Hi folks!

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 Sandy haXe team is proud to present the haXe port of the Sandy 3D Engine.

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

We are proud and pleased to see that Sandy in a way was granted the FWA Site of the Day Award March 25 2009.

Gabriel Laet at the multilingual Brazilian media firm Gringo developed the vivapositivamente site for Coke, and to the joy of the hard working developers of the Sandy3D team, they used Sandy to drive this fine and elaborate site.

If you know a bit of Spanish or Portuguese you’ll understand the text. Otherwise, enjoy the artistic work!

We are happy to announce a new version of our engine, tagged as a 3.1.1 since this release comes with some improvemens and bugfixes withotu any API change. [Edit] A 3.1.2 release in sync with the 3.1.2 haXe version is now available under download.

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)

We are proud to annouce that the 3.1 version of Sandy3D is now available as a stable release.

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?.