Two major releases in two months must mean only one thing… all clients are on holiday!

Away3D Lite is the latest release to come out of Away-central, and is something a bit different. It is a complete break from the development line of previous releases, and there are two very good reasons for this - size and speed.

Put simply, Away3D Lite is the fastest and smallest fully featured 3d engine in Flash to date.

Written from the ground up in Flash 10, the native 3D feature of the new player are used to full effect. Speeds up to 4 times that of the standard Away3D library are possible, and all this at a fraction of the filesize - weighing in at a little under 25K

So why bother with Away3D Lite at all? Native 3D effects in Flash does away with the need for an engine, right?

Well, no. what Away3D Lite offers is a framework that fills in the gaps left out by the player, but at minimal expense to you in terms of filesize and speed. So you can instantly load and display 3DS, Collada, MD2 and MQO files, choose from a range of sorting and rendering options, enable 3d mouse events, enable viewport clipping, create primitive objects, etc. Plus one of the best things about Lite is it’s similarity to the main Away3D engine. If you’ve used Away3D before, you’ll already be able to use Away3D Lite!

So enough talk, here are some demos. The sources for all of these are available from the svn or the downloads section of away3d.com, along with v1.0 of the engine source.

For a full list of supported features, go to the official announcement over at away3d.com. There is also a complete set of documentation files available from a new livedocs folder here.

Finally, if anyone has a working copy of Flash Builder 4, I would be forever grateful if you could help me do the usual publish source option to allow it to be accessible in the browser for the above demos. Unfortunately Adobe’s idea of a beta product license is one that runs out before the final commercial version is released. Nice.

Enjoy the new release!