The Underscore Archives

On 4 Sep 2007, at 09:59, Tom Gidden wrote:

>
> As many of you know, I think Flash is Pants, but I've been asked to
> put together a brief for a game.  From a requirements perspective,
> it's effectively a texture-mapped 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube that can be
> taken apart.
>
> Anyway, what's the current state of affairs with doing simple 3D work
> in Flash?  Is is possible/practical/easy, or does it need to be faked.
>
> Right now, I'm mocking stuff up in Quartz Composer, but I need to
> know how much is doable in Flash.
>
> Any thoughts gratefully received!

Papervision seems to be the way to go: http://www.papervision3d.org/
Now for a "Flash is pants" discussion.
I've not used it myself, but it looks impressive, and I'll certainly  
evaluate it when I start on the next version of the CleVR Viewer.
I used to think Flash was pants, but the work I've done over the past  
year has really made me re-evaluate it. There have been some  
significant developments over the last 18 months or so that have made  
the platform a lot more serious a contender. Player 9 brought a  
massive increase in performance, while Actionscript 3 is designed to  
be the reference ECMAScript implementation, and is a million years  
ahead of the old versions. Adobe's donation of the AS3 VM to the  
Mozilla project certainly helps in that ambition. I never thought I'd  
say it, but it really is a nice, elegant language.
Since the Flex SDK was open sourced in June, there's no need to shell  
out for the pricey Builder if you want to do serious stuff. (Also, I  
really don't like Eclipse, so I'm glad I can now do all of the  
development from within TextMate).
Finally, AIR is very cool.
Not to blow my own trumpet, but we've been able to do some pretty  
cool stuff in Flash/Flex that would never have been possible before  
these changes. This includes some quite intensive image processing  
(photo stitching).

I think most people here would agree on the crimes that made so many  
people (me included) hate Flash. Here are some thoughts of an Adobe  
employee on one of those: http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=61

OK, got that off my chest.

Matt


--
Matt Kane, Lead Developer, Clementine
http://www.clevr.com/
http://www.clementine.info/

Clementine is a trading name of Sphex LLP