Well, it was going to happen sooner or later, but i think most of us weren’t necessarily expecting it to happen today!

Earlier today at the Flash Gaming Summit keynote, Adobe announced its incubator program for the current Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 builds, which gives public access to the new features of Flash 11 as they are developed, including the current state of the GPU-accelerated Molehill APIs. After the announcement, Away3D 4.0 Alpha (codename Broomstick) was released on away3d.com, with all code and examples uploaded to the Away3D googlecode svn and mirrored source repositories appearing on Github. The Away3D Team have been  working very hard to get to this point, and all credit must go to them for the incredible job already done on the engine.

The above video shows one of the code demos (ShallowWaterDemo) published in the example sources in action. In order to compile and run these sources you will need to follow the instructions on setting up your development environment on the Adobe Labs Wiki for the Flash Player Incubator release. You can see this and a variety of other demos running live over at http://away3d.com/away3d-4-0-alpha-release-broomstick.

It is important to stress that at this point, both the Flash Player Incubator release and Away3D 4.0 framework are in an alpha state and are therefore only to be used for prototyping and demonstration purposes. However, with the Incubator program, Adobe have opened the door wide for user testing and feedback on the planned features of the next Flash Player, which should ultimately lead to a better developed, more stable release. So cheers go to Thibault Imbert and everyone involved in the Incubator program at Adobe!

More updates on Away3D 4.0 will follow on away3d.com and the Away3D google group in the coming weeks, so be sure to keep an eye out for new demos & resources.

Last week the latest Away3D release was launched – the FP10-only 3.6.0 version which added some much needed memory and speed optimisations to the main branch of the engine. Now, these updates have been transferred to an interim 3.5.2 version (one that requires no code refactoring) and an equivalent FP9 2.5.2 release, both of which try to includes as many of the bugfixes and optimisations from the FP10 trunk code.

The announcement of the new release appeared alongside a new Away3D demo called BattleCell, the result of a recent collaboration with Influxis which uses both the extra power of the new engine and the peer-to-peer capabilities of Flash 10.1 to produce a realtime 3D multiplayer prototype. Special thanks must go to Influxis dev Sean McCracken, as well as Away3D coders David Lenaerts and Fabrice Closier, and 3D designer Federico Selmi for their hard work on the project.

The demo uses a newly developed API for multiplayer games over RTMFP (the new P2P protocol available to Flash 10.1 users). What this allows is many live data connections directly between clients with little to no latency, creating the perfect environment for some serious fragging fun! BattleCell is the name given to both the demo and the underlying AS3 API, the latter written by Sean in order to easily connect multiple users and pass data between clients.

The BattleCell demo is a typical FPS Deathmatch-style game, complete with room allocation, choice of weapons and a large play area for you to roam. Obstacles in the game include lifts, teleport windows, acid baths and secret tunnels to assist your attacks… but be careful who is lurking round the corner!

The new 3.6.0 version of Away3D has a completely remodeled core to take full advantage of all native 3D APIs in Flash 10, which results in more stable and less memory-hungry apps. Performance has improved also, and we expect framerates to increase still further as we continue to optimise the new framework. There have been some older class replacements that you need to be aware of when upgrading: both custom classes MatrixAway3D and Number3D have been replaced by the native Matrix3D and Vector3D classes respectively for added speed and stability.

The Battlecell demo is kindly hosted by Influxis and can be accessed online at http://www.influxis.com/battlecell. Type in a room name for your friends to join, and a user name so that others can identify you in-game. The game URL can easily be copy-pasted for fast access to a room, and any user leaving the game automatically frees-up their slot for a new user to join. As the APIs are still being tested, a maximum of 4 users can join a single room at once, but we hope to increase this limit in future versions of the demo.

As usual, all updates can be downloaded from the googlecode svn, or from the downloads section of away3d.com.  For those of you just interested in upgrading your FP10 library without having to worry about existing code breaking, there is a specially tagged 3.5.2 version of the code that includes all enhancements up to the point where external API adjustments are made. This version is recommended for developers in the middle of a project, who don’t want the hassle of changing their code. A full breakdown of the API changes for 3.6.0 will be posted on the Away3D mailing list in the next few days.

For this year’s US Open, IBM has deployed advanced technology on the tennis field to collect the data to be analyzed and visualized.  With the U.S. Tennis Association, IBM is providing public access to its PointStream technology in the form of a real-time data visualisation, which offers a special insight into every match.  Each point is individually visualized in the application to offer an interactive representation of match data that updates in real time.

Expanding areas of the visualiser under the mouse allows them to be viewed in more detail. Each match is split into sets (concentric circles), games (collections of line segments) and points (individual segments). Players are represented by different colours, with each point segment taking the winning player’s colour. The length of each segment is representative of the length of the rally for that point, and serve speed is represented by the height of the segment.

A Key along the bottom of the visualiser doubles as a filtering option. Each representation can be clicked on to highlight the areas of the visualisation that contain those events. This allows a user to instantly focus on individual aspects of a game, such as the progression of converted breakpoints, where in a match double faults occur, and who benefits most from unforced errors. Further detail is available for each point in the game by clicking on the relevant segment, with the information displayed in the center of the visualiser.

At all levels of the application, the central momentum meter displays an overall swing of player success, calculated algorithmically from match data. If a player is particularly on top of their game, dropping less unforced errors, holding their service games etc, the momentum meter will display a larger portion of their colour in the central circular graph. This acts as a quick indicator of how the match is progressing for the players.

As matches are completed, they are added to the Pointstream database and can be re-visited at any time. The data view for a completed match retains all information that is available in the live data view, although obviously the outcome is already known! A completed visualisation is unique to the match it represents, and goes some way to demonstrate how data can be at the same time both interesting and informative to look at.

