For anyone looking for a christmasy e-card at this time of year, look no further than Santas search, a fun, customisable animation using Away3D. We have even been sent our own personalised greeting from our good friends at JiglibFlash, which you can view by clicking here or on the screenshots below… elves packaging up a perfect 3D gift of The Essential Guide to 3D in Flash, EvoFlash Disconnected demo and Prefab3D, to the sound of a rocking christmas tune.

2010 has been a year of collaboration for us, so I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have been involved in or encouraged Away3D development in some way, including JiglibFlash, EvoFlash, Influxis, Adobe, Prefab3D, Friends of ED, HaXe, the Away3D community and of course, the Away3D Team. Have a great Christmas & New Year everyone!

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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At the recent LFPUG meeting, a showcase video for past Away3D projects got its first airing. now that I’ve had time to create a high quality YouTube version, here is the finished product!

Featuring content created by many different companies and individuals over the past 2 – 3 years, the vid offers an overall feel for the number and variety of projects being produced with the help of the Away3D engine. Our admiration and appreciation goes out to all the people who were involved in producing the content (a full list is available in the end credits), and the motion graphics skills of the video itself must also be acknowledged as the most excellent work of Joseph Rufian.

Here’s to another year of blistering Away3D content!

I’m not normally one to blog about stuff i find on the internet, but i just couldn’t resist with this one. ThruYOU is a site that remixes youtube videos into songs… and while that may sound like a crap idea, have a listen before passing judgement. What i loved about the story of the guy behind this was that when he was asked if he was worried about lawsuits, he replied:

“I guess that they uploaded their work to YouTube because they wanted it to be seen, so I thought that it was fine. If someone wants to sue me, I could probably take the site down. But I’m not earning any money, so I don’t see why anyone should be upset.”

I think i just heard the sound of several thousand lawyer’s backs snapping