The actionscript architect Paul Spitzer has posted two killer demos of pathfinding using A* in AS3/Flash 9 using the Away3D engine (derivative of Papervision3D that is taking off) and you can download the source for both. These demos not only highlight the pathfinding but also provide editing of the graph to be traversed which could easily be made into a game world editor.

Paul adds to some path finding work with the likes of Zeh using Tweener (the best animation kit for AS3 yet) with the bezier papervision pathfinding and the good work going on at polygonal labs in data structures for games and their usage in pathfinding for gaming in flash.

At the actionscript architect’s blog check out the true 3d path finding in all three dimensions, and a 2d based pathfind using A* algorithm in 3d.

Here’s the 3d pathfinding with true 3d (x,y,z) points used in the path.

Here’s the 2d pathfinding with 3d interface.

Paul has been doing very cool vector work from video on 3d in flash using papervision3D, to being one of the first people making demos for WPF and Silverlight such as the Northface Demo.

If you are working on path finding or gaming in AS3 be sure to check out Paul’s work, Zeh’s bezier pathing in papervision and polygonal labs often.

John Grden the resident Flash rockstar \m/ and of Red5 fame has been kind enough to release the Papervision3D FlashCS3 UI Components.

What’s nice about this is it lowers the bar to people using Papervision3D and make it more accessible to non programmers.  I have been working to get Papervision3D in many projects but this will make it easier to get designers more into the engine and using Flash to create pv3d experiences. It may also help others to combine pv3d and 2d into some neat mashups (all this can be done before in script but when barriers are lowered usually more creativity follows, also visual use of 3d models in the IDE is powerful).

Here’s what John has cooked up:

Finally! After waiting for a couple of months, I’m able to release the new Flash CS3 Papervision3D Components! There’s a lot to cover, but to get things started, let’s look at the features:

• Design-time render and editing in Flash IDE
• 3 Material types supported – BitmapFileMaterial, BitmaAssetMaterial and MovieAssetMaterial
• Creates MovieScene3D and Free or Target camera
• Manages resizing / centering of Papervision3D scene [optional]
• Dynamic masking to constrain the viewable render area to the bounds of the component [optional]
• Full API and access to Scene, Camera, Collada objects to code around
• Automatically loads materials via Collada file [when materials list is not given]
• New Custom Panel for modifying rotation, camera zoom, camera focus, camera Z at design-timeReady to get started?
  Download it hereYou’ll needs some docs with that sauce:
  DOCSWanna see it in real world action? I used it for the slide presentations at the class this last weekend at RMI.
  Here are the demo files and the project for the Jedi Training Sphere slide show

  In case you wanted to see the Jedi Sphere in action, and thus, the slides from the classes:
  Developer’s slides
  Designer’s slides

  And of course, you can find all of that stuff out on Google code:
  Papervision3D google home

Be sure to check out the quick video and more info over at RockOnFlash

Rock on John!

Open Source Flash Conference – June 15th UPDATE(Change In Time)

The second Open Source Flash Conference will be held on June 15th. The conference will start by 11:00 am Eastern Time. This conference is completely free and to attend you only need a computer , the internet and flash installed on your computer.

http://osflash.org/blog/2007_06_12_open_source_flash_conference_-_june_15th

**Recorded Sessions**

Aral Balkan – Keynote Speech
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/p53406718/
Ralph Hauwert – Papervision 3D
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/p83105421/

Aral Balkan – SWX
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/p62103321/
Nicolas Cannasse – Haxe Programming Language
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/p22188329/
Firdosh Tangri – ASWing Component Framework
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/p20838194/
John Grden – The Red5 Project
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/p20388149/
Igor Costa – Flex Applications using Flex 2 SDK and Granite Data Services and Conclusion
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/p19208031/
Special Drum Solo – John Grden
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/p38865264/

Session Details

Session : 22
Start Time : 06/15/2007 10:00 AM
End Time : 06/15/2007 4:26 PM
Number of Attendees : 838
Peak : 256

Polls

How do you rate this conference
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/admin/meeting/sco/reports/sco/polls/poll-answer-distribution?interaction-id=6712579&sco-id=6438511
How good was John’s Drum Solo
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/admin/meeting/sco/reports/sco/polls/poll-answer-distribution?interaction-id=6713919&sco-id=6438511
Are you more design or development oriented?
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/admin/meeting/sco/reports/sco/polls/poll-answer-distribution?interaction-id=6713995&sco-id=6438511
You are using recently mostly…
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/admin/meeting/sco/reports/sco/polls/poll-answer-distribution?interaction-id=6714276&sco-id=6438511
ASWing
https://breeze.itap.purdue.edu/admin/meeting/sco/reports/sco/polls/poll-answer-distribution?interaction-id=6715098&sco-id=6438511

Tinic Uro who works on the Flash machine recenty posted some great news to hopefully a new direction, possible hardware acceleration with the next Flash update! This is mainly for 2d drawing acceleration but Tinic also notes in his first point that this update improves the speed of Papervision3D (currently a fake 2d painters algorithm 3d).  Adobe is listening to the market on this one.

