also be a chance for Q&A on where we see things headed in the longer term.
Jumping forward a few weeks, I’ll be attending the Flash Gaming Summit event in San Francisco for some shiny gaming nuggets, and this will be closely followed by the obscenely gargantuan GDC conference. The latter will be an interesting opportunity to showcase some new Away3D games to a wider gaming audience at the Adobe expo booth – for those who’ve not yet seen, we are taking submissions for any Away3D game developer interested in being part of the showcase content on the Away3D user forums, so if you’ve got something great in development that will have some sort of public release (or even promo video / site launch) on or before GDC, reply to the forum thread and let us know!
Finally, at the beginning of May, I’ll be returning to the West coast along with Richard to attend the “better late than never” revamped Adobe Max conference in LA. We will be presenting a new session titled Cross platform gaming with Away3D, and will be taking a look at some of the recent developments in 3D-land as well as some practical examples of Away3D workflows and optimisations. We will also be attending an Actionscript Gaming Frameworks panel along with other members of the SDK development teams for Starling and Feathers. Should be an interesting discussion about the current gaming landscape and where the various SDK libraries are headed.
I’m always open to meeting up with local Away3D groups or companies/developers using our libraries, so if you happen to be in the area at any of the events above and are keen for a chat, please let me know!