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.

A great experience

I've been on the Papervision3D team for around 3 years in total. Only weeks after it's first closed alpha release, I joined the effort. All in all it was a great ride and I had an enormous amount of fun working on the project. Mind you, contrary to what some people believe, Papervision3D is not a company, there is no steady revenue and there is no direct income from it. It's an opensource project, with all the team members contributing out of fun, love and a feel for our great community. With the team, we have been able to deliver a solid, fun and easy to use 3D API for the Flash Platform. While Papervision3D certainly wasn't the first Flash 3D engine, many of it's features where and it's ease of use propelled the name to the top-ranking name in Flash 3D engines.  Along with that, Papervision3D helped putting Flash 3D solidly on the map for companies and individuals, making Flash 3D a tool accepted and available within the creative palette. I'm very proud to have been part of that and very grateful for all the valuable and nice feedback from the community. When I started on the project, it was only me, John Grden and founder Carlos Ulloa working on it. With time the team grew, changed composition and we also got more and more community input. These days, the team has grown to a rather large size, we got many blogs and sites dedicated to the engine and a vibrant community working with and on the engine. There's nothing to describe how proud I am of achieving that together with my fellow team members.

Building engines

Over time, I've spent more and more time in creating and architecting the core of 3D engines. With Papervision3D, this was the 1.7, 1.9 and 2.0 core of the engine. For PapervisionX I've taken that even further, creating the entire core architecture and implementing the many things I've learned over the years. But next to Papervision3D, I've also built multiple engines in my commercial effort as a freelancer, and have greatly enjoyed doing so. During my FOTB presentation, I showed a video of the Anne Frank Virtual House, for which I was commissioned to build the 3D engine by LBi / Lost Boys and the Anne Frank Foundation. For the project I worked closely together with Floris Drupsteen of Biqini, the 3D modeller on this project, who did an awesome job of building the actual 3D models. It was an all in all great experience to build an engine on that scale and I'm proud to have been part of that effort. Considering the goal of the effort, it was a very meaningful implementation of a 3D engine to me, and an honor to be part of that effort.

With me stopping to work on the Papervision3D project, this is certainly not the end of me building 3D engines. Rather a rehash on how and why I do that. First and foremost, I will keep in chipping in the community effort, through this blog and upcoming projects to be released in the opensource domain. Also, commercially, I see myself building graphical / 3D engines, when possible, for a while to come too. All in all, I just love building the graphical engines for projects, hence also my self-given titel; "visual programmer". With no noticable big difference in what I do, there is a question remaining.

Why ?

There's a couple of reasons to the exact why of me leaving. First and foremost, this is a personal choice on my side, has nothing to do with my feelings towards the engine or the other team members. An important factor for me, things have to do with momentum. The engine has had an incredible amount of momentum over the years, and that pushes me to work on such a project even harder. Currently the project is a bit lower on momentum, which doesn't help me either. I think it's important to know I've been working on the engine many, many hours over the last years, and at some point you get to some fatigue of working on the same thing for a while. With the success of the engine and the personal success of my fellow team members, all of us have gotten more busy on the commercial side of things. This means less time goes into the project, which in turns into less momentum for the entire project, which in turn leaves me less "pushed" to do more. Considering the enormous amount of pressure from people on the outside, this wasn't good for me either. On the other side, this change in team composition, with me leaving, gives room for other people to full-fill that position and get new ideas, new work and new momentum going. All in all, I think it will do the engine good.

Next to momentum, another important reason for me was the goal of building an opensource 3D engine. With many people doing awesome experiments and examples / implementations of the engine, it really gives me a natural high to see how it's beeing used. But next to that I'm also looking to create beautiful things myself. Now, I'm not anything near a real visual designer, I like to see myself as one who builds the tools and technology to help enable these experiences. But I want to be part of something which will lead to beauty in visuals, story telling and emotion of the experience. Without a doubt many Papervision3D powered experiences can be classified as beautiful experiences, but most of the time, just building the engine means that they use the technology, but you are not directly involved in that process of creation. I really feel I need to work on projects which will give me a more direct link to the artists, or even more closely enabling artists. One of the projects I have recently joined is the Rhonda Forever project. Certainly very different as a tool to people, my job within the team is very similar to what I did for Papervision3D. For Rhonda I'm building the online drawing viewer for the project. The change for me there is that I will be working directly with it's creative community and seeing results of that effort in a more tangible/graphical way.