The application will be producing live data all through the US Open up to the finals on the 12th of September, so if you are following the tournament, be sure to check it out!

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I was recently invited to write an article relating to Away3D for The FWA. Wanting to do something a bit different from the usual parading of sites and demos, I decided instead to try and write a bit about what running an open source project is like, and what you need to watch out for. The result was given the following rather long title: A survival guide to building a successful open source project, and was published on The FWA earlier this week. The article ended up sounding a little dark, so should probably be accompanied by the caveat that I do quite enjoy writing open source software! I must have been in a bad mood that day…

Thanx go out to Rob and the team – flying the flag for cool sites and their creators

Away3D has a new double-release in the now familiar 2.X / 3.X format for Flash Player 9 and 10 branches of the main engine.

The biggest new addition is the fantastic work done by both Fabrice and David to get BSP sorting working in a usable form. For those of you scratching your heads over what BSP sorting is, take a quick look at this excellent explanation of the principles from David, who has been the main coding force behind the feature.

Implementing BSP sorting is only half the issue – the other half is getting your model into a format that is readable by a BSP renderer. For this, Fabrice has upgraded his extremely useful pre-processing  tool Prefab3D – the new 1.3 version includes an option to export any model in a format that can be processed by the BSP algorithms in the Away3D library.

The practical upshot of all this is that Away3D now has the capacity for creating large FPS-style games that allow many different rooms in a scene, while suffering no loss of render speed. A case in point being the David-Fab collaboration for the recent FITC keynote in Amsterdam, the Hacienda Experiment:

A number of rooms can be navigated using the mouse and keyboard, with collision detection enabled by processing the BSP format in Away3D. The beautifully shaded textures were created using Prefab3D’s texture baking feature.

Be careful where you tread, as this is still an experimental demo! Further optimizing work is being carried out on collision and rendering loops in Away3D, but even at this stage, the speed benefits are evident.

You can grab the Away3D update either from the svn repository or the downloads page of away3d.com, where you will also find a bunch of updated examples. As usual, please direct any bug reports to the googlecode issues list, and any questions about functionality to the Away3D mailing list.

Enjoy the new release!

The Away3d 2.4 & 3.4 update has been recently released on the Away3d.com site, with a completely revamped examples section, for both Flash 9 & Flash 10 versions. To grab your copy, head over to the svn or go straight to the downloads section of Away3d.com for a zip download of sources and examples.

many new features have been added to this release, including:

• Vector graphics and fonts support.
• Typed-checked loader support.
• Geometry modifiers for exploding, welding, mirroring…
• Depth material for creating depth masks.
• Normalmap and Bumpmap generators from geometry.
• Light pre-baking on textures.

plus the usual stability improvements and a ton of bugfixes. Documentation will soon be updated at away3d.com/livedocs

Special thanx must go to Guojian Wu of wu-media.com for his excellent new as3 library swfvector, which allows you to convert any shape outline or textfield in a swf into as3 data. This is used to great effect in the new release, easily enabling the drawing of textfields and shapes in 3d

The examples interspersing this post can be accessed by clicking on their images – each comes with it’s own source which can be downloaded by selecting “View Source” in the right-click menu. Or you can download these and other examples (both .as files and .fla files) by going to away3d.com/downloads. The Basic_Swf example also uses the excellent as3dmod library (which you can download from here) for producing the bend effect. Now you can twist and deform vector graphics in 3d, thanx to as3dmod, swfvector and Away3d 2.4 /3.4

Enjoy the new release!

Away3d’s flash10 branch has recently been updated to the 3.3 version – a parallel release that now runs alongside the 2.3 version for Flash 9. Initially a compatibility release, the flash10 branch is now being used as the place where Flash 10 optimisations are made to the engine.

One such optimisation is in the area of shading, where Pixel Bender filters allow far greater render speeds than standard Flash filters. The demo above is an illustration of the kind of power now available with the latest update – normalmapping becomes a good deal faster and smoother than before, thanks to per-pixel normalising and the abandonment of layering which was previously the only way to achieve a shaded effect.

Special thanx go to Eddie Carbin for supplying the model, and David Lenaerts for the HDR filter that creates an extra ‘blooming’ layer to the view for an accentuation of highlights and shadows in the shading. Source for the demo can be accessed via the usual right-click in the movie, or directly from here. Don’t forget that to compile this demo you will require the 3.3 version of Away3d, downloadable from http://www.away3d.com/downloads or from the flash10 branch in the svn.

The 2.3 update of Away3d has been released! This new version comes in two flavours, a legacy Flash 9 version for all people wishing to carry on using Away3d in their current projects, and a new Flash 10 version for those lucky enough to be already developing in cs4 and Flash 10.

Added features in the version are many and varied! Some highlights include:

• Frustum and nearfield clipping
• Object culling (using frustum calculations)
• Camera lenses
• Advanced normalmap tools
• Bezierpatch tool for creating smooth surfaces
• Improved memory management
• Improved extrusion tools
• Billboard mesh objects

The Frustum room demo shows the new frustum clipping class in action. The 3d room can be navigated with no clipping artifacts that are usually a common problem with interior scenes such as this. The frustum technique involves slicing triangles to the viewing window rather than removing them.

Use the mouse and cursor keys to navigate, and the keyboard shortcuts listed in the demo to see various different render options for a comparison between old and new.

As always, the source for the demo is available here, or by right-clicking in the demo window.

Frustum culling is only one of the new features on offer – for more information on others, head over to away3d.com!