Archive for the 'General' Category

Andagel an amazing 3D sci-fi game developed with Sandy3D

Friday, November 7th, 2008 by kiroukou :: General :: 4 Comments

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 !

gate

Tough times for Sandy?

Monday, September 29th, 2008 by makc :: General :: 9 Comments

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.

What’s up

Friday, July 25th, 2008 by makc :: General, Project, en, tutorials :: 3 Comments

Hey, it’s time to spam the blog again! People ask when 3.0.3 will be out, so I thought I’d write a bit on subject as well as what’s going on in general.

So, when 3.0.3 will be out? Well, you might know that Thomas is currently on vacation and will not work on release for next two weeks, at least. Then, you also might know about some breaking changes he introduced for better performance, but currently performance seems to be even worse, and so this situation needs some investigation. People who want latest version compatible with 3.0.2 can use revision 663, but be aware that some bugs were fixed after that (not to mention pending bugs).

Still, things aren’t bad for 3.0.3, in my opinion. I make noise and contribute some new stuff (you might have noticed StarField or MD2, I guess). Other people in team keep quiet, but SVN commits notifications give them away :) If you suddenly notice some clever code or documentation improvements, you know they did it.

So, when 3.0.3 will be out, again? I think you can expect it in August as final version for v9 (unless someone suddenly finds lots of bugs a day after release).

To conclude this post, I’d like to take my chance and congratulate folks at Ginga who released online jets comparison application for Embraer company last week. A part of this great application - flight range flash widget - was designed using two open source libraries, APE and - you guessed it - Sandy.

Using globes for spatial data visualization is something we now see more and more; to address this trend, I just added new tutorial for Sandy users who would like to do something similar themselves. For other people, I plan to release some basic globe component for free, so keep an eye on this secret link.

He’s back!

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 by makc :: General :: No Comments

This time with lots of new features for you to play with, Mathieu Badimon released new version of Five3D package. Brand new Five3D 2.1 now have:

  • Back Face Culling
  • Flat Shading
  • Z-Sorting
  • Space Drawing Functions (moveToSpace, lineToSpace, curveToSpace)
  • Bitmap3D Class
  • Video3D Class
  • Sprite2D Class
  • Letter Spacing for DynamicText3D
  • Text Width for DynamicText3D

This is serious, I was finally able to make my cube test work:

Five3D 2.1 cube swarm

What can I say, thanks a lot! I can only wish myself could do some coding too :)

Commercial grade 3D

Friday, April 18th, 2008 by makc :: General, Must see, demos, en :: 4 Comments

Hello again, flash 3D fans. Today you will be looking at REAL commercial grade flash 3D solutions in action:

Latest alternativa v5 demo Electric Oyster engine

The one on the left is recentry released Alternativa3D milestone tech demo. The one on the right is not so recently released Electric Oyster engine demo, but neverless I enjoy it too much to not include it in this post ;)

That’s pretty much all I have to say, you don’t really need lengthy ramblings about them. Just click, sit back and enjoy the show.

FriedSpin™

Thursday, April 17th, 2008 by makc :: General, Must see, en :: 6 Comments

Dont spam pv3d list... ever
Sincever I made this picture in Dec 2007, I knew I am going to use it again :) Guys at revolver3d.com apparently have released their “commercial grade” FreeSpin flash 3D engine yesterday and, to celebrate the release, they posted an announcement on Papervision mailing list. Needless to say that their announcement received heavy backfire immediately.

I could not find any pricing info on FreeSpin site, but their examples and documentation sections reveal nothing that could not already be done with existing free engines. It will suffice to say that their claimed “correct representation of the vast majority (if not all) of 3D models and scenes… without disappearing polygons and/or flawed sorting” fails to work even in their simplest example.

Come to think about it, all of this hype just two weeks after another, much more impressive, commercial engine goes open source. To conclude, these guys have a long way to go before they start making serious money with it.

Far, far away…

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 by makc :: General, Must see, Resources, en :: 1 Comment

Seems like yesterday was busy day for flash 3D world. Away3D has just released v2, that includes all the stuff they were carefully hiding from us since 2007 fall. Release comes with kick-ass alien planet demo:

 Click to enjoy

Well, Away3D has really gone far away from PV3D now. As Rob wrote before, they “no longer measure success with a Papervision yardstick”.

Congrats to Away team!