Wanting to create visual beauty also means that for me, there was a decisive direction to take. The work you do is the work that defines you within the industry and that in turn gets you the next big job. With me wanting to do more directly involved work on creating things with beauty, but my work mostly being hidden in technical solutions like for instance Papervision3D, I wanted to expand my working area to more visual beauty and become more part of that side of the process. The only way to do that is by just start doing it, finding people to work with and changing that direction. This one of my first steps towards that. With a renewed sense of freedom, I'm hoping to work on projects more closely and be part of the actual implementation more, rather then being part of a tool that enables people to do that, but not being part of the creation of the end result.

Community wise; I'm still there. I am pondering on some of the directions. Along with doing more work with and on OpenFrameworks and Rhonda, I will still build 3D things for the Flash Platform. What I can release, will be released through this blog. With the 3D Flash community having considerably grown from near to nothing to an almost distinct part of the industry, I will be part of it. Also, I'm looking forward to build technology which spans and extends all the available 3D engines, rather then just focusing on one engine.

PapervisionX

One thing I'm not entirely sure of as of yet, is what to do with the PapervisionX code base. Built entirely from scratch by me and Tim Knip, this project really has part of my soul in it. It's been exclusively me and Tim working on it, with plans to have the rest of the team start on it a while back. Currently, that hasn't happened yet and the engine is not ready for release and officially not part of the Papervision3D code base. In other words; it's mine and Tim's. While I'd love to release it at some point in time, currently it's not ready for that and with me leaving the team, it's most likely not going to be released under that name, if released at all. I might decide together with Tim to donate it to the Papervision3D project, but currently I'm not sure on that decision yet; as there would have to be a considerable effort to make it stable for release. As it is unfinished now and publishing source code is somewhat a personal thing when most of it is yours, I'd think this is not what should be done right now. As I am going to pursue my own goals for the time being, this decision might take a while.

I will discuss with the team and Tim closely to see what can be done in the future, but for now, I don't think it should be released. It might also be better for the team to work on it's own Flash 10 compatible version of the engine.

Triangle3D

Another engine I showed at FOTB was my personal experimental 3D engine Triangle3D. Not at all meant to compete with any of the 3D engine, rather to be my own basis for experimenting with Flash and 3D, this engine might be released through this blog in the nearer future. Again, this is not me splitting off from the team and doing my own thing, this is more or less just giving the community my personal playground for Flash 3D. The engine is far from feature complete, and honestly, I don't want to focus on that. Rather just build it as I go and need something. This engine will most likely form the basis for my commercial 3D efforts too, as a custom based engine is almost always going to be more focussed on the specific implementation then a more generalized 3D engine API.

Thanks

All in all, in regards of the Papervision3D project, I would like to thank my fellow team members for all the good times. I would like to thank the community for their beautiful implementations and experiments as well as feedback. You make it all happen! Lastly, as a special member of the team, I would like to thank founder Carlos Ulloa for having me on board in the first place. It's been a great ride, and I'm sure we'll be riding our race cars for quite some time, even if we have to build them ourselves.

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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.

This was the realm of pure magic. All of a sudden things went a lot faster. Moving a sprite along the screen could be done fast and smooth. But things where a lot more complicated. 6510 (or actually 6502, for the purists) asm, although especially now a days, quite simple, isn't exactly humanly readable, nor was it clear to me how to structure full programs or games. I learned how to do a lot of tricks, like getting more then the 8 hardware supported sprites on screen at the same time (something then called multiplexing), playing sound while still having being able to do other things at the same time, getting sine waving color bars on screen and screen border, but I never managed to build a full game. What I learned about that was that interpreted basic was a lot slower then assembler and if you wanted to get real speed you'd have to target the platforms native code. Assembler wasn't magic, it was just a better way to target the platform.

