Here is a video with more information on Silverlight 3 Beta features that are matches of the latest Flash killer features in pixel shaders, 3d planes (ability to create pseudo-3d engines like papervision3d), local saving, pixel operations/bitmap handling, local messaging (silverlight to silverlight – like localconnection), out of browser desktop running ability of SL3, SEO and search indexing capabilities / deep linking navigation and more.

Video of the features of SL3 Beta, Demos, at a Slow Pace from #mix09

A few points after the video and taking a tour of the features.

The pixel shaders are written in HLSL (shader 2), however they are compiled to byte code and do not currently use the gpu for rendering. While the pixel shaders are very cool and the language to write them is standard pretty much for shaders in HLSL shader model 2 DirectX-based (the other is GLSL OpenGL based) they have not allowed this byte code to run on the GPU… yet. Here Flash and Pixel Bender actually are ahead there.

Although there are 3d planes which is very exciting, no good pseudo 3d engine exists yet matching the 3 in flash (papervision3d, away3d, sandy). When SL3 comes out I am sure we will see a few emerge or build them ourselves because this iteration of SL3 looks pretty fun.

Pixel based operations will be a huge advancement much like it was in earlier flash versions as it adds some demo scene type abilities and experiments with pixels that are fun.  This also lends to doing cool things like shaders, effects, AR, face recognition, motion detection etc.

Effects like Blur and Drop shadow are good and the ability to add custom ones, great. However currently they are pretty performance intensive.  They are also in Flash but there needs to be some refinement in SL3 effects before launch.

Desktop runnable apps in out of browser will be nice and this is a direct compete with Adobe AIR which was a surprise.

Local Communication supports desktop to browser communication.

Isolated storage (similar to shared objects) supports 1MB in browser, 25MB out of browser defaults.

This version of silverlight is really a 1.0 version as typical with most software.  Version 2 or version 3 is usually what the initial design goals pan out.  Much like the latest unity3d version (2.5) that has windows support and the iPhone SDK 3.0 that both came out this week, even actionscript 3 compared to earlier versions, these toolkits are finally iterated enough that they are really solid platforms for building cool stuff on and become platforms.  The next version of all these could be very, very dangerous.

Huge missing features:

Although there are some great features in SL3 beta, it is still not done and it is still missing some key components that Flash has which make it very attractive in the interactive space.

• Camera and Microphone support - Macromedia hired one of the smartest dudes around in Jeremy Allaire back in flash 6 days to help add support for Flash Communication Server (Flash Media Server now) Camer and Microphone support.  One of the best R&D periods at Macromedia. SL needs this soon.
• Printing support – what was long a problem in Flash is so in SL, there is no good printing support
• No GPU usage for Pixel Effects/Shaders – (neither flash nor silverlight support hardware accelerated shaders in PixelEffects/Pixelbender – Pixel Effects/Shaders need GPU support (see Kevin Goldsmith’s article on GPU mixed with CPU and how this may or may not be good. However processors are speeding up and multi-core helps software rendering, the quality of GPU is well beyond what software rendering can deliver for a few years to come at least while architecture advances, probably more like 5-10 years.
• No UDP plans yet - Adobe has RTMFP, SL sockets has no public plans for adding UDP that I have seen
• No Alpha Channel in Video - You can do this with a shader though but not supported by default.

Silverlight 3 Video

Flash has the upperhand in video and probably will still even though SL3 has H.264.  Flash added this at the same time and though they still have FLV which revolutionized web video they are now much broader in support in video than SL3.  Silverlight has H.264 and VC1 support (their own FLV like codec).  Still pretty cool a couple years ago there was no HD on the web now everyone has it in H.264 video support.

Currently nothing innovative, mainly catchup still, but here are some options

Silverlight 3 beta and the video below the features and highlights will look very similar to flash and flash community advancements over the last couple years.  There is no innovation just yet.

But where that could happen is in socket support with UDP. Flash has moved on this in RTMFP and the beginning of larger scale networking support with UDP with samples like stratus.  This is a huge differentiating feature for what I think will be game changer on the web (it already is on desktop mmos) in real-time or closer to real-time support for larger sets of users in online games like MMOs or virtual communities, even tools to make request based real-time sites like micro-blogging faster and able to handle more users (right now it is very linear if users get many followers, UDP will allow a better distributed framework for messaging).

