nochump.com

So recently I start working on a 3d engine again. I had toyed around with writing one back in the flash mx days but the speed of the flash player prior to version 9 was a major hurdle. Obviously even with 9, you’re not going to get 3d quality on par with the popular games out now without hardware acceleration. But seeing all the exciting Papervision3D based demos in the recent months and being blown away by this SWFZ demo renewed my interest. Speaking of which, there was another great 3d engine demo with an dancing Yoshi but I lost my bookmark to it Sound familiar to anyone and might have a link?

Another thought is the possibility of having hardware acceleration in the future via Apollo. There is one question on the Apollo developer FAQ:

Will developers be able to extend Apollo with native code?

No. This functionality will not be available in Apollo 1.0.

So maybe in 1.0.1?

Well I’m sure there’s lots of other concerns involved with adding OpenGL and DirectX but can you imagine if Apollo offered this? I’m not pushing it for the flash player, it’s not worth the risk of bloating the player size thus affecting the penetration rate. But for Apollo? It’s desktop and if they did it for Director I would bet it’s possible and that they’re considering it.

Anyways I just wanted to ramble on a little about 3d in flash in general. As for my engine, it’s mostly a learning experience and not something I’m looking to release as a usable library.

Update: April 12, 2007

So I finally found that 3D dancing Yoshi demo, one of the 1st Flash9 3D demos I came across and it turns out it was the SWFZ engine all along! Check it out.

Tagged: flash