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.

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.

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…)

The unity3d platform is about to realize about 900% or 9x more possible market for selling their wares and I believe will blow up with unity 2.5.  Unity3d 2.5 will bring a windows IDE and development environment to unity3d developers. Many game companies are heavily invested in Windows and having this option is breaking down a huge wall to get this development platform and engine into many new hands and companies.

The best part about unity 3d development is the hardware acceleration, the fantastic pipeline, the ability to publish desktop, web, mobile (iphone) and console (wii) is pretty amazing.  All using the powerful mono open source .net framework as a base.

Full update list:

Windows Editor Support

Unity 2.5 adds full support for Windows Vista and XP, with 100% feature parity and interoperability with Mac OS X. The Unity Editor has been rebuilt to look, feel, and function identically on both operating systems, each running the same underlying engine. The best part? Unity on either platform can build games for either platform — cross-platform in the truest sense.

A Whole New Look

Find the tools you need quickly and easily. The Play buttons are front and center, clearly visible and inviting you to play, test, and improve your work. And when you do, they light up, dimming the rest of the application, drawing your attention to the most important things in the play experience you’re creating.
Precise Navigation and Placement Tools

Improved Usability

Snap any object to customizable increments of position, scale, and rotation values. Drag objects around, clamped to any surface collision. Manipulate objects in local or world space. Use the new flythrough controls to get around easily. And did we mention the completely redesigned rotation tool?

3ds Max Importing

Drag and drop your .max files right into the Editor, including support for all skeletal based animation, multiple UVs, and vertex colors. Autodesk 3ds Max now joins the existing support for Maya, Blender, and all other 3D applications that integrate with the latest FBX plugin on the Windows platform.

Completely Customizable Editor

UnityGUI, Unity’s own GUI creation system, now powers the entire Editor and allows you to integrate your own unique level design tools, AI control tools, debugging tools, difficulty tuning tools, or anything else you need. Over 130 new API entry points enable you to create specialized, customized editor tools and build them into the existing Editor interface.

Tabbed Interface

We took cues from the best designed applications, and the rewritten editor has received dozens of improvements. The most visible change is the tabbed interface, where every part of the interface can be moved, undocked to a secondary monitor, and even stacked to achieve logical grouping.

Information at Your Fingertips

We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that you always have the info you need, when you need it. Model files have previews right inside the inspector. Audio Clips show their waveform with click-to-play behaviour. Meshes show the detailed rendering stats – and that’s just scratching the surface.

This is pretty impressive.  This is Moonlight for mono (a silverlight clone in mono.net for multiplatform) running inside of Ogre3D (a 3d renderer) as a material.

Argiris Kirtzidi (one of the developers behind Managed OGRE) modified Moonlight to run inside the Ogre3D engine. You can render Moonlight applications or XAML files inside Ogre3D.

Some details in no particular order:

-Moonlight uses cairo for the graphics. I developed a new backend for cairo that fully utilizes the GPU (through Ogre’s RenderSystem) for rendering. This is completely independent from Moonbeam and can be used standalone.

-Moonlight’s core is a native C++ engine and is not dependent in Mono. It is flexible enough to be scripted by anything, javascript, managed code, native code, etc. I’ve got it working on both Mono and the .NET framework and I plan on embedding and trying out Lua for more lightweight stuff.

-If you opt for using managed code, it should be possible, in theory, to utilize the silverlight controls, develop a silverlight widget using visual studio and have it run through moonbeam with full debugging support.

-Getting it to work on Windows was no small task as the moonlight team is completely focused on linux, and there doesn’t seem to be much consideration about cross-platform-ness. I think this is reasonable, though, since moonlight is a young project and their specific goal is to implement silverlight for *nix systems. The downside is that it reduces its flexibility, e.g. in order to inject keyboard/mouse events I will have to create and pass to it GDK events or make heavy patches to it.
Hopefully, there will be more push in the future to get the *nix dependencies abstracted away from the core moonlight engine.

• The Moonlight Calculator Example.
• Miguel’s post about this
• Original post about the technique from the author

Augmented reality is a very cool technology.  It is the star wars holograms that we always want, it is playing a game that maps out the physical world mixed with virtual assets, it is straight up cool.

The FLARToolKit is doing some of this cool in Flash.  This little toolkit is pretty sweet mapping points and sets of points to patterns, colors or other visual queues that technology can latch onto.  Combine this with a webcam and you have some pretty cool AR.

(more…)

as3isolib is a great isometric library for actionscript 3 by Justin Opitz.  This is a lower level isometric library that could be used in building your own isometric gaming engine or learning more about the popular isometric view in games or other flash content.

From building basic blocks…

To constructing sprites and objects with individual iso objects with their own bounding boxes.

This sample shows a two piece tree, a common issue with sprites in isometric is where to slice them up.  This sample shows a tree with the leaves able to be in front of a character so that you could walk under the tree and be in front of the trunk but covered by the trees.  Essentially height is respected.

