The response to my Flash / PV3D based first person 3D engine has been excellent. Thank you to all who have left such kind remarks. There have been many questions regarding the engine asked both on and off the PV3D list as well as within the comments of my original announcement. I’d like to now take the time to evaluate, explore, and answer these questions. But I’m not going to do that here. Huh? Wha’? You ask. What do you mean? If I post anything more about graphics, games, or 3D I think I’ll be forced to change my site to ActionScriptGraphicsProgrammer. I’m long over due for a nice fat post on architecture, design patterns, or development processes, or something along those lines. But I digress, that’s not really the reason I’m not going to answer your questions here. Let me explain…

From here on out I’ll, for the most part, be providing all communication about the engine over at Animas Interactive. I have a couple of motivations for doing this. First, my vision is that the engine will be bigger than myself and my personal blog. More than just an experiment I’ve done or am working on. My hope is that this will soon be a collaborative effort and there may at some point be other co-conspirators posting updates about the progress of the project. But not a whole lot on that front has happened yet. We’ll just have to see how things play out. The other motivator is to help formalize this vision by giving the engine an identity to live under.

Now that that little explanation is out of the way, let’s get on with the information about the engine.

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!

Fluid develops and sells the Fluid Retail™ suite of online merchandising tools that simplify, automate, and optimize online merchandising. Fluid also designs and develops award-winning interactive digital retail experiences for clients including Reebok, Timberland, JanSport, Mattel, and The North Face. For years Fluid has been a leader in the development of single page architecture rich internet applications.

Fluid is hiring skilled and passionate software engineers to work with technologies such as Flash, Flex, dHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, Java, and SQL. Fluid will provide the necessary technical training in these specific languages; we do not require prior experience with them. We do, however, require that candidates demonstrate proven ability and motivation. Specifically, we require:

• The proven ability to write superior object-oriented code in a language like Java, C++, ActionScript, or C#
• Demonstrated facility with object-oriented analysis and design techniques like design patterns and UML
• Written and verbal communication skills
• The organizational ability to manage time predictably and effectively
• Motivation for professional growth

Fluid also values related skills like illustration, photography, information design, visual design, digital music, and project management. Successful candidates will contribute to the conception, planning, development, testing, and deployment of innovative web development projects. You will be given as much responsibility as you show you can handle.

Candidates would work in Fluid’s San Francisco office. Fluid offers competitive pay and benefits. Please email your resume, a cover letter, and a code sample. Thanks for your time.

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.