Finally, happened something we’ve been waiting for — Flash Player 10 preliminary version called “Astro” came out. New version lets to use in Alternativa3D faster and more quality drawing system and to optimize some counting routines.

We decided to do two develompents in parralel way — for Flash Player 9 and Flash Player 10. We’re planning to keep equal functions and API to make projects compilation easy for both players. So, after first 5.0 release we’ll release 5.0 FP10 too.

Here are earlier published demos with new drawing system without adaptive triangulation.

You have to have Flash Player 10 installed.

First of all we would like to say that some silence in blog was connected with very hard work, part of which is our beloved 3D-engine at its 5th version. Now we can tell that new architecture was worth working on it. With a great pleasure we created these two small demos for you, to show engine abilities.

Alternativa3D tech specs:

• Signals system — only nesessary calculations;
• BSP — quality polygon sorting, “sharp” crossings;
• n-gons support;
• reusing layers (only changed regions redrawing, polygons are independent);
• objects hierarchy;
• only necessary matrix, coords and UVs recalculating;
• perspective correction — dynamic triangulation;
• collision detection.

Isometric mode was also optimized and now works much faster.

And this is not all. In a future we’ll create and implement some new features::

• dynamic lighting and shadows (point and directional lights);
• bump lighting;
• parallax mapping;
• automatic UV-mapping;
• sprites, 3D-sprites;
• sprite lighting;
• texture objects;
• Global Illumination imitation;
• sprite pre-render system (phases render on server using uploaded 3D-models);
• animation system (including inverse kinematics);
• 3D-objects interactivity;
• physics simulation.

Besides that, Alternativa3D engine is already adapted for coming Flash Player 10. Texture correction and lighting will work faster.

This technology applications are rather wide::

• 3D online first- and third person games;
• architecture visualisation;
• multyuser entertainment media;
• promo-sites;
• advertising (including “3D-banners”);
• science фand educational interactive projects.

We hope that you share our passion. It is spring outside, everything grows and develops, so we are.

As an experiment we just tried to visualize an avatar using latest magically developed features (parallax-effect and bump).

Controls:

• Mouse move — move light source
• Mouse click — change light color
• Mouse wheel or +/- — change highlight curve

Despite all the russian holidays and clear Karpovich’s directive to forget about job and have some rest, I couldn’t let go an idea to make fast “bump light” not only from directional light source, but from spotlight too. This is relatively hard because light goes in all directions, so it seems that you’ll have to count lighting for every pixel… or not? I came up with an idea to modify normals map, to kinda “bulge” it in spotlight coordinates. Main issue is that it is not so hard to count it pixel by pixel, but it is slo-o-ow process. So I was forced to cast a spell find a way to modify normals map using standart Flash filters and blending modes.

We will use that in engine for sure, because our bet is do-it-once counting phases with further maps “baking”. When Hydra will come out with new Flash 10 we’ll just have to pass this routine to shaders.

Size: 1.6Mb

Controls:

• Mouse move — move light source
• Mouse click — change light color
• Mouse wheel or +/- — change material’s highlight curve
• Ctrl + wheel or +/- — change spotlight size
• Spacebar — nex tex

I hope now I can finally turn loose now :) Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!

If you also take “heightmap”, you can create so called parallax effect, when texture is changed depending on view angle. We don’t need this for the game engine ’till we’ll got Flash Player 10. It will have an ability to write texture crunching scripts on Adobe’s Hydra language (they say it will use hardware acceleration). So it will be more like pixel shaders then.

Размер: 1Мб

Controls:

• Mouse — move
• Click — change light color
• Wheel or +/- — change specularity
• Space — nextex

Normal maps can be used to lighten sprites in the game. They have to be rendered or paint, but the effects worth it.

Controls:

• Mouse move — move light source
• Mouse wheel or up/down arrows — change specularity

We also managed to build bump using normal maps. We use prepared image with “relief normals” to pass “surface curvature” info to the engine. Geometry is not changing (we’ll not see this features at the very edges of an object), it works like bumpmap.

This deature is not engine integrated yet (we’re busy with texturing optimization), but you can check quality/speed already.

Size: 1.6Mb

Controls:

• Move mouse cursor — move light source
• Mouse click — change light color
• Mouse wheel — change specularity
• Space — next texture

Just finished one of the most complicated stage in 5.0 engine development — dynamic BSP-tree rebuilding. Let me remind, that BSP lets us to save and establish all the “who behind who” correspondences between polygons. Thanks to it we now can divide any complex objects and get nice performance in sorting (even during camera or objects moving).

To compare, we took an old 3d-model with house and landscape from 3.0 engine demo.

Controls:

• Arrows — camera movement
• Mouse drag — look around
• Mousewheel or +/- — change FOV
• Spacebar — animation on/off
• Enter — change BSP-priority
• Q — change quality
• B — show BSP-tree

Most of the integration work is done: there are 3D world editors, users run and chat, world is uploading dynamically, and the object actions system is working good.

Further integration will be done when 3D engine 5.0 will be ready to go.

Full-size screenshots:

For those who don’t want to know technical details I should say that everything goes right. We’re going not very fast, because we spent some time re-thinking engine architecture. But now we see some results. Many things have to be finished and optimized, but you can check it out already:

Controls:

• Arrows — camera movement
• Mouse drag — look around
• Mouse wheel — change perspective

Right now we have:

• signals system (there is no CPU load during standstill),
• perspective correction (including isometry, optimized too),
• multiply cameras on scene,
• correct invisible faces cutting,
• BSP-sorting (any complicated crossing forms now sorting very fast).