wildwinter

Press Release.

Excellent news…

Things which have caught my attention recently:

• A modular application framework for AIR allowing download of signed and non-signed SWFs into different sandboxes…
• Away 3D Lite released – a stripped down version of A3D with some really impressive speed/size numbers.
• Also in Away3D news, Prefab has been released; a comprehensive tool for baking lightmaps on to Away3D models.
• Sean McCracken’s experiments with hacking Tamarin/AVM2 and adding Irrlicht support.
• The Cocos2D game framework for the iPhone – nice!

Now back to experiment with both Objective-C and the Android API…

Vectors and vector-fonts in PaperVision:
VectorVision.

At Flash on the Beach this year, James Paterson was one of the inspirational speakers. During his talk he showed off a novel 3D sketching tool (well, novel to me, anyway) which let you sketch a pen line on a 2D plane, then rotate, and sketch again, adding another plane to your scribble.

I believe it was written in C or C++ (from memory).

I thought I’d have a quick go at doing something similar in Flash using Papervision. So here is a very rough copy. Not nearly as polished – or as fast – as James’s, and doesn’t have the nice line-intersection-with-drawing-plane feedback that he had, but it works as a quick proof of concept.

You can try it out here:
Scribble!

Here’s a really nice bit of 3D Flash – Tomas Eriksson has an interactive spider crawling across a map:

http://www.onemotion.com/flash/spider/

Well worth the click!

There are some truly awesome demos coming out of the Alternativa Flash 3D project.

Here’s a really interesting post on a physics-based desktop rendered using Papervision3D and controlled using two Wiimotes. The most interesting bit, to me, is that the physics calculations are actually done outside of Flash by a locally-running server; Flash is connected to it via a socket. The server wraps the Open Dynamics Engine and so has access to a large array of existing physics code.

Nice idea. Won’t work with enough speed across the web (I’d have thought), but very interesting from a local-install PoV.

A very nice work-in-progress from Doug McCune – TileUI, a Flex/PaperVision/APE-based user interface that’s intended to run under AIR.

There’s a video here.

…is now out.

A completely amazing 3D demo from Outsmart Labs…

Yes, it is Flash. (Flex)