[ draw.logic ]

Jono is giving SWFZ to science and the open source devices.

The SWFZ engine is one Flash 3D engine that took a different approach. It is a bit early in its technique used but the author at custom:media Jono has decided to float the source code out there in ghost mode (no active development but not dead). It is just ready to branch and others to run with it. He is floating the source but I think in 1-2 years this will be the preferred method if processors and multicore parallel usage is optimized. We shall see.

The implementation method and difference with SWFZ engine in Flash for 3d is that is is a pixel based renderer or scanline. It is based on a really fun game engine called Irrlicht which has been pretty active for the last few years but is a C++ DirectX and OpenGL engine. Since SWFZ has to run in Flash and it is a pixel renderer/scanline it has some limitations currently in Flash. Games and renders have to be fast to pull this off and Flash is limited by the software renderer but as computers get multiple processors and flash player gets better at this then this will be a viable option (it is the same thing that limits Canvas based renderers right now). One main problem with this is you can’t go too full screen the biggest sizes that perform well are smaller windows 320×240 etc. But if the processors can handle it it is actually more efficient when it removes overlap, extra triangle drawing and painters algorithm like problems dont’ pop up (triangle overlap when on same plane). This method draws pixel by pixel but fast enough flash engines like Papervision, Sandy3D and Away3D draw overlaps due to the drawing technique, back to front.

But SWFZ still manages to pull off some amazing feats such as these demos

Quake Demo

Terrain Demo

Yoshis Hip Hop Couzin

Jono has put some great classes into SWFZ engine such as bsp parsers, quake md2 parsers, animated mesh, and lots of great examples in porting C++ Irrlicht to AS3. This was a very early example of how AS3 was fun for programmers to port stuff from C or C++ into Flash. AS3 is just fun. Also be sure to check the site for more samples like an FPS game, some basic ai etc.

Jono has been working on 3d in Flash for a while and actually this message is what shows the difference betweeen this approach and other flash engines the way Papervision, Sandy and Away3D (pv3d derivative) make 3d in flash fast enough (Painter’s Algorithm and drawing skewed movieclips and textures.

Demos

• Post on Open Sourcing of Code
• Post on Some Unfinished Work to Build On
• Demo Quake Prototype
• Demo Terrain
• Download Source SWFZ
• Download Source Dependency (FileSystem)

More about the Engine Some Notes

The SWFZ engine.

Overview:

SWFZ engine is the result of four years of me messing with 3D in Flash.

I was a complete newbie to 3D, so a lot of learning has happened to get to here.

If you’re interested in 3D engines check out the resource links at the bottom of the page:

The Demo:

Model

• .md2 format from ID’s Quake2.
• Uses frame based animation
• Textured with jpeg
• No lighting, No Gouraud Shading, just plain texture

Skybox

• Textures are just jpegs.

Boxes

• Rendering – Textured Gouraud , Textured Gouraud with Alpha, Textured Gouraud with Quick Alpha, Gouraud Shaded, and the large box is just Textured.
• Star Texture – Targa (.tga) file format.

AS3 classes

• 171 classes and interfaces

Scene

• No lighting
• No collision detection

SWFZ engine technology:

The demo only shows a small part of the capabilities of the engine. In the coming weeks I will get www.custommedia.co.nz up and running and start to post more info then.

Currently implement stuff:

New file formats supported

• .tga – Targa Image
• .bmp – Bitmap Image
• .3ds – 3D Studio Max
• .bsp – Quake3 levels
• .md2 – Quake2 models
• .obj – Wavefront 3d object (static)
• .zip – Read from a zip archive (all in Flash, no server side scripts)

3D Rendering

• mipmaps
• perspective correct texturing + affine texturing
• Flat shading
• Gouraud
• Textured Gouraud
• Textured Flat
• Textured Two Layers
• Gouraud Alpha
• Textured Flat Alpha
• Textured Gouraud Alpha

3D Scene

• Billboards
• Parent, Child scene nodes
• OctTree
• Skybox
• Static Meshes
• Animated Meshes
• Basic collision detection
• Scene node animators

If any code is useful to you maybe drop him a donation or what would be nice if this was all setup at google code and used to be integrated into other engines. Irrlicht ports are fun and there is a future in this method when processors catch up I think.

TweenMax (Speed Test) has been released that adds a main feature missing from GreenSock’s offerings in tween animation libraries and kits over Tweener. That is the bezier curve tween. Tweener is very popular for use in PV3d and AS3 due to the bezier curve and Zeh’s great example that is really the base of a possible 3d editor. TweenMax now adds this and bezier tween capability for the GreenSock animation libraries.

