Flash: New 3d engine - Director3d API

[psychlonex]

Hello all!

I just posted a very early version of a 3d engine that I'm working on. The engine is targeted mainly toward flash users, or anyone who has flash and doesn't know or want to learn Director's Lingo, or maybe doesn't know c++/objC/etc well enough to use one of the many existing 3d engines.

The way it works is very similar to the Dim3 engine. You write scripts in flash actionscript (similar to javascript) and export the flash files to swf. The engine then loads these swf's and uses the code inside them to affect a shockwave 3D scene.

The engine is cross-platform, err.. sort of. There are executables for Mac OSX, Mac Classic, and the oh-so-popular MS Windows.

Instead of repeating a bunch of stuff, here's a link to more info and downloadables:

http://psychlonex.dyndns.org/FDir_3d/

Again, it's in the very early stage of development so there are a lot of things missing, broken, etc. But if there is anything you find please let me know via the email address at the bottom of the linked page.

Thanks!
psx

[AJ Infinity]

Cool (although you already showed it too me)

One thing I want to see you do one day is build a 3D engine completely in Flash (like the 3D world fla on FlashKit's forums)

[psychlonex]

Hehe.. I've tried. It's completely doable, but just not that practical. Flash just chokes graphically way too quickly. This is actually another reason why I decided to do this engine... I really like coding in flash, but was getting sick of having the rendering slow me down.

For 3d "natively" in flash, I'd say my favorite example is here:

http://www.mx3d.com/

That's probably about as good as 3d in flash gets, outside of being pre-rendered (no fun!).

:: Back to the engine ::
I've been adding some new stuff to the engine today and discovered a nasty bug on some windows machines. The problem is that they default to using the DirectX renderer. The engine seems to run really slow in DX, while in OpenGL on the same machine runs awesome. Not quite sure how I'm gonna fix that yet. Also added the ability to spit out a text-file should there be any errors. Actually, even if there aren't errors, it will spit the file, which will contain some info about the 3d world and your graphics hardware. I plan to upload new versions some time this evening. I'll post when they're up.

psx

[psychlonex]

I just posted a new version (b11) if anyone is interested. Added particle systems, fog, interface images and a few other things.

If it crashes, errors, or if it's just plain slow, send me the text file that it produces (error_out.txt)

The latest versions can be downloaded here:


http://psychlonex.dyndns.org/FDir_3d/

psx