UnitZeroOne

Last week at Flash on the Beach I had an announcement regarding me and Papervision3D. While some people took that as a hint to the release of PapervisionX, the actual news was a bit more sad. After pondering on this for a while, I made the rather big and tough decision to leave the Papervision3D team. As many of you couldn't be in the session, since the room was packed and as I heard later, many, many people not being able to come in from the line outside. Next to that many of you not able to come out to FOTB, this post is to ellaborate on my decision and explain it to all of you.

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Take your time, this is a lengthy post. Before I jump in the matter, I want to go back a bit.

The magic of C64 Assembler

One of my first experiences with computer programming was on the C64. My dad bought my uncles C64...... Of course we played games at first, but at some point I started to look at all the books that my uncle had gaven with it. One of the first books I opened up and started playing with was called "Basic for Beginners". I remember thinking, wow, so this is how you make games ? I started playing with existing programs and later on began writing my own, such brilliant programs as "My cassette collection" and "Adding Numbers". But what I really wanted was to write my own games.

How come my C64 basic programs where always so slow ? Surely, there must be something I was doing wrong. With nobody around to teach me, or tell me anything about this machine, I dived in the pile of books that came with the computer once again. Two books took my interest. "C64 Programmers Reference Guide" and a home printed & binded book that had written on it "C64 Kernel listing". I had two problems with these, being 1, my ability to read english and understanding the magic listings this book had. It took me a long, long time to grasp what these books where saying, but these 2 books, together with a dutch book on C64 programming, I slowly learned how to do 6510 assembly language for the C64.

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A smooth shaded elephant.

Behind the scenes I've been insanely busy for the last months. But just to keep you posted on some progess on my side, here's some demos of me playing around with Flash Player 10's 3D API's.

I'll keep this short, here's some demos.

Some tests with shading : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

You'll notice that the speed slows down when you go up in the number of examples. The amount of triangles increase per example. Since shading is still one of the most heavy appliances of any 3D engine, I thought it would be good to start out testing that, and see how it would work in a realistic 3D engine environment.

Next, this is not adviced to look at if you get car-sick easily.....a pure speed test.

A bit slower then it could run using any of the new wmodes, but for speeds sake, we're getting there.

Source code not available yet. First I'm looking at how to optimize. And yes, I'm working hard on a new version of Papervision3D, with the rest of the team. Soon I'll post some better examples, including a BSP example.