Local Storage

Silverlight and Unity3D all need this, Flash could use better support for this.  Local saving of a files for cache beyond the internet cache and greater than the 1MB/25MB limits of SL3 IsolatedStorage.  This is an issue when you are making large scale games in that you need to save lots of assets to a client but to make it economical you want ot save more than the default internet cache amount. Flash Shared Object (Local) allow you to do this somewhat but it would be great to have a way to just download files for cache (upon user agreement) to store assets in bulk of allowable types (images, video, models, bundles) to the file system.

Hardware rendering for 3d support and UDP support will put Flash and SL3 on par with the killer Unity3D kit for making online web games and other activex/plugins like instantaction that allow you to do these things already.

The one thing SL has over Flash

Flash and Flex are great. But there is this massive division in the community and marketing of Flash. Silverlight is entirely unified and this has much to do with starting clean at a time that interactive development is heading more into a technology and developers control. Flash and Flex need to bring it together. AS3 has been out long enough that the people with skills have hopped on and taken it to a new level, mainly from programmers. If Adobe created a version of Flash that was a new IDE and consolidated Flex and Flash into just Flash, made the IDE as powerful as FDT or FlashDevelop3 there could be hope to bring the platform together. I understand they had to work it in slowly because it was a designers platform really (even though coders still pushed the limits in games and apps built on it) so they had to tip toe carefully on this to not alienate people. But now I think the division is a serious problem with the platform and must be addressed, noone expected Silverlight to be this quick on at least SL3 features. And even though the initial approach might have been bad as SL1 was a huge letdown, Microsoft does not give up and you can see in the XBOX360 and DirectX that they are very pursuant. DirectX really didn’t become huge until version 7 so these guys won’t relent.

I am not a huge fan of using the proprietary tools. Even in Flash I use as much open source as I can even though the player is locked, but Moonlight is something that trails Silverlight development and is a very unique thing in both open source and cross platform/multiplatform development. It is a clear relationship and aims to make Silverlight run on multiplatform mono including Linux. This could win out in the end who knows.

Futures

Great iterations of software happened this week in the latest unity3d version (2.5) that has windows support and the iPhone SDK 3.0 and now SL3 is quite a surprise in feature set.

I have been really busy this week just delving into all them and hope to start making more cool and useful projects in them.  The best part is right now is great to be an interactive or game developer as all major software companies and markets are focused on retaining good developers.  I don’t’ recall a time other than the beginning the the web virtual land rush that has so many options and markets that skilled developers and designers can choose from.  Good times.

The interactive space is blowing up with releases of really good iterations of software.

Just this week the iPhone 3.0 SDK was announced and available for download for developers, Unity3D 2.5 was released with a windows development capability (was previously mac only) and now Silverlight 3 is making some waves as it was released at #MIX09 (with the Moonlight open source mono version hopefully not too far behind…).

There are a few things that piqued my interest in Silverlight 3 beta notes and that is hardware acceleration on video, 3d canvas and pixel effects (unclear if these are hardware accelerated like shaders or pixel bender) similar to filters and with the possibility to write effects similar to shaders or Adobe’s Pixel Bender pbx shaders.

