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.

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:

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

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

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.

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.

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:

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!

Two months after unofficial port, Mathieu Badimon finally took his time to make official release today, along with typography tools.

This is certainly one of most compact engines (and so is very easy to start working with), with some unique features, such as 3D vector drawing and text support. Now, rewritten in AS3, it is probably fast enough to handle very complex scenes, but also very limited dynamically because of fixed rendering order.

This release comes with promise of v2.1 in coming weeks, so let’s see what comes next.

Get Five3D 2.0 here.

Dennis Ippel, one of the Sandy3D developers, just released his Blender export script. for Sandy3D, but also Away3D and Papervision 1.7.

Check it here and let your comments there!

This Blender (free 3D modelisation tool) export script is a possibility to generate native 3D objects (no parsing required), as the Seraf AS3 geom exporter is doing with 3DS Max .

Good job Dennis!