Hey, it’s time to spam the blog again! People ask when 3.0.3 will be out, so I thought I’d write a bit on subject as well as what’s going on in general.

So, when 3.0.3 will be out? Well, you might know that Thomas is currently on vacation and will not work on release for next two weeks, at least. Then, you also might know about some breaking changes he introduced for better performance, but currently performance seems to be even worse, and so this situation needs some investigation. People who want latest version compatible with 3.0.2 can use revision 663, but be aware that some bugs were fixed after that (not to mention pending bugs).

Still, things aren’t bad for 3.0.3, in my opinion. I make noise and contribute some new stuff (you might have noticed StarField or MD2, I guess). Other people in team keep quiet, but SVN commits notifications give them away If you suddenly notice some clever code or documentation improvements, you know they did it.

So, when 3.0.3 will be out, again? I think you can expect it in August as final version for v9 (unless someone suddenly finds lots of bugs a day after release).

To conclude this post, I’d like to take my chance and congratulate folks at Ginga who released online jets comparison application for Embraer company last week. A part of this great application - flight range flash widget - was designed using two open source libraries, APE and - you guessed it - Sandy.

Using globes for spatial data visualization is something we now see more and more; to address this trend, I just added new tutorial for Sandy users who would like to do something similar themselves. For other people, I plan to release some basic globe component for free, so keep an eye on this secret link.

We are pleased to accounce that Dan Allen, one member of the Sandy team, decided to release his excellent script FlashHelpBook to generate flash help book for your libraries.

Basically it adds an help book, syntax highlighting, and code hints to the Flash IDE for any existing library ( successfully tested libraries: Sandy, Away3D, Papervision, and Box2D)

This is an excellent tool that Dan release for Sandy for months now, and which helped quite a lot of developers to get the Sandy documentation directly in Flash, as the normal flash help (shortcut to go in correct documentation part is working too).

See this announcement of Sandy Forum to have full information and give feedbacks.

Go now, and use FlashHelpBook script to improve your workflow in Flash IDE developments !

Thanks Dan

Yes they did it, the engine which seems to be the best 3D engine for flash platform is now available to users, and freely for non commercial use.

So no open source in there, but it might be interessting to check that new library and test its wonderful exclusive features such as:

- BSP tree, which allows to resolve depth sorting keeping a vector approach, so good resolution and performance.

- Embeded collision system

- Frustum clipping (or viewport one?) which is a feature that Sandy has too and which is extremly important while doing correct 3D immersion.

From the small examples I’ve seen so far, the API is good, similar in some points to Sandy3D one.

Now, up to you to test it more, and make some extra demos to  check its performance capabilites.

We recently have seen some really good use of Sandy3D engine, which is a good illustration of what’s actually possible to do.

Alien Slayer 3D :: Full 3D FPS Game

One of the first complete real 3D FPS game, realized by QiGames studio. The result is fairly good, and shows a good future for flash 3D games.

Telenor Body Language

Cool 3D model with IK manipulation. Nicely done!

The LownDown, government new zealand website

Interactive 3D navigation for that complex website.

City of Light

Beautiful use of Sprite2D Sandy feature.

More demos in our Forum

This time with lots of new features for you to play with, Mathieu Badimon released new version of Five3D package. Brand new Five3D 2.1 now have:

• Back Face Culling
• Flat Shading
• Z-Sorting
• Space Drawing Functions (moveToSpace, lineToSpace, curveToSpace)
• Bitmap3D Class
• Video3D Class
• Sprite2D Class
• Letter Spacing for DynamicText3D
• Text Width for DynamicText3D

This is serious, I was finally able to make my cube test work:

What can I say, thanks a lot! I can only wish myself could do some coding too

Hello again, flash 3D fans. Today you will be looking at REAL commercial grade flash 3D solutions in action:

The one on the left is recentry released Alternativa3D milestone tech demo. The one on the right is not so recently released Electric Oyster engine demo, but neverless I enjoy it too much to not include it in this post

That’s pretty much all I have to say, you don’t really need lengthy ramblings about them. Just click, sit back and enjoy the show.

Sincever I made this picture in Dec 2007, I knew I am going to use it again Guys at revolver3d.com apparently have released their “commercial grade” FreeSpin flash 3D engine yesterday and, to celebrate the release, they posted an announcement on Papervision mailing list. Needless to say that their announcement received heavy backfire immediately.

I could not find any pricing info on FreeSpin site, but their examples and documentation sections reveal nothing that could not already be done with existing free engines. It will suffice to say that their claimed “correct representation of the vast majority (if not all) of 3D models and scenes… without disappearing polygons and/or flawed sorting” fails to work even in their simplest example.

Come to think about it, all of this hype just two weeks after another, much more impressive, commercial engine goes open source. To conclude, these guys have a long way to go before they start making serious money with it.