And what is this, OpenGL and DirectX hardware scaling? It helps to draw the full screen version faster since its more taxing on the processor probably but this will lead to further use of OpenGL and DirectX for 3d, I hope.

Full-screen mode with hardware scaling. Probably the biggest new feature in the Flash Player Update 3. This leverages DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on OSX. There is an new API to control the behavior which was required since we could not change current behavior and we wanted to give the maximum flexibility possible. I know you are probably eager to use this feature, we will post more information on this on labs.adobe.com soon. I’ll also will give you much more technical details in an upcoming blog post.

Found via Zeh. I have dreams of hardware acceleration in flash and what it will do to the gaming world. Microsoft has Silverlight which they could easily make DirectX capable and might as well at such low penetration rates right now, but they would stop at switching to OpenGL I think for cross platform support.  Adobe might be willing to risk it and since they already own Director, roll in OpenGL engine support into Flash and win the 3d web battle not to mention just entirely take 2d effects and animation to a new level as well.

UPDATE: Here is Tinic showing the 1080 video with nhardware acceleration in the new update. Anyone with >2 screens at work, they get stuff done.

http://video.onflex.org/2007/06/14/tinic-uro-shows-new-fullscreen-hd-video-in-flash-player/

Here’s some of the best commercial Papervision3d projects so far
(all commercial papervision I have seen so far has made theFWA):

1)  The Brahma Bus interactive project
       by Russian firm PARK Studios.

Customize your own VW Bus, received theFWA recognition.

2) Eye Project
      by Takayuki Fukatsu aka fladdict

This is a killer use of pixel color mapping to video overall color.  It has papervision in the archives where it uses some more really well done pixel manipulation effects, received theFWA recognition.

3) The Net Eye interface (based on pv3d sample PaperCloud)
      by Neteye

Nice interface based on a pv3d sample project, received theFWA recognition.

*** The authors of papervision3D also have some of the coolest demos with it as well listed here.

Carlo Ulloa (based on pv3d sample Focus – by far the best)
      by Carlo Ulloa

Papervision3d homepage Shark Demo (wait for it, wait for it…)

Very First Papervision3D Star Wars Game by John Grden.

Also the original shader demos by Ralph Hauwert were killer.

About Vector/Web 3d

Papervision3d created by Carlos Ulloa Matesanz, Ralph Hauwert, and last but not least John Grden has really hit a development and design nerve, along with AS3 finally being ready for primetime. People are really excited about projects like this and it just goes back to my point that in the Vector Wars (Adobe vs Microsoft (haxe making a little noise in dev circles as well)) whoever rolls out cross platform 3d harware rendering in their plug in they will pwn.

Whos the Next Leader of 3d on the Web?

Director has been abandoned for new released until 2008 at least for any 3d updates (if we ever see another version).  But Flash could implement OpenGL (which would lead to it maybe being open one day) and Silverlight would implement DirectX but woudl probably stop at implementing OpenGL.  Flash *could* own with hardware rendering but it opens it up to many more plugins which lead to Director being maxed out at 50% market saturation. 

Anyways, it probably won’t happen but today we have some nice 3d engines in Flash that are fast enough in AS3 with its new shiny VM and there have been some nice commercial successes of the wise early adopters of this technology. Papervision3D, Away 3d (possible merging of code), and Sandy have all helped to add to the buzz around AS3.

UPDATE: Check out this Mech Demo that is making the rounds.  The demo has working hit detection and projectiles from the mech as well as animation on the 3d model.

Zeh has posted a great article on using Tweener to animate along a Bezier.  There is even a papervision3d sample.  Tweener has been a good choice for papervision3d animation due to its flexibility to be able to easily handle z and custom params.

This is excellent for game development or pathing in game systems.  The sample in papervision is a set of cones that the path can be set around.  For custom scripted sequences and triggered events this is exactly what is needed. Things like flying through cities, vehicles, transitions, recording replays etc.

I am blown away by this as its probably the most useful and cool demo I have seen yet. Check it out Download the source here (Flash CS3, AS3). 

I will give this project 6-8months before its a full blown papervision3D scene editor in flash. 

The new Flash CS3 application is excellent.  The new menu and pallette system they have build in is very quick and non-intrusive.  The general UI is very responsive in Flash and Dreamweaver.  In version 8 and other big IDEs out there things have been slowing down, but this release by Adobe things have really sped up.  However if you have been developing Papervision3D and using flash 9 alpha, FlashDevelop etc you may have a bit of setup to do to use Papervision3D or some of your old kits that are having trouble compiling.

Compiling AS3 with Flash CS3 is pretty simple the default classpath to the ‘flash’ namespace is already set by the application to $(AppConfig)/ActionScript 3.0/Classes.  You can also add your class library path to where papervision3d is located in Edit > Preferences > Actionscript > ActionScript 3.0 Settings… (button). I keep mine in [drive]\Projects\FLASH\classpath\as3\. 