• Support for Higher Quality Video & Audio. With support for native H.264/Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) Audio, live and on-demand IIS7 Smooth Streaming, full HD (720p+) playback, and an extensible decoder pipeline, Silverlight 3 brings rich, full-screen, stutter-free media experiences to the desktop. New and enhanced media features in Silverlight 3 include:
  • Live and on-demand true HD (720p+) Smooth Streaming. IIS Media Services (formerly IIS Media Pack), an integrated HTTP media delivery platform, features Smooth Streaming which dynamically detects and seamlessly switches, in real time, the video quality of a media file delivered to Silverlight based on local bandwidth and CPU conditions.
  • More format choice. In addition to native support for VC-1/WMA, Silverlight 3 now offers users native support for MPEG-4-based H.264/AAC Audio, enabling content distributors to deliver high-quality content to a wide variety of computers and devices.
  • True HD playback in full-screen. Leveraging graphics processor unit (GPU) hardware acceleration, Silverlight experiences can now be delivered in true full-screen HD (720p+).
  • Extensible media format support. With the new Raw AV pipeline, Silverlight can easily support a wide variety of third-party codecs. Audio and video can be decoded outside the runtime and rendered in Silverlight, extending format support beyond the native codecs.
  • Industry leading content protection. Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady Content Protection enables protected in-browser experiences using AES encryption or Windows Media DRM.
• Empowering Richer Experiences. Silverlight 3 contains new 3D graphics, animation features, hardware accelerated effects and text improvements that enable designers and developers to create next generation Web visuals. Additional features include:
  • Perspective 3D Graphics. Silverlight 3 allows developers and designers to apply content to a 3D plane. Users can rotate or scale live content in space without writing any additional code. Other effects include creating a queue in 3D and transitions.
  • Pixel Shader effects. These software based effects include blur and drop shadow. In addition, you can also write your own effect. Effects can be applied to any graphical content. An example would be to make a button appear depressed on rollover you could use a drop shadow effect on the pressed visual state.
  • Bitmap Caching. Silverlight 3 dramatically improves the rendering performance of applications by allowing users to cache vector content, text and controls into bitmaps. This feature is useful for background content and for content which needs to scale without making changes to its internal appearance.
  • New Bitmap API. With Silverlight 3, developers can now write pixels to a bitmap. Thus, they can build a photo editor to do red eye correction, perform edits on scanned documents or create specials effects for cached bitmaps from elements on the screen.
  • Themed application support. Developers can now theme applications by applying styles to their Silverlight 3 applications and changing them at runtime. Additionally, developers can cascade styles by basing them on each other.
  • Animation Effects. Silverlight 3 provides new effects such as spring and bounce. These make animation more natural. Developers can also now develop their own mathematical functions to describe an animation.
  • Enhanced control skinning. Silverlight 3 provides easier skinning capabilities by keeping a common set of controls external from an application. This allows the sharing of styles and control skins between different applications.
  • Improved text rendering & font support. Silverlight 3 allows far more efficient rendering and rapid animation of text. Applications also load faster by enabling the use of local fonts.
• Improving Rich Internet Application Productivity. New features include:
  • 60+ controls with source code : Silverlight 3 is packed with over 60 high-quality, fully skinnable and customizable out-of-the-box controls such as charting and media, new layout containers such as dock and viewbox, and controls such as autocomplete, treeview and datagrid. The controls come with nine professional designed themes and the source code can be modified/recompiled or utilized as-is. Other additions include multiple selection in listbox controls, file save dialog making it easier to write files, and support for multiple page applications with navigation.
  • Deep Linking. Silverlight 3 includes support for deep linking, which enables bookmarking a page within a RIA.
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Silverlight 3 enables users to solve the SEO-related challenges posed by RIAs. By utilizing business objects on the server, together with ASP.NET controls and site maps, users can automatically mirror database-driven RIA content into HTML that is easily indexed by the leading search engines.
  • Enhanced Data Support Silverlight 3 delivers:
    • Element to Element binding : UI designers use binding between two UI properties to create compelling UI experiences. Silverlight now enables property binding to CLR objects and other UI components via XAML, for instance binding a slider value to the volume control of a media player.
    • Data Forms. The Data Form control provides support for layout of fields, validation, updating and paging through data.
    • New features for data validation which automatically catch incorrect input and warn the user with built-in validation controls.
    • Support for business objects on both client and server with n-Tier data support. Easily load, sort, filter and page data with added support for working with data. Includes a new built-in CollectionView to perform a set of complex operations against server side data. A new set of .NET RIA services supports these features on the server.
  • Improved performance, through:
    • Application library caching, which reduces the size of applications by caching framework on the client in order to improve rendering performance.
    • Enhanced Deep Zoom, allows users to fluidly navigate through larger image collections by zooming.
    • Binary XML allows communication with the server to be compressed, greatly increasing the speed at which data can be exchanged.
    • Local Connection This feature allows communication between two Silverlight applications on the client-side without incurring a server roundtrip: for instance a chart in one control can communicate with a datagrid in another.
• Advanced Accessibility Features. Silverlight 3 is the first browser plug-in to provide access to all system colors, allowing partially-sighted people to make changes such as high contrast color schemes for ease of readability by using familiar operating system controls.
• Out of Browser Capabilities. The new out of browser experience in Silverlight 3 enables users to place their favorite Silverlight applications directly onto their PC and Mac, with links on the desktop and start menu—all without the need to download an additional runtime or browser plug-in. Further, the new experience enables Silverlight applications to work whether the computer is connected to the Internet or not—a radical improvement to the traditional Web experience. Features include:
  • Life outside the browser. Silverlight applications can now be installed to and run from the desktop as lightweight web companions. Thus, users can take their favorite Web applications with them, regardless of whether they are connected to the Internet or not.
  • Desktop shortcuts and start menu support. Silverlight applications can be stored on any PC or Mac computer’s desktop with links in the start menu and applications folder, and so are available with one-click access.
  • Safe and secure. Leveraging the security features of the .NET Framework, Silverlight applications run inside a secure sandbox with persistent isolated storage. These applications have most of the same security restrictions as traditional web apps and so can be trusted without security warnings or prompts, minimizing user interruptions.
  • Smooth installation. Because Silverlight applications are stored in a local cache and do not require extra privileges to run, the installation process is quick and efficient.
  • Auto-update. Upon launch, Silverlight applications can check for new versions on the server, and automatically update if one is found.
  • Internet connectivity detection. Silverlight applications can now detect whether they have Internet connectivity and can react intelligently including caching a users’ data until their connection is restored.