Sample code for the tree tutorial:

package
{
import as3isolib.display.IsoSprite;
import as3isolib.display.primitive.IsoBox;
import as3isolib.display.scene.IsoGrid;
import as3isolib.display.scene.IsoScene;
 
import flash.display.Loader;
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.net.URLRequest;
 
public class IsoApplication extends Sprite
{
 private var scene:IsoScene;
 private var assets:Object;
 
 private var loader:Loader
 
 private function loadAssets ():void
 {
  loader = new Loader();
  loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.INIT, loader_initHandler);
  loader.load(new URLRequest("assets/swf/assets.swf"));
 }
 
 private function loader_initHandler (evt:Event):void
 {
  buildScene();
 }
 
 private function buildScene ():void
 {
  scene = new IsoScene();
  scene.hostContainer = this;
  scene.container.x = 200;
  scene.container.y = 200;
 
  var treeTrunkClass:Class = loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition("TreeTrunk") as Class;
  var treeLeavesClass:Class = loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition("TreeLeaves") as Class;
 
  var grid:IsoGrid = new IsoGrid();
  grid.showOrigin = false;
  scene.addChild(grid);
 
  var s0:IsoSprite = new IsoSprite();
  s0.setSize(25, 25, 65);
  s0.moveTo(50, 50, 0);
  s0.sprites = [treeTrunkClass];
  scene.addChild(s0);
 
  var s1:IsoSprite = new IsoSprite();
  s1.setSize(125, 125, 100);
  s1.moveTo(0, 0, 75);
  s1.sprites = [treeLeavesClass];
  scene.addChild(s1);
 
  scene.render();
 }
 
 public function IsoApplication ()
 {
  loadAssets();
 }
}
}

current features

• simple scene creation
• 3 primitive types
• base class for displaying user-created content
• plenty of styling option on vector based primitives
• integrates well with a variety of tween engines
• standard 3D isometric positional sorting

So get busy building the flash version of roller coaster tycoon…

• Features of the library
• Online docs
• Download as3isolib at Google Cod
• as3isolib_tutorial_001 – Intro single block
• as3isolib_tutorial_002 – Multiple blocks
• as3isolib_tutorial_003 – Customizing sides
• as3isolib_tutorial_004 – Sprites and construction
• Blog post about the release

If you are exporting from blender to actionscript directly so you can get your models into flash as script you can use the Blender to .as3 exporter which so kindly supports all flash 3d engines currently Away3D, Papervision3D and Sandy3D.  Dennis Ippel made the Blender exporter a while back but the update supports papervision 2.0.

• Post on the exporter and how to use
• Sandy 3.0 Example
• Away3D Example
• Papervision3D 1.7 Example
• Papervision3D 2.0 Example
• ActionScript 3.0 exporter at the Blender wiki

The benefits of COLLADA are nice but there are so many differences that you can run into trouble.  With the exporter it is a direct faces and vector export without all the bloat of DAE/COLLADA xml.  This works if you are only developing for flash and dont’ need to use the models in other platforms/systems/engines that aren’t in flash.

A few weeks ago the makers of Unity3d released some really valuable information about casual gaming and general hardware of users that play online games.  It was an interesting report and very beneficial to developers on the Unity platform and others.  We wish other plugin makers would do the same in such a thorough method.

Unity 3d creators listened to the market and have now posted updated numbers and information as well as a page that quarterly stats will be updated. Check the new, quarterly, hardware of the casual gamer stats.

I would have seen this earlier but I have been deep in a Unity 3d project myself .  I am a big fan of all web based gaming platforms and Unity is almost a dream come true for 3d web gaming.  For the company to be this open that is a very good sign.

What can you do with Unity3D?  Here is a list of games made with Unity3D on the web.  The one great thing about this platform is that is was made for gaming specifically from the start.  Simulations and game development with Unity3D is very fun and productive. I still love Flash, Director etc but Unity3D development is now very much in my rotation.

Games made with Unity3D:

Hancock Movie Games

• http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/hancock/site/games/gameshell.html

Tennis Stars Cup

• http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/tennisstarscup.jsp

Duckateers

• http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/dukateers.jsp

Temploe (ninjas attack you)

• http://www.conspiracaopequim.com.br/game/

RC Laser Warrior

• http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/rclaserwarrior.jsp

Urban Race Star

• http://web.mac.com/digitaldouble/digital_double/URS_Preview.html

FlashBang studios

• http://raptorsafari.com/
  http://splume.flashbangstudios.com/
  http://jetpackbrontosaurus.com/

TraceON

• http://www.ramtiga.com/TRaceONVersions/TRaceON_Current/tabid/122/language/en-US/Default.aspx

EPIC Tower Defense

• http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/epictowerdefense.jsp

InvinciCar

• http://www.protonfoundry.com/InvinciCar/

Besmashed (multi)

• http://besmashed.gamepulp.com/demo/index.htm

Global Conflicts

• http://www.globalconflicts.eu/

Phoenix Final

• http://www.nether.org.uk/bad_mac_code.html#phoenix_final

Doom Siege

• http://runevision.com/blog/2008/07/3-demos-and-new-blending-feature.html

Mario Galaxy like run (third one down)

• http://runevision.com/blog/2008/07/3-demos-and-new-blending-feature.html

Zombie Drive

• http://crank-dev.fuelindustries.com/zombies/TestDrive.html

Pocket Piglets

• http://www.pocketpiglets.com/private/scene.html

ChickenDemo

• http://web.mac.com/galentucker/Site/ChickenDemo.html

Castle Conquest

• http://home.in.tum.de/~wuehrer/

The Zupko show continues with reflections in Papervision 3D [demo].

Be sure to check out the shadow demo that this is based on:

After posting my shadow experiment, Patrick Matte posed a question wondering if I would be able to do real-time reflections in a similar manner. The next day I had it done, along with some nice iterations along the way: orthographic and perspective projection (I can release those later if anyone really wants them). I’ve been sitting on it every since and finally decided I would take the time to write a little description into how its done and give the code to those who are interested (and I fixed up some code for backface culling in the reflection this morning).

• View the reflections demo
• View the reflections post
• View the shadow demo
• View the shadow post