Here is my very first email of the day (1AM, yes, I should be sleeping…)

Basically it means that  there’s a SANDDE™ product related to 3D drawing associated to a patent.

Now is my question, how the hell is that related to our small opensource project?  We do not market anything here .. Sandy3D isn’t even a trade.  We ask for people to make some donations and in the past 5 years, only 25 people did considered to do so. Can we name this market?

As most of you might know, the reason of that name is extremely simple “San” “Di” would be how the word “3D” is pronounced in Chinese language from my very modest knowledge. Could them patent such a thing?

What would happen if I remove the 3D attached to Sandy, and make the project named “Sandy, an opensource 3D API for Flash”?

Anyhow, I do not even hear SANDDE™ be pronounced like Sandy3D… Moreover our API does not define a method to draw 3D …

I just feel stupid right now, not being able to know where my rights stop. Why should I bother taking any kind of risk for a non-commercial project? But in the same time, why should I consider changing the project name (and identity) with so few good reasons.

If you have an opinion or advice, please comment, I’ll read it seriously.
World is crazy…..

AsI know most of you like playing great flash games to change your mind, here are some of these which use Sandy3D:

New Protopop game: Waterfall woods

You can’t skip this one, the latest Protopop production: waterfall woods

That game offers the best visual quality I’ve seen so far on a flash 3D game. A wonderful artist work, nice gameplay! We ask for more !

Robots and Aliens

that studio created 2 really funny 3D flash games, both very different and really fun!

Flying Saucer Panic very innovative gameplay, I guess some love it, some don’t. In all cases, nice idea and good realization!

Reactor Twist 3D Is also a really cool game, nice graphics, simple gameplay, LOVE IT!

starfall survivor

I’m sure you know where its author got inspiration from. An interesting shoot’em up quite peaced, you need to get all your focus for that one!

There are also a lot of other 3D flash game created with Sandy3D that you can see in the wiki games page (thanks Makc)

http://www.flashsandy.org/games

Have fun!

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.

Go get it !

Give it a try

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

It is always nice to see new uses for Sandy. The firm web3dmodels has created a simple 3D viewer for presenting products or maybe dinosaurs ?

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

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