The great news is we have all major companies about software, mobile and the web are focused on interactive development. If you are an interactive developer with programming skills and design skills, this is the time.  Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, even Google with Chrome (javascript engine ineteractive focused), and others are all on development that suits needs and requires skills of people that know the interactive and web platforms and are able to develop the best solution with the best technology for that solution. The programming depth is getting deeper (Adobe’s Alchemy, Silverlight/Moonlight/Mono/C#/Unity3D) but the capabilities are growing exponentially with what you can do with these new markets.

There are so many new, emerging and re-newed market forces in interactive development that things are going to shake up a bit and there is plenty of opportunity no matter what platform you might be locked into.  However I recommend not locking yourself into one platform and exploring, but specializing in what you do best. There has never been a better time for developers looking to take the web to the next level with cooler game development visuals, more immersive virtual spaces and applications that have usabililty and design in new ways and mimic the great usable design of the iphone; for developers going mobile or specializing in web game development this is a good time to be in the game.

This is fantastic news!  Unity3D 2.5 has been released a bit early before GDC and it includes the game changing windows build environment and IDE.  This now opens up the Unity 3D market by a huge factor and Unity3d will find its way into many gaming companies that are heavily invested in Windows. We should see the amount of unity 3d players and content ramp up quite a bit this year.

• Forum Announcement
• What’s new in Unity3d 2.5
• Download the 2.5 update
  
  • Mac OS X: http://unity3d.com/unity/unity.dmg
  • Windows: http://unity3d.com/unity/UnitySetup.exe <- well look at that

Dont’ get me wrong I love my Mac Book Pro and continue to use it for development in Unity3D, iphone sdk etc.  But being able to use my windows machine as a dev box is great and I know this will be huge for many windows users not wanting to shell out the $1500 for the unity license AND $3000 for a decent macbook.  The cost wall has been lowered and it is a great investment if you are an indie game developer or a large game developer.

I usually only get excited about open source tools on this blog because they help everyone with skills have access, I hope one day there will be an open source 3d browser based engine as well.  Right now though there is nothing price competitive other than maybe torque instantaction plugin or the gaim engine (quakelive) that comes close with hardware rendering and none of them beat Unity in ease of pipeline.

One thing about Unity3d is it was a game engine from day one, it is only a game engine.  It isn’t like Director or Flash that are also application development kits, rich internet application kits etc.  This is pure game engine baby with hardware rendering for the win. Also, if you want to make 3d games for the iPhone without going hardcore OpenGL ES you can do so with an additional license that opens up your distribution channel to the iphone, flash can’t do that currently unfortunately.

And so it begins… GAME ON!

Libspark from Japan is a treasure trove of great flash advancements, they seem to realize the great things that can come from porting in existing solid libraries from C/C++ etc into flash and have been scoring lately including augmented reality in flash porting the ARToolkit to FLARToolkit.  Recently a port of openCV for as3 called Marilena was found and it is for object detection and decent facial recognition (it is a computer vision library from intel) considering the processing power needed to do this.

