Dennis Ippel of rozengain.com wrote a very informative article entitled “Blender to Flash workflow”, in the March 2009 issue of Flash & Flex Developers Magazine.  It is now downloadable for free from http://ffdmag.com/prt/view/pdf-articles.html. The main focus of the article is how to create a 3D object in Blender and export it as an AS3 class, that you can directly add to your Sandy 3D project. But even if you don’t intend to use Blender for object creation, the article contains lots of goodies for the 3D Flash programmer. You can download the whole magazine, containing lots of knowledge for Flashers and Flexers alike.

Go get it !

The Sandy haXe team is proud to present the haXe port of the Sandy 3D Engine.

The version is 3.1.1 and sports the same functionality as the AS3 version.

Now you can program and compile your 3D worlds in haXe, which is fast and easy. Your code compiles to a SWF, that you play in the Flash player.  Later on you may present your applications on other platforms as well.

Download haXe from their site and  Sandy from the Sandy download page. It comes with full API documentation and lots of examples. Make sure to select the haXe version.

To read a little bit more on how and why you should use the haXe version, go to our short page on the haXe port

If you haven’t worked with the haXe language before, you’ll certainly visit the haXe friendly home site to learn about the language and the goals of haXe.

Welcome to the new 3D world!

The Sandy haXe team

We are happy to announce a new version of our engine, tagged as a 3.1.1 since this release comes with some improvemens and bugfixes withotu any API change. [Edit] A 3.1.2 release in sync with the 3.1.2 haXe version is now available under download.

We are really recommanding to make the upgrade, since there’s a better memory management with the addition of a smart reference counting system. Basically this system allows material ressources to be disposed automatically as soon as no polygon reference it. You don’t have to care about that manually, Sandy does it for you. If you need to keep the material alive for some reasons, just set the property of the material autoDispose to false.

We also added more examples to help users to get started with the library. In this examples you can learn the best practises and rapidly give a try to the feature you need while preparing a project.

Here is the change log: (Access complete changes list)

A very interessting project is on the road, it is a port of jiglib from C++ to AS3.

What is jiglib, basically a 3D rigid bodies engine, so different from what Wow offered to us until now.

Here is a fast port of their official demo to Sandy 3.1, use keyboard directionnals keys to move, and space button to apply vertical force.

Andagel is the last game proposed by protopop studio.

After the successful Alien SLayer 3D FPS game, Sandy3D is proud to be the engine chosen for this incredible flash 3D game.

After some long months of development, Robert Kabwe offer us this incredible flash game, approaching quality of our old good playstation games.

Good use of 3D in flash games is pretty rare, and most of people still consider it as a waste of time, but I’m guessing Andagel will change their mind

Here is the brief story of Andagel:

Centuries a go this planet was the target of a terraforming alien species. Their terraforming project was abandoned but not before leaving an outpost on the planet’s surface to collect and harness energy.

This outpost grew into the thriving Megatropolis of Junx City, and it is on the outskirts of this city that the story of Andagel takes place.

It is very rare to play some good and well finished flash games, especially when there’s a use of 3D in it. But hopefully there’s some, and Andagel is one of them, definitely! A good story board, great textures, interessting gameplay and good sound design, that is what I call a real game

Hope you’ll like it as much as we do !

Hello there again. Last time I promised you 3.0.3 release in August, but that did not happen. Unfortunately, Thomas was not able to work on the project, hence the delay. Meanwhile, the world was not standing still there; papervision now finally has clipping, and away3d now has triangle caching, for example.

So, what are we going to do about that? Well, the plan is still to get that 3.0.3 done, step by step, as soon as possible, and see where do we go from there (most of you already know that there are two ongoing efforts that take Sandy in different directions, haXe and AS2 ports).

Back to the purpose of this post, our devoted users, I would like to hear your thoughts on subject. If you use Sandy, let us know what future would you want for it.

Thanks.