So, there’s been a lot of talk about Flash and HTML5. We’re not going to get into that here. What I saw on the Adobe Max conference was good. Flash getting into hardware accelerated worlds. That’s all good and dandy. But will it really be what “Flash turned hardcore” developers want? Or developers who were already hardcore and were only waiting for flash to spiff it up. Time will tell.

But, I’ve prepared what you can call a pre emptive scale to see how I want Flash or hardware acceleration to be. If it achieves any percentage near to this, I’ll buy my apples from Adobe. Eh? That was weird…

Then again, I’ve been working on Papersteer for the sole reason of measuring the raw power of these technologies and how they scale up to each other. Before, I move forward, I must tell you that although Flash is doing software only drawing for now, it has amazed me. Flash is indeed good. Thumbs up Adobe. Alright, no more babbling from me, take a look at this movie:

This video demonstrates the difference in computation and drawing on different platforms. From software drawing to parallel processing.

The demos use Opensteer to demonstrate the results.

Throughout this time, I’ve been working on porting Opensteer to flash, I’ve learned so much about technologies.  This project gave me a lot of insight into the flash low level techniques. I left the project midway, but I’ve seen that people have always been interested in using it on flash. However, I felt that Flash does not have the proper “horse power” and “ability” to render Opensteer properly. I was wrong. Flash does a great job but needs proper drawing acceleration.

Papervision3D helped me a lot too. At first, I created a pure ActionScript 3 project, which didn’t even have an example. But now, I’ve almost completely ported the whole opensteer library to Actionscript 3. I did this because I’m waiting for the next Flash player . More on that later.

For now, I’ve finished work on AS3Steer and I won’t be working on it anymore. Papersteer will be the only thing, I’ll be updating in the future.  I’ve uploaded massive updates to the papersteer google code repo. So do check it out. Here are some examples and a demo of Papersteer as well .

Click to Focus then Press TAB to change demos. Press C to change camera views. Press A to toggle Annotation. Press F to change frame rates.

Here’s a demo of the AS3 branch, click on the image to load it:

Here’s a demo of a Predator and Fish, click to view:

Download PaperSteer here. AS3Steer here, (example1,example2). Alternatively, you can just head over to the repository to download and compile all of them yourself.

Hey guys,

It has been so long since I wrote a technical or programming post. One reason is that I am busy with an awesome social game project at the company I’m working with right now, White Rabbit Online. I’m having a great time with the project but have also been working with Papersteer, more on that in another post.

While working with Papersteer, I created many solutions for the ActionScript world and I learned a lot as well. During this time, I came along a problem which required me to create filled circles using Papervision. Initially, I searched around the net and found Seb’s 3D Circle post. However, that did not solve my problem and I needed filled 3d circles/disks. I looked into Vectorvision for Pv3D as well but the absence of true 3D geometry forced me to trash that as well.

I missed TriangleFan because I’ve used in C# and other platforms. So, I went ahead and tried to simulate a TriangleFan algorithm.  It didn’t take me long and all I needed to do was create a rotated path for the common triangle vectors. Voila, see below:

Patterns? . Click on the snapshot below to view the original image. This one uses 500 segments to draw the circle.

There may be better ways to make this. If there are, do let me know. Download the source with demo here.