Tweener and TweenLite have become the micro animation kits as well as micro kits you can make with Go base kits. TweenLite, TweenFilterLite and TweenMax divided up into different kits allows it to be embedded for banners or small assets easier if you don’t need the filters or other advanced tweens (this comes into play heavily with large games and asset collections when the compiled SWF each need the library). Tweener packs all features into one kit for simplicity. GreenSock kits are divided up for need. The comparison together is about the same but for basic tweens TweenLite is only 2k.

Performance is one area that the kits from GreenSock have really shined and since the addition of the speed tests and benchmarks it has become a great focus on showing how the open source kits are much better than bloated included animation calls in Flash and Flex defaults. I think all the kits have niches that they fit and Tweener and TweenLite are just very simple to use which adds alot to an animation kit success.

List of Animation Kits for AS3 (some for AS2 as well)

• Tweener
• GreenSock
  • TweenLite
  • TweenFilterLite
  • TweenMax (Speed Test)
• Go Base
• Twease
• AS3Easing
• Animation Package
• Animation System

If you are using the Flex of Flash default animation classes, I am sorry…

I was messing with water effects and Perlin Noise (sandy3d) and some other stuff and collected some water effects and simulations that are fluid like for research, a snapshot of the state of fluid and water effects in 3d in flash.

Ralph Hauwert, of course one of the original pv3d team members, posted some great samples on water effects on 3d objects in Papervision 3D. Of course the papervision list spawned this discussion from another great post on water simulation in papervision and away3d by Exey Panteleev .

Also, some other water like effects from Fabrice Closier and the notorious mrdoob.

Ralph’s Water Effect Demos:

• Water Ball Experiment 1

• Water Ball 2(cpu burner alert!)

Hey look, the water ball is smiling at you.

Exey Panteleev’s Water Simulation:

• PV3D Simulation [source]
• Away3D Simulation [source]

Some other Water Like Fluid Effects:

• mrdoob fluid visualisation effect (like wata)

• away3d temple fabrice

Water is hard in flash. Fluid dynamics will probably have to be cheated but it is still looking pretty good. The amount of processor usage depends on how real you want it to look.

If you are looking to make some agua, with x, the y AND the z in Flash or Flex, these are a good place to start.

Moses has posted some nicely presented info on Go performance.

So far it looks almost neck and neck with TweenLite in drop dead sprints for fastest performing exhaustive tween kung fu-ing.

Although these are not really for competition it is to mainly show patterns for design for purposes that you need. Where this is a more apples to apples comparison (Go vs TweenLite) as the other kits have other overhead such as filters, utilities, even pathing for AnimationPackage and Tweener. TweenLite solved this by separating out into TweenFilterLite and just making TweenLite for animation (and keeping file size extremely small, virtual machine advantages). There is just no excuse for the F9 Tween class though, what the…

It is one thing to build, another to share, another to present information in a very consumable way and then another to make that whole presentation look really good. Moses, like polygonal labs, throws down some nice demos and information posts.

Go was late to the AS3 Animation kit game after pwning with FuseKit in the AS2 age (especially the creative agency love), I think it was the right time as it was released the TweenLite and TweenBencher performance testing utilities put a focus on performance to see just how many more cycles we could get out of AS3 from an animation kit. When building your own animation kits or contributing to one, these observations from various aims helps in the code design.

I still use Tweener in most production work, and TweenLite when I need really small assets if there are going to be many of them. But, I have started to use Go in a kit I am building that I hope to share more in the future, and used it in a small game. But by the speed of the tests and my own experiments it is pretty clear to see that both TweenLite and Go would be excellent base layers to animation kit architecture and Tweener is a bit more on top of that with the filters and bezier tools that it is really a more complete package with less work to do as your animation gets more complex (colors, saturation, bezier, etc). But if you were looking to build your own animation kit or for micro assets a base like Go or a base kit like TweenLite is the way to go). Some notes from Moses’s tests show that performance and sync are also what starts to fall apart as performance critical mass is reached. Go and Tweener held sync the best.

Side notes:

The TweenLite system was highly performative on all three measures. That system also features a very small filesize footprint, making it a clear choice for banners or other filesize-restrictive projects.

Go & Tweener were the only systems here that synced their animations – others ran out of sync to different degrees which yields less visually favorable results. Actually, it looks kind of neat in the tests! But you don’t want out-of-sync animation in your real-life projects. This effect can be clearly seen using the open-source TweenBencher utility, included in the Go package.