Face Detection: Here is the sample included with Marilena showing facial detection on an image.

Lots of recent action has blown up on this front from Mr doob, quasimondo (optimizing the Marilena classes for better performance) and Boffwswana. Also there is a kit called deface by sshipman that is the first foray into this a year ago doing similar things but it was just a bit before it’s time and a bit slow in previous versions of flash, it performs decent now in this sample. Flash 10 performance of the AVM2 and future directions with Alchemy will lead to more interesting stuff just like this.

Mr. doob head tracking sample, be sure to check lots of other examples there

Boffswana example of head tracking Johnny Lee Wii style with only a webcam and flash, no wiimote needed since it uses facial detection to check where you are and how close you are in the screen and then moves accordingly.

This is stemming from the recent explosion of the FLARToolkit and augmented reality in flash as well as the gimmicks used by Nintendo with the wii and Johnny Lee’s great head tracking advancements. Porting great libraries to flash seems to be the phase we are entering now judging by the recent excitement around Adobe Alchemy and the LLVM along with the lead from the libspark.org contributors. We have also seen this heavily last year in ports of Box2D for 2d physics and other toolkits using established working code and porting that to flash now that is is mostly capable of handling the performance.

OpenCV (Open Computer Vision Library by Intel) is quite a powerful platform that allows you to do all this and now it is available in flash. There are other great libraries for nearly all platforms now. I have done some previous work with Aforge which is also a port of OpenCV mainly for motion detection. This was always around but not until the recent performance updates and the innovation that has come with Alchemy and the thinking that goes along with that (porting in libraries to flash from C/C++ etc), has allowed this to flourish in flash and thus the web.

The amazing new things we can do with flash by porting in existing libraries is only going to get more intense as alchemy and flash 10 are even more mainstream.  It is almost as if Flash will eventually just become a web renderer and simplified front end to many great toolkits that exist in more native environments like C/C++ but with the speed and distribution access of the web with Flash.  Exciting times ahead.

Polygonal labs, maker of some of the best demos, information and tools for AS3 since inception updated the killer AS3 Data Structures for Game Developers and ported it to haXe.

Of course along the way making many improvements and showing great information on how and why the haXe version is faster which mainly boils down to a more strict virtual machine but flexible still with generics.

haXe is fast because it is a very highly optimized virtual machine language with compiler (and could be called a virtual machine to target other VMs similar to LLVM with the ability to target the Neko VM, AVM2 or Javascript, it is more than just a language) by Nicolas Cannasse that may one day overtake directly coding for the AVM2 or maybe we will even see haXe have more influence on flash soon for performance gains.  Some of the Alchemy LLVM virtual machine work is similar in nature to what haXe does and helps the language become an abstraction and translates into highly optimized code from very powerful and productive language syntax.

Anyways, I ramble, be sure to check out Data Structures for Game Developers by Polygonal Labs now ported for haXe as hx3ds if you are doing any sort of work in AS3 or haXe for AS3 it will be worth your while and provide a very common and useful data structures capabilities into your production that is highly optimized from one of the best AS3 developers.

As the name suggests, hx3ds is a port of as3ds for haXe and is now available at lib.haxe.org. hx3ds only supports the flash player 10 target, as it makes extensive use of the Vector class. If you need data structures that compile across all platforms, take a look at colhx instead.

Here’s a list of new features:

• orders of magnitude faster
• collections now support clone() and shuffle() operations
• object pooling framework
• revised graph, tree and linked list classes
• memory manager for the virtual memory API (more on this soon)

The Structures Included

Multi-Dimensional Arrays

The library contains a two-dimensional and three-dimensional array. They are both implemented by a single linear array rather than nested arrays. This is the fastest method in flash to simulate multi-dimensional arrays and outperforms the nested array method because multiple array lookups are slower compared to one lookup combined with a simple arithmetic expression (which you can also often precompute in the outer loop). The most obvious application would be a tilemap in 2d or a layered tilemap in 3d.

Queue

This is also called a FIFO structure (First In – First Out). The queue comes in two variations, which have the same methods, but differ in their implementations: There is the arrayed queue, which obviously uses an array internally, and the linked queue, which is build upon a linked list. They are both very similar, except that the arrayed version has a fixed size and is faster.
A common application would be a command queue – imagine you have a unit in a strategy game and apply many commands which the unit should follow. All commands are enqueued and afterwards dequeued and processed in order.

