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.

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?.

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

Basically it adds an help book, syntax highlighting, and code hints to the Flash IDE for any existing library ( successfully tested libraries: Sandy, Away3D, Papervision, and Box2D)

This is an excellent tool that Dan release for Sandy for months now, and which helped quite a lot of developers to get the Sandy documentation directly in Flash, as the normal flash help (shortcut to go in correct documentation part is working too).

See this announcement of Sandy Forum to have full information and give feedbacks.

Go now, and use FlashHelpBook script to improve your workflow in Flash IDE developments !

Thanks Dan

Let’s Dmitri present himself his baby:

The foundation is a multi key-framed geometrical and camera ( point of view) animation. Cast3D supports geometry and texture morphing, skin animation, 3D sound, animated movie and video. A number of animation interpolation splines is implemented to provide smooth and natural motion, like Bezier, TCB, Hemite(cubic), Cosine and Linear.

Right now, Cast3D is still really young, and need some experimented 3D animator to share some 3DS animations (Collada will be supported soon) in order to improve the library.

So please, if you feel interessted and confortable in that field, go to the forum and drop him an email or answer to the Cast3D announcement topic.

OCast3D is independent from the rendering engine. Currently Sandy 3.0.x series are fully supported, as well as PV3D

I’ve been pleased to help Dmitri setting up this project (website and other small things), and to see that kind of amazing effort. Now it is your time to help making that dream become even more real

A lot of good stuff are coming with that 3.0.2, but let’s talk about the most interessting part, the new features :

• ParserStack to preload and parse several files sequentially
• Phong shading
• CelShading
• Sprite2D/3D attributes management
• Sprite2D/3D new properties plus event managment
• Material tiling
• Sound3D object
• Light color managment in shading attributes
• Some major bug fixes and memory optimization.
• Performance has also been improved up to 20% in some cases.

Also a new component, the Sandy extension for Flash CS3–help book / code highlighting from Dan! You’re gonna to love it, so useful…

Even if we focused a lot on not breaking your existing code, there’s few behaviour modification in order to improve the general API.

To see the complete list of changes, check that page.

And to celebrate this release, Makc prepared a very cool demo illustrating some of the new features.

Have a look, especially in full screen mode.

But Sandy is not only some new features, but also some new tutorials and new tools. Here is the list of the new tutorials :

• Simplest Sandy example, your first 3D sphere in 3 lines of code!
• An amazing set of tutorials from Arthur V and Max. This tutorial starts from the modelisation of your model in 3DS, will all the tips to have a good export, and next, all the Sandy side code to have an advanced use of that model in Flash. Check the first tutorial right here.
• Fire effect using Grant Skinner component
• and much more, check our complete tutorial list with at least 30 tutorials to learn all the tips.

A special thanks to Makc for his hard work, but also Petit and Dan for the great documentation effort, Collin Cusce for the celshading material (with Makc’s help) and Daniel (aka Delta 9) for his great Sound3D class.

Once again the whole community effort is fantastic, and make all of that possible and today available for you, freely.

Happy 3D !

Sandy team and committers.

ExtraLight offers a texture based lightening, which is by definition a bit heavier in file size but also much more CPU friendly.  Get all the information from its dedicated webpage clicking on the banner above.

Cedric offers a new demo to celebrate this release, very impressive as always!

Good job Cedric

From the previous release announcement the team worked a lot to bring new cool stuff and fix the few bugs users have found.

The complete list of changes is available here : http://www.flashsandy.org/changes_3_0_1

Go to the download page, and grab the very latest version: DOWNLOAD (backward compatible) 

Update note: Some errors were introduced in the first archive zip, we have fixed that. Sorry about that. Archives are updated.

But here are the major modifications:

• Addition of the GouraudAttribute to simulate a smooth light shading to your objects. Can be used, as all attributes, with any material.
• Addition of the material interactivity. From now if you set the new enableInteractivity property to true and if you use a MovieMaterial, you’ll be able to have a basic interaction with that material content. You can use any of your movieclips or flex components as material. Mind that this is still a work in progress.

New demos are coming but for now you can see an update of the gouraud demo and a small demo of material interaction in Xavier’s blog.

Petit and Max have worked a lot of tutorials and Sandy offers now more than 25 tutorials (with sources and examples) concerning the AS3 release. You have anything you need to start with Sandy 3.0 from now.

The team and the contributors list has grown during the last month.
I’m very pleased to see the community sharing experience and ideas. That’s the real beauty of open source projects!Please read this page : how to contribute to Sandy3D project, in case you are interessted in helping and wonder how to help. 

Happy 3D flash community