Here is a well done game based on the popular Line Rider phenomenon, only this one is Line Golf and it is using the APE AS3 2D Flash Physics Engine. I am sure game sites are just as excited as game developers like myself about the prospects of games that are more dynamic and fun and even 3d with the flash kits of today all thanks to the power of AS3.

Play Line Golf at Candy Stand

This was posted on the APE Google Group where onedayitwillmakeit explains more on how he modified APE for use in the game.

haXe, one of the coolest and most versatile languages and platforms of today just released something to add to the already amazing feature set of haXe.  Nicolas Cannasse has posted about releasing haXe Video 1.0. I have been engulfed by Red5 for a few weeks and this could not have come at a better time for fun.

haxeVideo is an opensource video streaming server entirely written in haXe.

Features of haXe Video 1.0:

• FLV streaming using RTMP protocol
• Webcam and Microphone recording to FLV file
• Live streaming for web conferencing
• light and fast scalable server
• only 50 KB of server source code : modify whatever you need !

Links

• haXe video at google code
• Blog post on the release
• haXe video site

• • Latest News about haXe

  • Introduction to haXe

  • The haXe Language Reference

  • haXe Documentation

  • Download haXe files

  • Projects related to haXe

  • License of haXe

  • The haXe Community Blog

Only a year after release Papervision is getting a major update to 2.0.

Get it while it is hot from the SVN server on google code: http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/branches/GreatWhite

Papervision3D, launched a year ago, really sparked the AS3 and flash/flex world and inspired every flash guru I know into working on this code. There have been some great tools made and some fwa’s won but it is only the beginning.

I am mostly looking forward to performance enhancements, ascollada integration, culling and Andy Zupko’s 2d bitmap effects on 3d.

New features:

• Faster!
• ShadeMaterials
• Shaders
• ASCollada (animation support)
• Frustrum Culling
• Multiple Viewports (3d editor anyone?)
• Render to Scene
• and more!

SVN server and branch:

• http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/branches/GreatWhite

We do indeed like to ride the racecars!

Another great new 2D physics engine for AS3 has been released called Box2dFlashAS3 that is based on the excellent kit Box2D for C++. It has been a busy year for physics engines in AS3. FOAM was released this month, APE, the highly anticipated Motor Physics from polygonal labs and plenty more still I am sure.

The Box2dFlashAS3 version has some great demos available on the site that show, use the arrow keys to move to the different demos highlighted here.

1. bridge
   
2. ragdolls
   
3. compound shapes
   
4. rube goldberg / domino / tank tracks etc
   
5. stacked boxes
   
6. slider crank / piston
   
7. pulleys
   
8. gears
   

Box2DFlashAS3 is an open source port of Erin Catto’s powerful c++ physics library Box2D. Cycle through the demos to see some of the features.

Full source code for the engine and examples can be downloaded from the project’s sourceforge page found Here.

This kit is nice because it mimics Box2D for the crossover and ability of developers to use it in C++ and Flash AS3 moreso than other kits. It looks good and performs well except for a memory or FPS pause I get intermittently.  The demos are already inspiring many uses of the features highlighted for games and effects.

The Proposal

Moses, the maker of FuseKit, is hoping to influence Adobe product lines to include a common base for animation and motion going forward. Currently the AS3 world is very alive and is inspiring developers like myself to build lots of toolkits and really creating reusable code and kits that can make things very easy from going to Flash to Flex. But wouldn’t it be nice if a part of these kits that have to be downloaded every time you have an application use them be part of the native Adobe applications, or a core animation kit that partially standardizes animation basics to build upon further?

Are we just asking for trouble or is this a good idea? I don’t’ think it can hurt to bring this to the surface. I know that common syntax and familiar kits can really help the developers and designers move from Flash to Flex to After Effects to Javascript, it could also help Adobe with usage and usefulness of their entire suite of products. Or further this could be a standard that allows Silverlight to also build upon (open standard) and may the best platform win.

I think it would be very wise for Adobe to:

• Standardize animation toolkits across their products and
• Start standardizing some of the basic tools of building motion and filter kits to native but still allowing a flourishing open source and community research and development aspect.

