UnitZeroOne

I’ve been wanting to play around with Papervision3D ever since I got my hands on the alpha’s. After not being able to sleep normal for some while now, I’ve decided to put that time to some good use, I’ve been hacking (hacking, really) around with PV3D, because I wanted it to support shading. That’s still a step to far off, but I’ve got it to do environment mapping; it’s still in demo so not to impressive, textures suck etc., but it gives a good idea of where I’m going to with this. If I get around on hacking with this a bit more, and exploit the material classes to their limit, it should do texturemapped & environment mapping.

At least this is very promising, and shows what developers would be able to do with Papervision3D by extending it…

Here’s my first try. (requires flash 9 player and might take some time to load)

I took some sparse time, and quickly hacked up some Papervision 3d / Flex 2 examples.
Carlos Ulloa, creator of the soon to be release Papervision3d 3d Engine was kind enough to point me the way to the Papervision alpha’s. If you haven’t heard about Papervision; it is the fastest 3d engine the Flash platform has seen up to now. It’s lightweight, and currently also being ported to AS3.

Today, Antonis sent an e-mail to the OSFlash / Papervision e-mail list, in which he asked if there were any examples of Flex 2 using Papervision; this triggered me to do a little bit of work of creating 2 examples of the current alpha as3 code to be used in Flex 2. Both examples are ports of the current AS2 examples Papervision is not only lightweight, it is also easy to implement.

So here you go :

Papervision3d / Flex 2 : HelloPlane Example.
Papervision3d / Flex 2 : HelloASE Example.

These examples are ugly, and don’t use all the capabilities of the engine, but as a proof of concept they show alot of potential in terms of speed and ease of implementation.
Although Papervision3d / AS2 seems to be shaping up quite well, Papervision3d / AS3 has some catching up to do, it is still alpha, let alone implementations in Flex 2. Still, these examples where fairly easy to create. Thanks to Carlos Ulloa and John Grden for the awesome work they have put in this engine.
Make sure you check papervision’s osflash page to see when it’s going in beta.

I hope to get some time somewhere in the beginning months of the next year and put some work in the OSFlash projects, most notably the FC64 SID project, and Papervision.

As I told before we are doing a pretty big Flex 2 project currently; great fun, and Flex is great. Yesterday we stumbled upon several memory leaks in the application (it’s still in development, and many things are not final, so logically, not all matter). The application could easily start consuming 100Mb, and never release the memory.

We finally managed to trace the source of the memory problem back to our logger view, in which I had implemented Adobe’s autcomplete component. The autocomplete component itself is great; thanks for that guys!

Strange thing was that except for our FDS & Cairngorm logging we didn’t have a whole lot of logging going on. Now we started to debug log some view things, and the amount of memory usage kept on rising.

After searching for several hours (and fixing multiple things) the Autocomplete component turned out to be the culprit.
I think it has something to do with the way it builds up the dictonary / bsp tree I assume it uses.

So; if any macrodobian is reading this : here’s an example of that leak (read explanation in left pane); and here’s the source to the example.