Stack

Also commonly know as a FILO structure (First In – Last Out). Like the queue, this comes in two flavors: arrayed and linked. A stack is often not used directly, but a very important concept in programming. Please note, that a queue and a stack are not real structures, because they just define how data is accessed rather then stored.

Tree

A node-based structure. Every tree starts from a single node, called the root node. The root node can contain any number of child nodes, and every child node can again contain children. A tree node with no children is called a leaf node. In fact if you draw the nodes of a tree it looking like a real tree with branches. The AS3 display architecture is also a tree structure, so you could use this to manage your display objects and update them by traversing through the tree. Also, this is useful for decision trees, BVHs, storing a plot line or storing data recursively by applying the composite pattern.

Binary Tree

This is just a specialized kind of tree where each node is only allowed to have up to two children, called the left and right node. Binary trees are very often used for parsing input data, for example arithmetic expressions or when building a scripting system.

Binary Search Tree (BST) and Hash Table

Both structures store data that can be retrieved quickly by using a key. The method however differers greatly: The BST uses a recursive approach to split up large amounts of data into smaller sets. A hash table stores sparse key-based data using a hash-key in a small amount of space.

Linked Lists

A linked list is similar to an array. The main difference is that in an array, each cell contains just the data and is accessed by an index. A linked list consists of several node objects, which in addition to storing the data, manage a reference to the next node (singly linked) or to the next and previous node (doubly linked) in the list. Think of it as a more natural approach to work with sequential data.
Other benefits are that you can insert and remove data quickly by just calling the appropriate method on the node itself – you don’t have to manage array indexes. Also in AS3 object access is faster than array access, so it competes very well in terms of performance when iterating over the list.

Heap and Priority Queue

A Heap is a special kind of binary tree in which every node is bigger than its child nodes. Whatever you throw into a heap, it’s automatically sorted so the item with the ‘most significant’ value (depending on the comparison function) is always the front item. A priority queue is build upon the heap structure, and can manage prioritized data – which can be used in limitless ways.

Graph

A graph is a loose node-based structure. Nodes are connected with arcs, and every node can point to any other node. They can also point to each other creating a bi-directional connection. It is essential for path finding, AI, soft-body dynamics with mass-springs systems and a lot more.

Bit Vector

A bit vector is some kind of array in which you can store boolean values (true/false – 1/0) as close as possible without wasting memory. I currently can’t think of a reasonable application, because usually you should have enough memory – but it’s nice to have because it shows basic bit masking operations.

Alchemy is going to shake things up a bit.  As witnessed before from Quake running in flash and now ODE compiled to run in flash using Alchemy (LLVM based). It is an early test but shows what could be possible.

Mihai Pricope has a post with sources on how he got the ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) a great open source physics engine for 3D, running on the AVM2 Flash Player virtual machine.

I’ve took Alchemy for a test and decided to compile ODE (Open Dynamic Engine). Just to add yet another physics engine to the Flash World. It was a hell of a ride but I finally got to produce some bouncing balls . For a still unknown reason some as 3d libraries have been very slow to render 6 translucent walls and 2 balls. Papervision3D seems to move quite decent.

You can download the ode sources from here. To recompile them do (you need to have the Alchemy environment turned on):

Flash 10 will become mainstream shortly and with that the possibilities of using Alchemy in your projects is becoming a reality for production.  But what specifically can you do with Alchemy, a project that helps to compile C/C++ code into AVM2 capable files?

Alchemy described from Adobe:

With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform.  Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2.  The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

Alchemy is based on the LLVM Low Level Virtual Machine that allows new levels of code translation.  Maybe this can lead to more effective and performing code to run on the iPhone with flash player 10. Or some type of system that allows flash developers to code in AS3 or take projects and get them ready to run on the iPhone much like some of the Java to Cocoa compilation systems and Unity3D using mono to compile down to iPhone capable code.

The guys over at Flashbang Studios, a web game development studio in phoenix, az, and some of the most visible developers in the Unity3d space with Blurst, released something that may interest both FlashDevelop users and Unity3d developers.

