Flash-CORE

Since last post i got a couple of emails and people asking me if and when will be the Agile3D engine public. The answer is simple: “as soon as possible.” As you can know making a 3D engine and it doesn’t really matter in what language is not a simple task, some languages make some of the parts easier, other languages make other parts easier but nevertheless its still a tedious task. Especially if its only the little me that works on it, i did around 95% work on Agile3D so far from scratch reusing very little of our previous Flash9 engine, the other 5% belongs to FiRE and Cifko and i hope this number will grow ;) Anyway it explains the latest delays in updates, but back onto the topic.

Agile3D works as you can see, but the problem is that so far there is a lot of redundant code thats just me trying various optimalizations, also there is NO way to create models runtime, it supports just our own ixf format which was used in all demos so far. Most of the API is transparent, its me debugging stuff again, methods that should be private aren’t, inheritance is a mess…

So what does that mean, it means i need to polish the code, create some usefull methods for creating basic 3D shapes, probably add ASE import, make some tutorials a little documentation here, little documentation there…

It took months of closed development for other Flash 3D engines out there, so please be patient i will do my best and hopefully make a public beta SWC binaries in a month or two. I am not paid to do this, i do it during nights when i am not working, which is rarely since i work even 16 to 20 hours a day sometimes if there is a rush project. So bear with me, i will also try to release the IXF format specification and Maya plugin binaries.

Thanks, and nope i didn’t forget about “Creating scene interactivity Part2″ its on its way this week. ;)

Just a fast note that i am back online and working on Agile3D, i got my hands on a new notebook and settled down in LA. So you can expect some updates soon, i am guessing this weekend but who knows. I am currently still working on the scene/object/texture interactivity which is without a doubt one of the must have features as far as i see it.

Btw if anyone is reading this at all, even though i doubt that, just drop me a line whats the most wanted feature in Flash 3D engine? Is there something that is missing in the current engines that would be nice to have implemented? Nothing is impossible lets push the boundaries together ;)

As it seems we will have some delays on any updates in near future. The reason is that tomorrow I am leaving for a business trip to Los Angeles and will be back week before Christmas. Its quite a long way from Slovakia, so when I get lost somewhere in Frankfurt the delay may be even longer than anticipated, hopefully not ;)

The reason for the trip is that I am going to check the main office in Pasadena. Nope its not my main office :) its an office of a firm I work for as a Flash lead developer. Yes we are kind of spread one office in LA and second one in Bratislava. Dont tell me, I know all about the hassle to work with 9 hours time difference between offices ;)

The other problem I need to mention is that I am not taking my notebook with me, I plan on buying one there since the price difference is huge. But again this may take a while till I buy one and get to work on Agile3D (or any other projects).

So wish me luck.
Thx

PS: Maybe some of the other Flash-CORE team members will take an initiative and make some progress and post about it. I wish… ;)

Today i am not going to talk about a new feature even if we do have some nice ones almost finished up. But i would rather put some light into this engine of ours Agile3D. We didn’t release any version for public use so one may say its pointless to talk about it, but i assure you its not, and public version will come sooner or later, after all we are demosceners and maybe making our engine public will make flash scene grow who knows ;)

But back to the topic, here are some facts about Agile3D:

– Agile3D is pure Flash10 engine, we will not go for the Flash9 compatibility due to many issues that are plain obvious from the difference of these versions and after all it isnt really necessary. If someone still prefers working on Flash9 content there are great 3D engines already to choose from (Papervision3D, Away3D, Sandy3D to mention a few) some of em will soon support Flash10 features as well. Our previous Flash9 3D engine is discontinued as well so don’t ask for it. (i think none would ask for it anyway :)

– Agile3D is really small, the actuall engine takes like 15kB in SWF!!! As you can see in some of our demos which have around 20-25kB where only the logo is 9kB

– there is not many of us working on it, actually as for now i do 95% work on it since i am the only AS developer in our group but i will push the other guys to participate more, after all we all have C background and math is same no matter the syntax. But what i wanted to say is that even if we are going forward in mile steps there may come a time when updates will become less frequent

– people asked me why we do this engine in the first place, there are couple of answers, we like to experiment, we like to do things our way, we like to do things from scratch, we do really like to reinvent our own wheel… ;) We don’t say that the other engines are inferior, we just want to work on our own, after all even in gameworld not all people use Carmack’s engine do they?

– Agile3D so far uses/imports our own format for 3D scenes, we invented this ascii format back in the scene days for our C 3D engine, with little changes it will be refactored and fully supported in Agile3D (so far only some of the structure is), we do have our own exporters for Maya starting with Maya 4 (yep it really is that old) to version 2008 and 3DStudio exporter is in WiP. The format is easily readable XML structure so can be tampered with even without 3D app. Of course engine supports scene creation during runtime, so you can create your own scene with custom geometry even without any external format but thats standard.

If there are any more questions i am all ears :) If not just keep an eye on this blog and lets see where this will go, i hope you’ll enjoy the ride with us.

Finally after almost a year the forum and blog is up again, unfortunately we lost our DBs becouse of somewhat strange policy of our previous provider, we lost the SVN too and that was the only major tragedy even thou we had all the latest versions and branches locally. But lets forget the past and look for the future. All our previous projects will be put up again on web and forum as well. If you participated in discussion feel free to do it again, if you had a question that wasn’t answered before just ask again, lets get rollin…

Once again sorry for the delay but we spent all the time developing ;)