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.

UPDATE: This release has been superseded by a new release. Please see this post.

Hi guys,

I’ve been lazy but eventually I managed to upload a new build of PaperSteer to the repository. This revision is a major overhaul of what I did with the port. It is in fact written from scratch. I wanted this port to be oriented towards its C++ parent i.e. the original release from Craig Reynolds and that is the reason why, I was not at all satisfied with my original release.

CHANGES:

- I have now uploaded the documentation, plugins and the new build with lots and LOTS of improvements.
- Bug fixes, stupid errors that I was overlooking.
- AS3 optimizations.
- OOP implementations and strict rules on compilation and AS3 compliance.

However, this build still does not contain the Demo which I initially promised for this build, but bear with me because I am actually working on it. Once that is done, I will be giving Papersteer a turn that the actual Opensteer lacks and that is, dynamic creation and loading of plugins.

Yes, I know that is something very big to tout about but since I love working on personal projects, I will definitely finish this sooner or later. For now, the build is up and I must say again that it is rather a preview for people to look at my work and it is broken. Porting a huge library such as Opensteer can be a severe pain, if it requires changes to the design and core implementations of the classes.

Go check it out already.

Apart from that, I recently tried to keep my artistic side alive by recreating an old scene from one of my favorite games of all time…Metal Slug. A destroyed submerged tank in the deep blue see…I hope you like it.

Regards,
MHAQS