UnityDevelop was released by Flashbang Studios recently and it is a modded version of FlashDevelop (originally from SharpDevelop a really nice open source .NET and mono IDE) and it supports intellisense for Javascript or Unity3d’s use of Javascript which is called UnityScript much like ActionScript.  UnityScript can be a little more strict and has access to all of Unity3d’s API calls just like C# and Boo in the mono based virtual machine that Unity3d uses.

FlashDevelop, is by far the best Flash / Flex /haXe IDE in my opinion so it is really great to release this for Unity.  I hope one day I or someone has the time to port to Mono so it can be used on Macs even with the 140 pinvokes, it would be a good spread mechanism for mono.

With Unity3d coming to windows soon, UnityDevelop could be a good go to IDE for unity if you aren’t using solely C# with VS.NET. Currently this is based on FlashDevelop2 source code.

Video Overview of UnityDevelop


UnityDevelop Walkthrough from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.

Downloads

• Download UnityDevelop (2.9 MB)
• Source Code

Thanks flashbang!

Looks like it is a javascript day here at *drawlogic.  Here is an interesting example with some demos of a javascript and canvas based pseudo 3d engine. Anything this cool you know it has to be from Japan.
Also of note, it has been rumored that Silverlight 3 will have fully hardware accelerated 3d and canvas and javascript engines are getting much faster with great demos like this.  Adobe needs to leap into hardware acceleration for flash on a broader scale soon.

But I digress, this demo it appears, was inspired by Papervision3D due to the naming and the javascript reference of “parpevision.js“.  I wasn’t able to find much more information about this but it is very well done and this example even shows some environment mapping. It is not close to flash pseudo-3d engines like Papervision3D yet but at the rate of javascript engine development lately this could rival flash AVM2 in the next couple of years.

Demos

• Cloth
• Miku Character
• Enviroment Mapping

Code

• Sample iPod iTouch Mesh data (meshdata.js) – contains models
• Code from the main engine (parpevision.js)
• Sample Viewport and main app (touch.js from demo 3)

Here is the code for the parpevision.js file and the mini engine, it is an MIT license. (more…)

Box2D is responsible for inspiring many 2d physics engines including Motor2, Box2DFlashAS3 and others.  Box2D the original toolkit is a solid c++ physics engine that has many great examples and features including real collision.

Now it has inspired a pure Javascript version of Box2D called Box2Djs to (using prototype dependency) to implement many of the same demos using the same functionality.  So it appears Box2D if you want to find a baseline standard physics kit for 2D, it now has versions in many languages that might allow you to have 2d physics capabilities across many platforms.

Box2DJS is a JavaScript port of Box2D Physics Engine. To tell the truth, this is converted from Box2DFlashAS3_1.4.3.1 in an automatic manner. (The reason why not Box2DFlashAS3_2.0.0 based is simply because I overlooked the renewal.)

Dependencies

• prototype.js
• IECanvas (when you use a canvas tag to display the result of your physics simulation)

Links

• Project Page (SF)
• Download Page (SF)
• Box2D
• Box2DFlashAS3
• API Doc (Box2DFlashAS3)

How to use

1. Download a zip file and extract it.
2. Copy js/ and lib/ directories from the extracted directory to your app directory.
3. Copy script tags in the header part of index.html in the extacted directory to your html file where you want to simulate physics.

   Because this library does not have a lazy-loading system now, you should load all classes before starting your simulation. To make things worse, each library has a bit complicated dependency each other so that loading libraries in wrong order may cause a fatal error. To avoid such a trouble, it is strongly recommended to copy the header part of this file or `index.html’ including the downloaded zip file.

4. Utilizing Box2D APIs, simulate the newton world as you like.

   The Box2DJS APIs are completely same as those of Box2DFlashAS3. Please refer information about it.

Also the speed of your javascript engine makes a big difference just like the AS2 AVM1 to the AS3 AVM2 virtual machines.  Chrome is much faster than FF3.

