This is an interesting direction. There are most likely many things that do not work about this approach for existing content. But it is also a neat way to create new content that might be simple enough to play on desktop and a mobile version.
Haxe Sandy is a version of Sandy that can export to an experimental Javascript 3D engine taking advantage of the <canvas> element. There are some great demos that run smoothly in canvas capable browsers and very smooth in Chrome.
Sandy was actually the first open source 3d engine in flash, maybe this will be a trend building in haXe for export to flash and javascript? It certainly looks like a great start and would make a very nice platform for 3d on the web allowing Sandy or other flash libraries to run in Flash and Javascript by writing in an abstraction platform like haXe. Other libraries like Motor2, Physaxe, haxe3D, PureMVC and more have haXe versions. Still very experimental but a possible need when Flash and canvas are both in the market in the future. Right now it is still all Flash.
Making games that integrate content from the web is especially required these days. It is a difficult thing to do within the 3d render because of all the plugins, styling etc that needs to be rendered on a 3d surface. Well Torque3D has a killer feature in that it supports entirely full features browser render on a 3d surface. So now you can integrate html content, flash video etc in your game easily.
You can play content in flash player content easily and have stripped down html but it is limited, you can play videos and have content in Unity3d but it is limited, even larger engines like Unreal 3 have difficulty handling flash and html content. If this is a good implementation Torque3D has a killer feature on their hands! Flash is commonly used as user interface elements and content within games but it can be challenging. This is pretty exciting if it works as advertised. Think of how cool all the little consoles, mini-games and controls in 3d games could be in flash easily.
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.
The demo shows great examples of the player with just the window canvas (chromeless) from both javascript and inside of flash.
The project is hosted on Google Code [youtubechromelesswrapper-as3]
Looks like they maybe had a contribution for this, so do it where you can.
This is something we’ve been wanting to provide for a while, and the YouTube API team greatly appreciates the work of developer Matthew Richmond of The Chopping Block for making it happen. Thanks Matthew!
Loads but does not automatically play video based on specified id.
player.clearVideo():void
Clears currently cued/loaded video.
player.setSize(w:Number, h:Number):void
Sets the size of YouTubePlayer instance.
player.play():void
Plays the currently cued/loaded video.
player.pause():void
Pauses the currently cued/loaded video.
player.stop():void
Stops the currently cued/loaded video.
player.seekTo(seconds:Number):void
Seeks to specified time within the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getPlayerState():String
Returns the current state of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getBytesLoaded():Number
Returns the value of current bytes loaded of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getBytesTotal():Number
Returns the value of total bytes loaded of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getCurrentTime():Number
Returns the current position in time of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getDuration():Number
Returns the current duration of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getStartBytes():Number
Returns the start bytes of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.setVolume(newVolume:Number):void
Sets the volume of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getVolume():Number
Returns the current volume of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.mute():void
Stores the current volume and changes the volume of the currently cued/loaded video to 0.
player.unmute():void
Returns the volume of the currently cued/loaded video to the last stored value when muted.
player.getEmbedCode():String
Returns the current YouTube embed code of the currently cued/loaded video.
player.getVideoUrl():String
Returns the current YouTube video url of the currently cued/loaded video.
Events
YouTubeLoaderEvent.LOADED
Fired once the Chromeless Player has successfully completed loading and is ready to accept operations calls.
YouTubeLoaderEvent.STATE_CHANGE
Fired whenever the player’s state changes. The YouTubeLoader class translates the JavaScript API numbers to their related string values, the YouTubeLoaderEvent class stores the current event in a variable called state. Possible values are unstarted, ended, playing, paused, buffering, video cued. When the SWF is first loaded, it will broadcast an unstarted event. When the video is cued and ready to play, it will broadcast a video cued event.
YouTubeLoaderEvent.IO_ERROR
Fired when an error in the player occurs. There are two error codes possible: 100 is broadcasted when the video requested is not found. This occurs when a video has been removed (for any reason), or it has been marked as private. 101 is broadcasted when the video requested does not allow playback in the embedded players.
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
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.
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.
OpenGL 4.0 released, in a couple years we will have opengl 4 enabled cards w tessellation... http://bit.ly/cggF3f - puts it on par with DX11 8 hrs ago
Finally got an openssl network lib running pc, mac, iphone + nix..biggest problem was iphone os compared to iphone sim (arm vs i386 targets) 22 hrs ago
Triangle was pretty decent for a netflix movie, totally ripped the premise from Timecrimes (which was really good) but still interesting. 2 days ago
Gordon, a flash runtime written in javascript, is an interesting project that recreates the Flash Player into svg using javascript from a flash source swf file.
