I have heard some people saying that the 3D in Astro is software 3D. From watching the video clip of the announcement the words "native support" mean that it is a feature built into the player which means that even if it is software, the action script api would be making calls to native code graphics functions which would still be considerably faster than doing the work entirely in ActionScript. Nobody will know for sure what the real speed and capabilities of the 3D support will be until after the beta is released and there is no announcement as to when that will be. So even if the simple 3D support is entirely in software, it will be faster than what can be done in ActionScript and libraries like PaperVision3D or Sandy should be able to take advantage of the API to get a speed boost. Below are links to keynote videos for those who want to see them yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ympeCv8lLmw
http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2007/10/03/adobe-max-chicago-sneak-peeks/
Another thing that Flash player 10 is going to have is support for Adobe's Hydra programming language. I don't know why the language is named after a multi-headed dragon but Hydra is a graphics processing language that will take advantage of the hardware shading languages that many 3D cards support. The technology preview that is currently on Adobe Labs requires 3D cards that support hardware shading but they say that software based rendering will be in the future releases for people who don't have high-end video cards (like me). If you do have a high end video card and want to experiment with Hydra, the link is
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIF_Toolkit
While the upcoming 3D features of Astro may not be robust enough to be the end of projects such as Sandy or PaperVision3D, I am hoping that there is hardware 3D support in Flash Player 10 and that it is good enough to make the existing 3D libraries irrelevant. While this may sound harsh, if there was a standard native library for doing 3D in Flash that was better than the existing software libraries, then everybody would benefit. Though going by personal experience, the Flash Player releases are just better enough to force me to have to upgrade but not good enough to do everything I want to do. At least this is better than Java, which basically abandoned the applet. Yes, FX looks neat but it really seems to be too little too late.
Showing posts with label PaperVision 3D. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PaperVision 3D. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Astro
Adobe had a really interesting announcement at their Max 2007 conference which I was not able to attend. Thankfully there were press and bloggers to attend the conference so that I could find out about the next version of the Flash player. It appears that Adobe is taking Silverlight and Java FX as serious competition and have decided to raise the stakes with the version 10 of Flash. The best part is that it appears as if they will be giving me exactly the feature that I want.
Flash player 10, which is code named Astro, is going to have much better text support. Wait...that's not it. Astro is going to support 3D. The demo only showed manipulation of sprites and movie clips using x, y, z coordinates and rotation along all three axes. I am assuming that this will be done using hardware 3D acceleration. No mention about support for 3D models was mentioned, but if there is hardware accelerated rendering of 3D sprites, it would probably be fairly trivial to port Papervision3D's Collada support.
I am not aware of any estimated release date or if there is going to be a public beta. If there is, I will certainly try to participate in the beta program. Right now I am trying to make sure that the renderer that I am developing for Coffee Quest Revenge is modular so that it will be easy to swap out with a better one if Astro is released significantly earlier than I am anticipating.
Flash player 10, which is code named Astro, is going to have much better text support. Wait...that's not it. Astro is going to support 3D. The demo only showed manipulation of sprites and movie clips using x, y, z coordinates and rotation along all three axes. I am assuming that this will be done using hardware 3D acceleration. No mention about support for 3D models was mentioned, but if there is hardware accelerated rendering of 3D sprites, it would probably be fairly trivial to port Papervision3D's Collada support.
I am not aware of any estimated release date or if there is going to be a public beta. If there is, I will certainly try to participate in the beta program. Right now I am trying to make sure that the renderer that I am developing for Coffee Quest Revenge is modular so that it will be easy to swap out with a better one if Astro is released significantly earlier than I am anticipating.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Revenge 3D plans
Last week's vote on Blazing Games was about posting my PaperVision 3D tests to the coming soon area of Blazing Games. The coming soon area is a page where I post the current build of the site selected project. Currently this page has a pre-alpha build of Coffee Quest Revenge on it, but with 100% of the few people who voted wanting to see my Paper vision tests you can expect to see spinning cubes soon.
Some regular visitors to Blazing Games may remember what I did with Coffee Quest GL. This was my attempt at using JOGL and required that I spent time re-learning Open GL. In fact, had there not been a lot of people who for some reason or another had problems running Coffee Quest GL, I would have stuck with Java for my Coffee Quest development instead of switching to Flash.
What I am going to do is follow the same basic steps used for Coffee Quest GL. I am going to start with a spinning cube. Figure out how to texture the cube. Turn the single cube into the basic structure of the level. Add doors to the mix at which point the 3D code can be incorporated into Coffee Quest Revenge and game development for that game can continue.
The current Blazing Games poll is about the movement speed already in the game. With the poll being out less than 24 hours, I have already received an email pointing out that 2D movement doesn't reflect what 3D movement is like. I suppose that is a valid criticism, but once the game is further along I can always revisit the issue.
Some regular visitors to Blazing Games may remember what I did with Coffee Quest GL. This was my attempt at using JOGL and required that I spent time re-learning Open GL. In fact, had there not been a lot of people who for some reason or another had problems running Coffee Quest GL, I would have stuck with Java for my Coffee Quest development instead of switching to Flash.
What I am going to do is follow the same basic steps used for Coffee Quest GL. I am going to start with a spinning cube. Figure out how to texture the cube. Turn the single cube into the basic structure of the level. Add doors to the mix at which point the 3D code can be incorporated into Coffee Quest Revenge and game development for that game can continue.
The current Blazing Games poll is about the movement speed already in the game. With the poll being out less than 24 hours, I have already received an email pointing out that 2D movement doesn't reflect what 3D movement is like. I suppose that is a valid criticism, but once the game is further along I can always revisit the issue.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Paper Coffee Quest
Just a quick post today. The vote about taking part of the Coffee Quest Revenge time to learn PaperVision 3D resulted in 92% of the vote for taking the time. I can only assume that people want the game in 3D as soon as possible. I am hoping that the game will be at least half as good as the game in my mind is, though development is taking a lot longer than I thought. Granted, a vast amount of the time is spent creating general purpose code that will hopefully be used by many future projects.
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