Back to current day.
I've been working with Flash for almost 9 years now. I dare to say I know quite a lot of Flash as a platform, and have been doing many projects and experimentation with it. Last year at MAX, when FlaCC or now, Alchemy was shown it looked like pure magic! Sure, I understood the basic principles, but running Quake in the Flash VM was nothing short of magic. Running Quake within the Flash VM using a port of the C code was quite an achievement, but the speed was more incredible. This was nothing short of pure magic, like turning lead into gold!

It's an ironic name Adobe chose for FlaCC. Let's look at the word and dabble into the occult. There's a clear distinction between alchemy and science. Alchemy is most known for trying to create noble metals from otherwise less-valuable materials. Even Sir. Isaac Newton spent a lot of time in the field, surprisingly, even more time then he spent working on subjects such as optics and physics, for which he is most known. In a way, Alchemy is the forerunner for what now is chemistry. From the occult to exact sciences. So, with that name, is Adobe suggesting Alchemy is pure magic ? Turning lead into gold ?

Is it witchcraft ?
After the initial amazement I had with seeing Quake run within Flash, I started to question some things and started asking around with people who might know more of this witchcraft. Was this really Flash Player 9 running this ? From multiple sources I heard it was a slightly modified version of the Flash Player 9. Something to do with reserving a block of memory. Later on, after finding Scott Petersen his LLVM session on this subject, this was confirmed. In this session, Scott also shows an emulator running on top of the Flash VM. Having some experience in the FC64 (a commodore 64 emulator for flash) project, again, the speed was pure magic.

What I ended up finding most interesting about Alchemy, wasn't the ability to take C code and compile it to Flash (although that's an incredible achievement on itself), but the pure raw speed it seemed to harness. And with that, I also got a bit disappointed in Flash. It boils down to this.

The first magic bullet in Flash speed came in the form of the ActionScript Virtual Machine 2. With JIT compilation of ActionScriptByte code the platform just became a whole lot faster. With the coming of the AVM2, lot's of things have changed. For me personally, one of the displays of the game changer was Papervision3D, in which I got involved quite early on. John Grden's early demo using Papervision3D running on AS3 was an incredible testament to the speed of the AVM2. Now, that demo was built using ActionScript 3 as the language to be compiled down to ABC. ActionScript 3 is the language which was intended to run on top of this platform and one might thus derive that the language and it's compiler is most optimized for the AVM2. So logically, one might asses that the best way to write code for the AVM2 is using ActionScript.

Heresy I say! Heresy! Burn the witch!
Alchemy is proof that this is not the case. Here's a bit of pure heresy in the Adobe church : Alchemy is a testament to the underachievement of the ActionScript compiler. Ouch. Surely, this can't be the case, right ? Well, yes and no.

Let's start with the "no" part. That reference of a modified player running Quake was partially true. This was an early demo of Flash 10, in a way. As Nicolas Canasse points out in this blog post about Alchemy virtual memory opcodes, it seems like Alchemy is cheating a bit. Cheating ? While, yes. This part of the API is not available from within ActionScript itself. So, the platform (AVM2) now has features which are not supported by the language which is native to it ? Wow. I find this a very significant move by Adobe. Moving to a more flexible compiler makes total sense, but is this the first symptom caused by the EcmaScript4 draft debacle ?

To achieve the speed as displayed by Alchemy, I have thus have to move to using C code, or HaXe to compile for the AVM ? This is odd, to say the least. Nicolas his work on HaXe is nothing less then brilliant. The features this compiler has are those which would greatly help the development of a 3D engine, such as Papervision3D. I've always had a great deal of interest of porting Papervision3D to HaXe, purely to be able to implement things like inlining easily, which will safe us function calls and thus speed up the process of rendering 3D to the screen. The downside to that is, that the code base would have to change to HaXe, and thus become incompatible with the compilers of Flash and Flex. We (Papervision3D) could provide with a SWC built with HaXe, but in a way, I'm still a bit weary of that.

Now we come to the yes part, of my earlier "yes and no". Next to the virtual memory opcodes that are currently unsupported from within the AS3 language, Branden Hall states something very disturbing on his blog about Alchemy, "Understanding Adobe Alchemy".

