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[jotapeh]

So I used to use Papervision3D a lot for Flash 3D, and I'm about to prototype something around that level of interactivity, eg. mostly flat 3D planes.

I know I could technically still use Papervision but it's been disbanded and won't have future support for Molehill. I'd like a painless transition if at all possible.

I know of Alternativa and Away3D - but haven't used either much. Do you have a favourite Flash 3D API? Will it be 'molehill ready'? I'm going to be doing some research today, so I figured I'd start this thread and see if anyone felt really strongly about their choice.

edit: I guess talking License is a good thing too (eg. BSD, MIT, GPL, etc)

[Richard Kain]

I haven't looked into 3D APIs for flash for a while. I used to use Sandy3D for some flash projects that required 3D graphics. I found it to be solid, and that it had some of the best documentation of any of the available APIs at the time. I'm not sure if it is being upgraded for Molehill though.

The introduction of Molehill is going to shake up flash development. The inclusion of true GPU graphics support is a big step for the flash player. I'm not sure if this will prove to be a positive or negative for flash development as a whole. Having additional power is usually considered a plus, but this power could also bloat the general expectations of flash development. One of the more appealing aspects of flash development has always been its limitations, and figuring out how to squeeze results from those limitations.

[raigan]

I think Molehill is simple enough that you should just be able to use it directly.

>One of the more appealing aspects of flash development has always been its limitations

Yeah, don't worry -- Molehill is in usual Adobe fashion stupidly crippled in many ways. For one thing, pixel shaders can ONLY output colour, so no depth-sprites or anything else that requires per-pixel depth calculated in a shader

[SFBTom]

I'm a big fan of Away3D, both in it's current form and for the new Molehill-ready build. It actually started life as a branch of Papervision, so switching isn't too much of a pain. Plus it's very much in active development. Oh, and it's under te Apache 2.0 license, so free to use for any purpose.

[bluescrn]

Yeah, don't worry -- Molehill is in usual Adobe fashion stupidly crippled in many ways. For one thing, pixel shaders can ONLY output colour, so no depth-sprites or anything else that requires per-pixel depth calculated in a shader

When I played with it a few months back, the more annoying thing seemed to be limited data types - having to create separate vertex buffers for floating-point XYZ/UVs and for packed 32bit RGBA colours...  (rather than having a nice vertex struct, with mixed types)

[st33d]

A guy at work has been developing with Away3D with fair success. You might want to give it a whirl now Papervision is a bit dead.

[bart_the_13th]

I've been using ND3D lately, it's quite lite 3D engine, there's also a molehill port but still unreleased, maybe waiting for molehill release. There's also ND2D, a 2D engine using molehill. The engine however, doesn't support polygon clipping and perspective correction.
I tried Away3D, the broomstick version, I don't know but the engine seems too heavy for me. Maybe I should look into it more often and deeper.

[bateleur]

Away3D is good provided the external API does what you want. I had to work with the source for one project and that was really painful. (You might argue that working with someone else's code is always painful, but Box2D is a pleasure by comparison.)

[jotapeh]

So I went with Away3D. Alternative comes with a pretty steep license for commercial use so that was out of the question.

Away3D looks like it will be molehill compatible from the get-go.

I can't code straight to the Molehill API because this needs to be functional in FP10 in case Adobe isn't ready with FP11 by Q3. We have to launch our product sometime in Q3 to coincide with TV commercials that will be done, so there's a definite time-limit on it. So this seems a pretty great alternative - same code, just re-link to the newer library and re-build if needed down the road.

[Richard Kain]

Have you considered using a WebGL library instead? Or is the product you're working on dependent on Flash? Going forward, it is likely that HTML5 and the canvas element will make WebGL a viable alternative for basic 3D rendering. Of course, this would mean abandoning IE8. But as a web developer, I hate IE on general principle.

[jotapeh]

I hadn't considered WebGL - you're right though, it's an interesting option.

The product we're making will be Flash-based, however. It's just simpler, performs more consistently across platforms and browsers, market penetration is higher and it is another instalment in a series of games we've made which have all been Flash based (and then subsequentely ported to iOS.)

Especially with Molehill so close I really can't justify HTML5 - but I will keep an eye on it.