What MosesProposes:

• Blog entry by Moses on this topic
• Diagram: Current Situation
  
  
• Diagram: Proposed Core Library
  
  

Moses did speak with someone at Adobe about this and it is generally in the plans:

“It was also a pleasure to see Richard Galvan present the upcoming crop of Flash features: the sleek update to the animation timeline (better late than never?), support for columnated flowing text (double finally!) and the big one, native 3D player support for Display Objects as rotatable 2D planes. He ran out of time and didn’t get to a few others shown at Adobe MAX, such as built-in IK (inverse kinematics) and faster pixel-level drawing for texture-mapping and photoshop-like filter effects.

Talking to him after the presentation I learned that Richard has a keen awareness of exactly where each feature is at currently. We chatted about low-level animation mechanics of the Flash Player, and I found out that the holy grail of a time-based player is indeed on the distant horizon, but that each rev will need to be a small step toward this goal. The new Flash timeline features meld After Effects, Premiere and Live Motion, and from what I’ve seen I have to say that they are nailing this long-overdue upgrade with great design decisions and a level of usability we’ve never seen in Flash. Kudos, team!”

The Current Situation

Right now Tweener and TweenLite (and animation package and a few others) have a unique position in that they work the same almost for AS2 and AS3 (Flex or Flash - with minor property changes such as _x to x as that has changed in AS3). But it would be nice if these kits also had a version for After Effects (really bringing that tool into Flash/flex developer worlds) and Javascript and it would be great if Silverlight also were supported (AgTweener anyone?).

Tweener is leading the pack in this aspect of creating a similar experience from AS2 to AS3 in Flash and AS3 in Flex and even JSTweener for Javascript, and a kit for haXe which is becoming my favorite toy and the dark horse with the most upside potential, with haXe on the loose these points may all be moot as haXe can target any platform (except After Effects easily, correct me if I am wrong and Silverlight but it could easily be done so to do it for Silverlight 1.0 which is ES3 based).

I don’t use After Effects as much right now but if I could easily incorporate this into Flash/Flex and script and animate in a similar syntax and way I know After Effects would definitely have a boost in interest.

Also, the forgotten one Director, can we please get an ES4 based language in that application, or an update? Then kits and add-ons are much more possible. I really miss hardware accelerated 3d in browser as a pushed technology, Director is still around but it does not get the focus it needs. Feel the freedom and coolness just in this small test here in director, hardware accelerated 3d is the best, the Director application environment and Lingo and hacked in javascript are not the best. As a long-time Director user, hobbyist and professional I am disappointed in Director’s support at Adobe thus far, but I digress.

The Reality

The reality is right now the only problem with kits like Tweener, TweenLite, Tween, mx.transitions, mx.motion, etc is that the source has to be embedded in movieclips multiple times. Sometimes there are multiple animation kits per compiled SWF that have to be used for more advanced features. This adds bulk that if common might not need to be there (this comes into play still on mobile and large games/apps).

Let’s say you have an application that pulls in many disconnected SWFs and they all have animation in them, well if you have 20 of these let’s say, and you embedded a very small Tweener at 9k per SWF. That is about 200k of duplication of AS code. Due to the kits small sizes this is not a problem really but when animation kits like Animation Package come into play, you are talking 40k per SWF which would leave you with almost a meg of just duplicated animation code. I don’t think this is that major of a problem for kits like Tweener (9k compiled) and Tweenlite (3k compiled) but as projects get bigger and more depth of animation platforms needed this can be a problem. This can also be solved in architecture with a controller and dummy SWFs to animate but there are times when you need animation in the compiled SWFs and then also need it in many others and the controller.

The other reality is the animation kits (mx.transitions.easing, mx.transitions.tween) for Flex and Tween for fl are a little bloated, more difficult than needed to use and as has been seen, much slower than kits currently available in the community. My one fear about this is that if Adobe makes this, possibly like Microsoft’s toolkits and libraries they put out, they are always bloated and slower, then because they are embedded they are untouchable. If it was standard enough as building blocks that are faster because they are native, then this is the best option as embedded script would be hard pressed to beat native code in the players/applications.

The Future Plans

Some of this is underway….

Animation kits for future, Adobe is releasing Flash 10 called ‘Astro’ that has many new improvements in tweening with xml closer to flex or even Silverlight like transitions and storyboards. Aral Balkan, a sponsor of OSFlash, posted on this and even that Diesel Flash CS4 will include more Tween tools for IK/bones. Tweener , TweenLite, Animation Package, Animation System etc these are all helping to define the best way to do animation kits.

