Ok so it has generated a fair bit of interest in the flash 3d interest group. Jono seems to have popped up out of the blue with an engine hes has spent his spare time on. I got an email from him regarding some of my comments on an earlier post. I asked if it had more interaction and if it could load more polys. The true test of and flash 3d engine.

"I’ll get my site up in the next few weeks, and I’ll post up the Quake levels, they are currently a bit slower though cos some of them are 30,000 polygons.I figure people will make simple Quake3 maps 5,000 – 10,000 polygons and those will render fine." 

What can I say. If your into flash and 3d you should be wipping your chin about now.

The good news is that he will be releasing some parts of the engine to opensource. Which is really a great thing for all. The guys at OSFlash have created an unbelievable resource for flash developers, all with a non funded effort, Props to them (Aral).

Byte access in AS3 has really opened some doors for the developers ready to peek under the hood of this dark mustang. It has enabled developers access to all the information of files that once was hidden behind what Macromedia though we would need access to.

"OpenSource parts will be the FileManager which queues files to load, and parses a few unknown image formats (.tga, .bmp) Also the zlib stuff will be made available – this reads zip files, so you can zib all your game resources, have Flash download the zip and then unzip them in the player to start using them. " ——drooooooooooool!!!

I can see the Zlib classes being really usefull not only in games but alot of developed applications. At the moment when developing C# apps alot of resources I use are embed into the exe itself or into bin resource files. This is something not to uncommon for win forms apps but for RIA it is something entirely new. We could possibly develope bundled builds of applications and release them. Just convienient really.

And finally the engine. After for years working to learn the secrets of 3d in flash I can understand why Jono would want to see some fruit roll back his way. Hes looking to license the engine to developers for a really reasonable fee. So we're all waiting now to see some of the demos on Jono's site when he sends it live…..cant wait.

http://www.custommedia.co.nz/