FlashDevelop/Flash9 Alpha AS3 Users

One problem is that if you have been using the alpha flash 9 and used FlashDevelop or another IDE you might have some classes to remove from your class path before you can jump right in with Flash CS3.  These would be anything in the ‘flash’ folder in your classpath and probably some type classes in the root such as Object.as (intrinsic classes you may have added to complile to AS3 or code completion like in FlashDevelop).

Best Solution

The best solution if you do not want to clean that manually is setup a new classpath folder and then move new AS3 libraries in there. Or, you could setup a new folder and keep the existing classpath until your projects are swtiched over. I keep a classpath for all versions I currently support in my development.

[drive]\Projects\FLASH\classpath\as3\

[drive]\Projects\FLASH\classpath\as3_alpha\

[drive]\Projects\FLASH\classpath\as2\

These paths can be added to your Flash IDE, your external flash actionscript IDE like FlashDevelop or other compilers that may come along now that Flex SDK is opensource.

Well it is ”pageturn” week here at { drawlogic } but this is worthy.  Its the first papervision pageturn zero point nine is now famous.

source code

I have a feeling papervision3D is responsible for a surge in new blogs.  It is an exciting technology but our processors are probably not too happy about all the extra work. 

Hardware 3D rendering…

One thing that might be interesting in the heating up battle of Flash vs Silverlight is rendering.  Will Silverlight down the road provide hardware rendering support for 3d in Silverlight?  If so Microsoft will have a compelling offering.  Would Microsoft really want this with strong 3d capabilities built into a browser (goes against their console offerings, or maybe not in the end).

With 3d in the browser on two competing platforms that use hardware rendering we can make Raycasted donuts (yummy) oh and there could be a massive surge in the online 3d gaming market (especially the indie market).

It is up for grabs 

But the problem is that Silverlight will also need to support OpenGL for other platforms (that do not run DirectX).  If Adobe wants to win this maybe OpenGL 3d integration into flash will make it more cross platform.  I know the developers on the papervision3d lists are all looking forward to better than software rendering in flash.

Who’s Directing Director? 

But then this leads to another question, where does Director fit in all this, is it even part of the plan? Will Director and Flash merge to support this? Then what happens to the saturation of Flash in the market when it has more third party issues like Director? (and possibly less adoption director usually gets up to 50% to 60% saturation) 

What exactly happened to Director in the plans?

Director is still the de facto standard in 3d web games, more on this soon.  Director has been noticeably absent from all versions of Creative Suite (they are up to CS3 now without it).  Buzz about it was happening in 2004-2005 but last anyone heard is it is still planned for released. The one problem with the Director development environment and community is that the IDE is clunky, the libraries and script (Lingo) is not as advanced as AS3 (the addition of Javascript to the capabilities was great but much of the community was Lingo) and the community is a ghost town (loads of broken links and pay xtras, its stuck in 2003-4).  It was a great market before that, I think Adobe is letting it slip further and further away.  If they wait too long Microsoft might add hardware rendering to Silverlight and then game over in owning 3d gaming on the web. 

“Halleys Comet”

Here is a posting to macromedia.director.3d from Ritesh Banglani, Product Manager for Director and Shockwave. It was in response to a joke about him coming and going from the forum like Halley’s Comet…

Still here, guys. I cannot give an exact release date for the next version, but it will likely be towards the end of the year rather than the middle. The Shockwave Vista release (with DirectX 7) will be out sooner – in 6 weeks or so.

We will NOT upgrade the 3D feature set in the forthcoming Director release. Requirements like new platform support, performance and text engine enhancements are very urgent, and we don’t want to delay this release beyond 2007. However, we are committed to maintaining Shockwave as the leading 3D format on the web, and you WILL see 3D enhancements in a subsequent release. The move to DirectX 9 is a signal of our long term commitment to Shockwave 3D.

I know this is not the answer many of you are looking for. I appreciate your patience, and hope to keep the channels of communications open!

…

Currently this is the status of hardware supported 3d in WPF/E Silverlight. 

WPF fully supports hardware rendering but Silverlight (cross browser) does not.

What features are missing from Silverlight presentation markup that will be supported in WPF?

Some high-end, Windows-specific features of WPF, such as real 3D, hardware-based video acceleration, and full document support, will not be supported in Silverlight. This is done on purpose in order to serve the Silverlight cross-browser, cross-platform reach requirements that demand a light-weight plug-in. However, Silverlight will offer a uniform runtime that can render identical experiences across browsers on both Macintosh computers and on Windows-based computers.

We like to ride the racecars.

Here’s a quick test of a NASCAR in Papervision3D.  I am checking the limitations which seem to be around 20,000 polys without making the processor sound like its melting.

Papervision3D is the most fun I have had with Flash since my first Asteroids clone in Flash 4 in 2000.

NASCAR racecar papervision demo

Things on the list are to:

• Make a demo with the camera as a follow cam
• Make a demo with the camera in many places (that change to the car as its close)
• Other cars
• Optimization

%&*^( 3d in Flash! Never thought I would see it this well implemented, thanks Papervision3D (Carlos Ulloa Matesanz, Ralph Hauwert, John Grden).