Wow, it’s been an amazing last couple of days with the announcement of Astro and all the hype around the new 3D API and the pixel shader language Hydra as well as some of the sneak peaks shown at Max. The community is in a rampant frenzy as speculation and confusion runs wild. Hardware acceleration, C++ getting translated into ActionScript, and Flash running Quake! It’s no wonder people are freaking out.

At any rate I figure now is a perfect time to make a little announcement of my own. Actually I confess, I already decided a few days ago was the perfect time when I posted this to the Papervision3D mailing list and John Grden is probably showing this right about now at Max. Never the less I decided this was worth a blog post.

I’ve been working on a Papervision3D based first person 3D engine. Below are a couple of screen captures from two different examples of the engine.

Before you get too excited and run off to see the demos there are a few disclaimers that need to be expressed. First, you need a fast computer. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is. Second, I haven’t implemented proper pre-loading so you’ll need to be patient and wait for all the imagery to load. Last, these demos are still a little rough around the edges.

Now for the controls…

Mouse click and move – look around
e – walk forward
d – backward
s – strafe left
f – strafe right

And the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

Demo 1
Demo 2

Thoughts are welcome and appreciated.

Enjoy!

Adobe launched my Flash Video in 3D tutorial today. The tutorial, geared towards intermediate developers, walks you through mapping video to a 3D mesh using Papervision 3D and includes source code.

Check it out.

I’ve been holding onto this domain for a while now. Originally I had grand plans for some kind of community content driven site with nice articles and pretty pictures. Of course in reality I never found the time to get it up and running. More recently I have been wanting a place to post some thoughts, ideas, code, etc. and decided this would become that place.