It was clear though, that there was a lot to be done, the API was refined, parsers were built. Since then, the market for flash 3D engines has exploded, both in the open source world, and in the commercial world. Sandy has undergone 3 major release cycles, several branches for different compilers and programming languages. To honour Sandy’s great history, Makc has created a video:

Without further ado, the team presents release 3.1.2, which represents a final minor point release to round off the Sandy 3.x development timeline. The main features of this release are:

- experimental BSP object sorting (Makc)
- plenty of bug fixes (mainly on caching system, some better garbage collection, and clipping)

Special thanks goes to Thomas Pfeiffer for creating Sandy and making this project feasible. Without his support, Sandy and it’s many variations would not be possible.

AS3 source and API documentation download: sandy3-1-2_src (SVN revision 1141).

There is also a haXe version, that features an MD3 parser by Russell Weir. This is used with haXe compiler to create Sandy applications for Flash and potentially other targets.

haXe download: sandy-hx-haxelib-3.1.2.zip.

According to Andy:

- If you have looked at the package before, you would  not recognize it now.

There must have been 30 classes in the old version and countless vectors to make it all run. This version, I think has 5 or so, and the scene is left to the developer. I just bring the remote transform groups and remote messaging/passing of object maps.

The end result from the old package was was similar, providing a shared transform group for each client, however it left little flexability, and was a large complicated body. In this version, I have rewritten it from scratch, and most importantly, cut out the need to use it’s world and scene. Before, the scene was created by the package, and you lost most control over the rendering.

Now, using the package, you provide everything. Your world, your root, your render routines. All the package brings is the other client, and a host of communication methods. Of course, the ‘SharedTransformGroup’ is the most important aspect of the new package.

Picture this: You have a scene and a charater already , and you want to make a multi-user environment. You construct a ‘RedSandy’ object which will deal with the network. You set a handler as it’s client.

RedSandy creates a ‘SharedTransformGroup’  for you and notifies the client when it is ready. Let your client alter the position and orientation of this extended TransformGroup, and it will propagate to the other clients.

When a new user loads your swf, the RedSandy class calls your client to notify it that there is a new SharedTransformGroup available in the same Red5 ‘room’. You then load another character primative and place it in the new  SharedTransformGroup  .

Of course, you need to add these special transformgroups to your world. And based on the server granularity, you will start to receive a stream of data which is processed in the background.

Clients are scoped out in rooms.  rtmp://server/sandy/roomName.  Only clients in that room share data streams.  The top level is also a ‘room’  rtmp://server/sandy

There is a project that is going to go to public beta testing very soon, at whirled.com.

Seems that our host made a small mistake and erased all the domain files.

Hopefully they gave us few minutes ago a backup (thanks for the reactivity) , and now we are working to put back the wiki IS back online. The forum and the blog are already doing their job again as well

The Sandy3D team

We have seen physics in Sandy 3D before, using the WOW physics engine. We also saw some examples of using the jiglibflash engine by muzer. You may not know, that we also have adapter classes ( jiglibflash plugins) for knitting together the brilliant visuals of a Sandy 3D world together with the physics aware  objects of jiglib.

This simplifies things a lot, as it helps us create these twin objects – a Shape3D and a RigidBody and add them to the Sandy scene as well as the jiglib physics engine.  The engine is an amazing piece of code, capable of creating belivable as well as unbelievable motion. The library is under development, as one might expect, and has so far not much of a documentation.

It has gravity, body mass, collision handling and ways to apply spring constraints between bodies.  For a game developer this is gefundenes fressen.

I’ve started to write a tutorial on how to use the jiglibflash physics engine withe Sandy.  Go there and get some introductory advice, and start experimenting.
/Petit

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)

After some good testing since the Release candidate, the API is now very stable and quite faster!

Most of the rendering process has been redesigned to gain few ms here and there, and to give more and more flexibility and reliability.

The version number step means there are some backward compatibility issues, but check the article on how to port your code from 3.0.2 to 3.1, and you’ll see how simple it would be for you to get that brand new power.

Now go and download it !

About the major features:

• parsers improvement, and automatic texture loading added to all parsers
• extrusion package with several utility tools
• Really smart cache system to save a lot of cycles, without adding a single line to your existing code.
• Startfield class, to create pixels based 3D effects, check our tutorials list
• MD2 animated models format support.
• addition of visitor pattern to smoothly integrate and customize Sandy into your complex apps
• Mode7 renderer to render infinite planes/floors with high quality and good perspective correction for very few rendering cycles.
• Better management of interactivity and handling of the requested MOUSE_OUT event.
• and lot more…

This is the result of a long and quiet work with several people, so thanks to all people involved into this release (Makc, flexrails, Max, Petit, etc.. and all mailing list people )

Sandy3D is also haXe powered !

I would also thank the haXe team (Niel Drummond, Pedro Moraes, Russell Weir, Justin Lawerance Mills) who are working really hard to get the haXe version Sandy 3.1 ready. If you want to give it a look,check the haxe branch in sandy svn.

For those who are looking for a stable haXe version, you can get the official stable 3.0.2.

If you don’t know haXe yet, it is a great language with amazing set of features, and the magic is that your code can target muliple platforms.

That mean Sandy is ready to target Javascript, and in the future Neko, and even more?.

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.

Download it with Flash CS3 examples

This version is currently in Release Candidate status, meaning it has been tested quite a lot, but need even mor testing to allow us supply the most complete document about your apps upgrade.

As always we focused on simplicity, and really small impacts with backward compatibility during upgrading. We need some testers to help us to complete the backward compatibility problems list (which is really short until now) and also make some feedbacks about performance and reliability.

We include a good list of new features which I’m pretty sure you will love!

- parsers improvement, and automatic texture loading added to all parsers

- extrusion package with several utility tools

- Really smart cache system to save a lot of cycles, without changing anything in your application. More on that soon

- Startfield class, to create pixels based 3D effects, check our tutorials list

- MD2 animated models format support.

- addition of visitor pattern to smoothly integrate and customize Sandy into your complex apps

- and lot more features I do not even remember…

This is the result of a long and quiet work with several people, so thanks to all people involved into this release (Makc, flexrails, Max, Petit, etc.. and all mailing list people )

Please make your feedbacks on our forum

This library will allow Sandy3D user to apply some modifiers to 3D objects geometry.

What are Modifiers?

let’s quote Bartek

Modifiers are basically functions that can be applied to a 3d object to transform it in a certain way. They can be used separately, but when combined they become a very powerful tool. In this, they are much like filters in Photoshop.

Right now that library, which should be fully documented in the coming weeks, offers:

• a framework for creating static and animated modifier stacks

• 3 basic modifiers: Noise, Bend and Perlin

Check this project at google code and play with it until some other cool Sandy3D news be available

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.