After a buildup possibly only matched by the splitting of the atom... The Away3d team are pleased to announce the release of the 2.2.0 update to the Away3d engine!
you can download the update from the trunk in the svn repository: http://away3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk or go to the downloads section of away3d.com where a new zip file is available: http://www.away3d.com/downloads plus all your favorite demos upgraded (with minimal fuss) to the latest codebase. Man oh man have we got features for you. Some more demos will be released in the coming days to illustrate some of whats on offer, but here a brief (!) rundown of the tastiest bits... *Triangle caching *So i'm sure everyone has heard of or seen the triangle caching available in the Alternativa engine. Well, think similar, but about ten times as useful, and your there! Triangle caching works by avoiding a redraw of an object if neither the camera or object has been updated. In 2.2 caching is done per-canvas, so objects in their own canvas will have their own triangle caching. This is where the fun really starts, because virtually any scene with a static camera that employs the ownCanvas property on it's objects will benefit, and the system will allow stupid amounts of triangles to be cached - tests have been done with 100,000 poly scenes without blinking an eye. *Collada bones *This has been lacking in our feature set for a while now - but no more! The bones importer is integrated into the collada importer, so you need know nothing new in order to use bones in your project. The only visible addition is the animationLibrary, which works in a similar way to the materialLibrary. Many different types of collada file have been tested to ensure a wide range of compatibility, plus collada bones objects can now be cloned complete with their skeletons by using the new cloneAll() function. *Pathextrude and pathanimator classes* This is the last word in bendy generated objects. You want a road, a ribbon, a railway? how about a bridge or tunnel? With pathextrude, this becomes easy. Pathanimator can then come along and help you move an object along the surface of your extrusions. If you haven't seen already, check out this fantastic example of the system in action: http://www.closier.nl/blog/?p=77. *Bounding boxes and bounding spheres* One for the physicists, or anyone wanting to detect collisions between irregular objects. The bounding system now available allows you to calculate the bounding radius or box for any object. Not only that, but the calculations will update in real time for any animations on the mesh or child objects. A simple debug tool allows you to keep track of what's going on by setting debugbb or debugbs to true on any object. *Meshrenderer* This has been talked about for a while, but the official name for it now is the Projector. These classes are responsible for the step in between projection matrix calculations and the render loop - the point where all visible elements of an object are projected into drawing primitives ready to be rendered. The projector classes do this in a number of default ways for triangles, segments and sprites. However, you don't have to stop there! Now you can create custom projector objects that can render in any way you want - maybe just vertex information as scaled bitmaps, or a selection of faces based on a defining property, or completely different drawing method for segment objects... Demos to follow with this one! A few more additions of note: Simple shadows class Obj exporter Separated geometry classes Corrections to multiple view interaction custom renderer definition on ownCanvas objects Fixed mirroring in 3ds files Elevation2AS3 function ElevationModifier class Added non-destructive scaling properties on objects non-destructive movePivot on objects So while this has been a little longer than our usual month and a half cycle, we hope this goes some way to explaining what the wait has been about In other news: *Conference! *I will be giving a presentation on the features of Away3d, new and old, at this year's Flash on the Beach conference in Brighton, UK. If you're attending I hope you can make it - first session on day 3.. ouch! Let me just say in advance that hangovers are welcome. Hope to see you there. *Training!* There is a new two-day training session being setup in London specifically for Away3d called *Essential Away3d Techniques.* Arranged through the LFPUG (http://www.lfpug.com) it will be running on the 22nd-23rd October, and at only £235 should be within almost everyone's budget. We operate smaller class sizes than some others to allow a more personal approach to training - the class size here is set to a maxium of 15 people. Feedvack from previous sessions can be see by reading the comments posted on the site: http://www.lfpug.com/?s=3d+training. As with any new release, bugs are only to be expected. We will be doing our level best to rectify those reported as quickly as possible - if anyone does experience problems, please report them etiher on the mailing list or in the issues tracker in the googlecode repository: http://code.google.com/p/away3d/issues/list Enjoy the new release! the Away3d Team -- Rob Bateman Flash Development & Consultancy [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.infiniteturtles.co.uk www.away3d.com
