The Alternativa Platform has officially launched. It is a 3d engine for Flash/AS3. It has been announced on their blog today and this is an exciting development for 3d in flash, especially if you are a game developer or game company.

They have offered it free for non-commercial use in the form of SWC files. It is well oganized and lots more good stuff to come it seems in the GUI and some information on setting up the gaming platform on the server as well. It looks to be a complete package.

This is not an open source release but the Alternativa Platform is an extremely well done and amazing looking engine. It has configurations for 3d and isometric 3d.

Here is a shot from the engine.

• Announcement on the Alternativa Platform Blog
• API Reference
• Direct link, register and download
• Demos and more info
• Previous post on Alternativa with shots for isometric and FPS demos

Sputnik has been launched!

Here are all the classes in the package (SWC):

All Classes

Wow. This new away3d demo of a temple and FPS movement in Flash9 AS3 rivals that of the paradox engine in pv3d.

Both are extremely smooth movement and great looking textures, both of these efforts are amazing for Flash is at this level. I would say Paul Spitzer’s paradox papervision3d based engine is still a little more responsive and the textures have such good baked lighting that is is very smooth (he posted recently on some internals and usages of media in the engine). But from these two engines and iterations you can see that the FPS engine in Flash is not too far off.

Although there used to be crashes with away3d it has really improved and this is very smooth. My processor was actually quite chillin’ with all the software rendering carpet bombing from software rendered 3d in flash. But it really is starting to get much better with optimizations to flash this year and papervision, away3d and sandy getting more mature and further iterated to greatness.

The away3d sample if you walk through the rooms also has an interactive button, opening doors, room transitions (and if these are dynamic) a decent room engine with pretty sweet load times since the whole thing is under 300k.