"In fact, because LLVM does a lot of optimizations, whereas Flash and Flex have no optimization step built into their compilers, Alchemy code manages to overcome a lot of it is overhead just on its own."

Ok, that is down right disturbing. The AVM2 was built with ActionScript in mind and visa versa. But compiling C using LLVM with ActionScript as a target produces better faster ActionScript (that's actionscript, not bytecode) then the actual compiler built for the platform does ? Ouch. Now, moving to C development for the ActionScript platform to utilize this "magically" acquired speed seems somewhat illogical to me ? Joa Ebert already showed us some work he had done on the compiler, allowing for inline bytecode to be used. Nicolas shows us he can harnass the new Virtual Memory Opcodes, and his work on HaXe also shows us that inlining is very, very nice.

I'd love someone from adobe shedding some light on this issue. I love the Flash Platform, I love the work all the people at Adobe do, but this leaves me somewhat confused on how to develop for the platform I hold so dearly. If we have to let go of ActionScript to harness the pure speed Alchemy proofs is possible, then tell us. What is the future of our beloved language and our compilers for it ?

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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.

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I just returned from teaching the Papervision3D workshop in Sweden; it was an awesome group and good fun! For all those who attended : Thank you very much for the good and fun workshop, you where an awesome group! Also many thanks for Johan and Marcus from the local usergroup for helping out with the event!

This week Saturday I'll be heading off to Chicago to be part of the FITC Chicago event. I'm looking forward to doing my Flash 2D & 3D effects session as well as a 1 day workshop on Papervision3D. If you haven't registered yet, make sure you do so as there are still some tickets left, but they are going fast!

Register here for the RMI Papervision3D 2.0 workshop Chicago.

Sorry for the silence on this blog lately, personal matters take priority and as such it will be more quiet here over the coming months. But expect a nice blog on some exiting news here tomorrow. Looking forward to see any of you attending FITC Chicago.

And then some more exiting news; FITC Seoul is happening and I am lucky enough to be invited to come over and speak amongst these great names ; Joshua Davis, Erik Natzke, Kyle Cooper, Richard Galvan, Marcos Weskamp, and Euna Seoul. With such an awesome line up, I'm sure this will surely be a success and a opportunity for us to reach out to the korean / asian community! Looking forward to see any of you there!

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Yes! April is coming up quickly and that means amongst others 1 awesome event, FITC Toronto. I'm excited to be speaking at this event alongside other speakers like GMUNK, Joa Ebert, Andre Michelle, Erik Natzke, Patrick Matte, Ivan Todorov, James Paterson, Grant Skinner, Joshua Davis, Thijs Thiemstra, Keith Peters, Evan Roth, Niko Stumpo, Mario Klingemann and many more!

I'm really looking forward to do my 3D and 2D effects session and hope to see you there!
Also, I will be giving a one day workshop on Papervision3D, in front of the event; as one of the dev's of the API I can assure this is will be one day of great fun, knowledge and learnings! Make sure you register in time, these things tend to sell out fast.

FITC was kind enought to pass me a special 10% discount code for the event in Toronto; using the code unitzeroone you will be given that discount.

You're not sure yet ? Well, check out these videos on FITC Amsterdam and be convinced!

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Today Exey Panteleev posted some creative use of Papervision3D and the Shaders in 2.0. Accompanying to his post he asked if it would be possible to run water simulation with Papervision3D....

Actually, yes...
Water Ball Experiment 1 Water Ball 2(cpu burner alert!)

As one of those things I never finished and probably don't have time to finish within the next month or so, I have two examples of Papervision3D running interactive water on top of a sphere.

Disclaimer : these things are hacked together experiments from a couple of months ago...as a result performance isn't to good. I'm sure that given some time they can run smooth, without burning your cpu to the ground. Hope you enjoy anyway

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A nice addition to the Papervision3D code base. With the latest repository version of Papervision3D 2.0 / GreatWhite, it is possible to cut any TriangleMesh into half. Here's how :

var meshes:Array = MeshUtil.cutTriangleMesh(triangleMesh, cuttingPlane);

Where the cutting plane is a Plane3D and the triangle mesh is any object with it's own triangle geometry, including for instance ASE, DAE, MD2 or Collada, but also all primitives.