Physics toolkits have their own animation kits currently usually to handle the movement according to algorithms. FOAM, APE , Box2DFlashAS3 (just released very recently will be posting more on this after I check it) and Motor Physics (unreleased but heavily demoed at polygonal labs) are great physics toolkits and I like this being part of the community to get refined, maybe one of them or the best performing ones becomes part of the proposed Adobe Animation bundle. These will define the best way to do physics kits.

3d in flash toolkits have also been emerging rapidly in 2007 with Papervision3D, Away3d based on pv3d, Sandy, and even engines starting to get built on top of these platforms.

The general direction is moving towards another platform in there somewhere but I think much work is left to be done to standardized physics systems, 3d and advanced motion filter tweens and bezier, splines (Catmull-Rom), editors, etc. I think it is getting time for basic animation kits to become more standard though and in latest versions of flash this is included in the flex and flash scripts but not the native code.

Right now the standard in syntax and the broadest reach is Tweener and due to the bigger fish syndrome, haXe that can target any platform, it also has a Tweener and can create code for as2, as3 and any target written in if After Effects, Premiere or other apps get more robust and standard animation and motion kits. Tweener has kits made and contributed for AS2, AS3, haXe, Javascript and others.

There is also Hydra and the AIF Toolkit that are standardizing After Effects and Flash shaders and filters into a new shader language like Cg and reminiscent of processing.org.

As humans we trial and error and build new platforms in the market to step on to create better platforms to build cool stuff, it is evolving right now. AS3 is inspiring platforms within platforms of Flash and Adobe kits as well as on Silverlight and in the Javascript world with JSTweener, jquery etc. As these things are refined we build a level standard platform to build more stuff on. Eventually this will be there and whoever does the standard platform for animation will probably reap in users and abilitty to easily add new products and solutions where people already have training. Silverlight is an example with .NET developers. .NET was also an example with C# so similar to Java. ES4 based AS3 has proven it is inspiring all types of new platforms and kits and will continue to do so and it is an interesting time in this industry whichever direction it goes.

Drew Cummin’s FOAM is a great flash as3 2d physics package that can be integrated quickly and get started with realistic physics in 2d flash apps and games. I have been playing with this since FOAM’s release last week and putting together some tests to show, comparing with APE and really looking forward to polygonal labs Motor Physics to add there.

Three excellent physics engines (FOAM, APE and Motor Physics) for flash in AS3 already. Basically at flash9 player/avm2 market saturation (it is now available to develop on in over 94% of market) is showing the power of the ES4/Javascript2 based Actionscript3 language and how it is inspiring developers to new levels of interest/inspiration. Then again haXe can target them all but I digress.

FOAM was recently released but the author Drew Cummins is showing very good support for the toolkit and released a plethora of goodins to support this great kit, bug fixes, samples, docs and some realistic physics demos as well as in depth walkthrough of creating a force generator and comparison of the Euler and RK4 equations used in that process and their differences (Euler being less correct due to the factors of the platform and intervals and environment, RK4 more correct but more expensive to run)

If you are developing realistic physics in flash games or apps this toolkit is a great source of inspiration.

• Demo showing semi-realistic physics and the results of the Euler and RK4 Solver in an orbit scenario
• Excellent post describing the IForceGenerator interface to make a GravitationalForceGenerator class used in the demo
• Code sample orbit of realistic physics (AS3)
• Code sample of GravitationalForceGenerator class (AS3)
  
• Euler class in FOAM
  
• RK4 class in FOAM
• FOAM AS3 2d physics engine source at Google Code
• Perpetual Fall
• Zero G Toy Chest

Flash 9 has reached 93%/94% penetration rates. If 90% wasn’t good enough from July then September and now Oct/Nov numbers are at 94% and probably 95% by now. To put it in perspective last December Flash 8 was at 94%.

If you aren’t using Flash9 and especially AS3 now for performance and code reuse you are hurting yourself and your clients. The recent animation package comparisons in AS2 to AS3 show us the type of power that AS3 has. Now you can jusify it by the numbers…and the tests that compare and show 10 times improvement in scalability compared to AS2, even for small motion apps, getting the most out of performance is important.

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Notes

1. Does not include Flash Player 5 and Emerging Markets.
2. Supports Adobe Flash Video (FLV).

• Millward Brown Methodology

–>[source]

I won’t even go into the business reasons that include AS3 being Adobe’s main focus compared to AS2 and the AVM1, from now on AVM2 will be the staple of focus at Adobe for the Flash team. Support will continue but don’t get smoked by AS3 interactives that AS2 ones can’t compete with. Get your AS3 learn on…