VaporVision3D

I have published VaporVision3D for this year's April fool. I am writing articles about 3D representation on Flash from scratch, so this VaporVision3D does not depend on Papervision3D or such 3D graphics framework.

I do not think that Reinvention of the Wheel has no meaning, but reinvention of 3-D graphcis framework is a heavy task. Who want to use 3D graphics on Flash should use Papervision3D or such however implementing 3D engine gives you lots of experiences. But I am seriously interested in performance problems on 3D engines. It is a well-known fact that drawing of FlashPlayer is very slow. What we can do is to reduce drawing. For now, my articles intentionally cut performance problems for simplicity. The time to argue the problems will come soon.

AS3 3D and physics engines

2D physics engines:

APE

This engine may be the most well-known one. It has been ported to C++ and Java. MIT license.

Box2DAS3Box2DFlashAS3

Crayon Physics Deluxe made the people attracted to this engine. Box2D was written in C++, now ported to AS3 as Box2DFlashAS3. zlib/ligpng licence.

FOAM

It was lately released, but seems worth trying. MIT license.

Fisix

Perhaps you do not know this engine because of its own license. Let's check the demo.

Motor Physics

This one is expected to join the AS3 physics engine list. Some demos are already available. zlib/libpng license.

This seems a little complicated compared with C++. In C++, there are practically two choices of 3D physics engine, PhyX and Havok. Which engine will survive? 3D graphics engine:

Papervision3D

I think that I do not need to explain about this most known 3D engine. MIT License.

Away3D

This engine is Papervision3D based one, but has has better visual quality.

Sandy

I immediately understood this name because I am a Japanese (see why). The API resembles Java3D, e.g. TransfomGroup class.

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Corrected the name of Box2DFlashAS3. (Nov. 23)

Color detection by AS3

Here is a demo of skin color detection by ActionScript 3.

• Inspired by this video.
• Hatsune Miku swings her arm when skin color moves vertically.
• Push V key to show/hide camera input.
• Push M key to show/hide detection result.

Detection algorithm is of this paper, section 3.1. Because this algorithm is very simple, it can be implemented by bitmap filter. Performance should be compared between both implementations.

mqo loader beta ?

I have eventually submitted my metasequoia loader to Snippets of Spark project. Only few tests about my library have done, so any bug reports are welcomed.

My next task is perhaps to load MIKOTO file that describes motion of metasequoia model. Watching motion of 3D model will fascinate us rather than watching rendered image that never moves.

mqo loader private alpha

Here is my private alpha version of .mqo file loader for Papervision3D. Mqo files are used by Metasequoia typically in Japan.

Location of flashlog

Since I changed my computer from XP to Vista, today is first time to use trace function of AS3. First, I created file named mm.cfg and wrote these lines.

TraceOutputFileName=D:\Users\\Documents\AS3\trace.txt
ErrorReportingEnable=1
TraceOutputFileEnable=1

But this did not work. I changed all the backslashes into slashes, but nothing has changed. I removed the first line to put the output file in default location, then it worked. Even TraceOutputFileName is not an necessary option, this behavior is strange.

I found the answer of this problem in the LiveDocs.

Note: Beginning with the Flash Player 9 Update, Flash Player ignores the TraceOutputFileName property.

TraceOutputFileName no longer works.