Here's an example source for download : Mesh Cutting sources

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This demo / source file is one which was used during the Papervision3D Workshop in Amsterdam, during the fantastic FITC Amsterdam 2008 event. These are the modified final sources for the example I did at the end of the day. Although quite simple, I think they are very useful at illustrating on how to use shaders. Download the sources here.

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Over the last months I spent alot of my time developing with and on Papervision3D. Most notably alot of the new features of Papervision3D 2.0 have been part of daily work and development. Now I have yet to see someone uncover all of the posibilities with the current alpha, next to people as mr.doob and zeropointnine (and many more, yes).

It's incredibly inspiring to me to see that the goals and purposes I personally had intended with the Papervision3D 2.0 source code is being picked up this well. Don't get me wrong, there's still alot to do...but in essence it seems to work for people ! I guess seeing your work being put to use by others in ways you wouldn't or would've expected is a big part of the pay-off in OpenSource development. It's both educational and inspirational to see how people are using the architecture.

(As a side note...in the FITC Amsterdam video on Lee Brimelow's blog I'm noted as aformentioned zeropointnine...which is wrong....obviously, I'm that other three word number like dude....UnitZeroOne...Lee....)

Anyway, I stumbled upon note.x when I got my traffic report. It's all in Japanese but I'm really astounded by the quality of code and work. It's a very nice blog indeed, go and check it out.

Some other very good resources on pv3d 2.0 include : pv3d.org, papervision2.com, actionscript architect and of course fellow team member Andy Zupko.

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Now, with the FWA seeing a huge share of Papervision3D powered sites there's reason enough to be proud on Papervision3D, but this implementation of the engine by lessrain is really insanely, insanely well done. No doubt this will become of the FWA prize winners.

Also, the nice people at lessrain where as kind to blog about the development of this site / game!

Redbull Flugtag Flightlab

Now, I'm actually to busy to blog, but on this one I couldn't help myself. See you all at FITC Amsterdam (where I'll also be revealing a very well kept surprise for all of you)!

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Alot of people are trying to come and work with Papervision3D 2.0, but there's not too much examples out there. Believe me, in between regular work and this we do what we can. I had this example I made to test some bugs in the envmapmaterial, and I thought I would share the source, so you can start playing around. Mind you, still haven't nailed the bug.

(Right click in this example to view and get the source).

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You'll be learning lot's about the new engine (and the old for that matter), and learn all about how to utilize it to it's full extent, like using shaders, frustrum culling, viewports. Be one of the first to learn all this directly from the source Teaching about this is really exiting me, because the full power of the API still has to be unleashed....

Hope to see you there, and if you already have a ticket, give me a ping in the comments.

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I'll give a quick tutorial on how to setup stuff as soon as I can. After a barrage of code of the last days, which Tim would know all about too, I need some rest. This stuff is not completed or optimized yet, so don't judge it on those factors just yet. Expect updates alot, so if you are not comfortable with fixing problems yourself, or are in a project which needs to be online tomorrow...don't do it...it's an Alpha.

Enjoy...it's made with alot of blood sweat and tears.

New things I can think of right now :

Viewport3D - Auto sizing, clipping and culling, enables you to render to a texture in the scene.
ASCollada
ShadeMaterials - Only shaded surfaces
Shaders - Shading + Texturing
Frustrum Culling + Frustrum Camera
New Rendering architecture
Swappable renderer architecture - More on that during the coming weeks.
So much more...and more will be coming.

I'll post more soon.

Get the code using SVN from Google code.

[update]
A small screencast (no narrative, sorry) on how to use it.src
An ugly tech demo showing off the BitmapViewportMaterial, done with an older version
Mr.Doob shows of some skills with 2.0
[/update]

[update2]
The screencast went over the monthly bandwidth limit at screencast.com, relocated to my server, so you can see it again.
[/update2]

Signing off exhausted,
Ralph.

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