Video of Box2DJS in Chrome

Video of Box2DJS in FF3

Recently two compact tweening engines have been released. Grant Skinner’s GTweeny and laborat’s ByteTween. This adds to the two that focus on micro-tween kit sizes in TweenLite and TweensyZero

Basically these engines look to be micro and provide pretty nice features while being so small. Micro tweening engines like GTweeny (3k), ByteTween (1.7k), TweenLite (2.7k), TweensyZero (2.9k) and Tweener (9k) have varying levels of support of features (Tweener being the most loaded with color and filter support without other kits just init, also TweenLite with a nice configurator to include only what you need).  Micro kits have benefits when used for banners, animated assets (where you have many assets and the per asset savings is worthwhile) and other places you just want really small output.

Light Transition ByteTween

(1.7k)

This kit has a c# version as well as a small as3 bytetween version.

The ByteTween static class eats only 1.7K of compiled clip! With this size it supports:

• Creation of tweens of any numeric property (not color/uint properties).
• Pause,Unpause,Cancel operations based on the tween target and property.
• Overlap system that cancel tweens of same property in order to avoid erroneous behavior
• Alpha tween with negative alpha support (negative alpha sets the MovieClip visibility to false)
• ’scale’ tween of both ’scaleX’ and ’scaleY’ properties.
• OnComplete callback with any number of parameters
• Easy interface for creating new tweens!

Download light_transition_CS_0.5a.zip.zip (c# version)

Download thelab_ByteTween.zip

TweenLite

(2.7k) base

• SPEED – I’m not aware of any popular tweening engine with a similar feature set that’s as fast as TweenLite. See the speed comparisons yourself.
• Feature set – In addition to tweening ANY numeric property of ANY object, TweenLite can tween filters, hex colors, volume, tint, saturation, contrast, frames, and even do bezier tweening, plus LOTS more. TweenMax extends TweenLite and adds even more capabilities like pause/resume, rounding, event listeners, timeScale, and more. Overwrite management is an important consideration for a tweening engine as well which is another area where the GreenSock tweening platform shines. You have options for AUTO overwriting or you can manually define how each tween will handle overlapping tweens of the same object.
• Expandability – With its new plugin architecture, you can activate as many (or as few) features as your project requires. Or write your own plugin if you need a feature that’s unavailable. Minimize bloat, and maximize performance.
• Management features – TweenGroup makes it surprisingly simple to create complex sequences and groups of TweenLite/Max tweens that you can pause(), resume(), restart(), or reverse(). You can even tween a TweenGroup’s “progress” property to fastforward or rewind the entire group/sequence.
• Ease of use – Designers and Developers alike rave about how intuitive the GreenSock tweening platform is.
• Updates – Frequent updates and feature additions make the GreenSock tweening platform reliable and robust.
• AS2 and AS3 – Most other engines are only developed for AS2 or AS3 but not both.

Download TweenLite

TweensyZero

(2.9k) base

Here are some simple steps to help you get started with creating your first animations with TweensyZero. TweensyZero is a light weight version of Tweensy most core features found in Tweensy are available to TweensyZero. Documentation for TweensyZero can be found under the folder ‘documentation/zero’ or online

Download TweensyZero

gTweeny

(3k)

gTweeny is gTween‘s lightweight younger sibling. It strips a lot of the secondary features of GTween (proxy, timing modes, etc) in favour of smaller file size. It is currently under 3kb…

Download gTweeny

Here is a list of all open AS3 “Micro” Tweening engines < 5k

• ByteTween (1.7k)
• TweenLite (2.7k)
• TweensyZero (2.9k)
• gTweeny (3k)
  

Here is a list of all open AS3 Tweening engines and base kits

• Animation Package
• AS3 Animation System 2.1
• AS3Easing
• Go (base animation kit – create your own tween engine)
• gTween
  
• KitchenSync
• Twease
• Tweener (9k)
• Tweensy
• TweenLite (TweenMax)

The decision on which to use can be affected be features you want, how it feels (many use the same object syntax so it is dynamic), what performance do they have (all are orders of magnitude faster than the built in tween (flash) or transitions (mx/flex)), which size is ok, author/community support needed (some are more active than others adding features or simplifying and tweaking performance methodically), and many other factors.  There are definitely plenty to choose from.

Speed Tests for many Tween Engines

• Green Sock Tweening Comparison Tool
• Moses Benchmarking Tool (relative comparison against SimpleAS3Tween sample)

For more on each features see their sites or these previous lists on tweening engines:

• Updated: List of Best Animation Packages for AS3