Its called the copper cube engine, and while it may look like there’s a slow revolution of 3D in flash only advancing because of this I found out there’s some glaring setbacks to be seen here.
1). It’s incredibly slow, the building demo runs at less than 30 FPS on my machine with a good GPU with just basic lighting and textures, you could get the Quake 1 engine to run faster with more polygons on a computer built 10 years ago than getting this engine to run at the same speed on a Quad Core with an 8800GT.
2). Slight texture warping
3). Obvious clipping errors in spots
For flash dev. kit owners it may seem like a great thing, but it still shows why no one has gotton a successful decently complex 3D game made with Flash at 60 FPS no matter what engine is used.
just goes to show that Director still has something offer. Flash still users software renderers whereas Director can take advantage of DirectX9 hardware renderers.
I’m sure AS3 3d is fine for toying with but it’ll never beat director.
Actionscript is an interpreted language so trying to do that sort of 3D on it is like trying to make quake in qbasic! It’s okay for a novelty value but anything more than SNES-starfox-style graphics and it’s going to be a struggle.
The best thing for 3D flash would be if adobe built 3D into the program. Internally optimized Vector/Quaternion/Matrix classes would be a start and vertex buffers would seal the deal.
Yeah, I got 10 - 30 FPS on all the demos. It’s a little frustrating because while 20 FPS is good for a normal flash game you certainly need more for a 3D game. Like ‘theyesfish’ said
It’s okay for a novelty value but anything more than SNES-starfox-style graphics and it’s going to be a struggle.
It comes across as sort of a crude hack to me–especially considering the issues surrounding the texture warping and stretching and the rather strange texture flipping.
I have seen some rather impressive 3D flash games, but until they can get that building demo running at 40 FPS, I’m not going to really care at all.
It’s completely CPU driven. Until they make use of the GPU using OpenGL, then it doesn’t stand a good chance. Especially with all the restriction Flash already places upon a system performance wise.
I heard a while back that they were thinking about adding hardware acceleration to Flash somehow. I dunno if this would be for 3D, or if it would come with a 3D engine, or if it would just be for the vector stuff, but it sounds interesting.
I think the best 3D plugin for web content is Unity. The player is free, the dev versions are cheap and there’s a lot of games and content being made for it. Hopefully something like that will become as ubiquitous as Flash eventually. It’ll be nice to have a decent platform to develop some more advanced games for. Too bad the Blender Plugin isn’t supported anymore… the technology is finally starting to kick into high gear and Blender could have lead the way all along.
