Just last week, a company from Russia called “Alternativa” released a 3D engine developed in Flash using the new Actionscript language, Actionscript 3. This 3D engine packs a powerful punch for what is capable of doing. To name a few: dynamic lighting and shadows, bum mapping, parallax mapping, automatic UV-mapping, sprite lighting, texture objects, animation system, 3D-objects interactivity, and many more. Tracking back as far as their blog lets me, the company and team have worked on this engine for over 2 years, and it currently on version 5.0.1. Very impressive if you ask me.

Well I downloaded the files to see what magic I can do. The files come in a SWC format to prevent you from peeking around in their code. Also with SWC, you need to manually place the files in the Configuration/Components directory of where you have Flash installed on your computer. After restarting Flash, I opened the Components tab and placed the packages in my Library, created a new Actionscript file, and got to work on some fun 3D stuff. Moving from 2D to 3D takes a little more thinking power, but it was a whole lot of fun doing so! Anyways, enough boring talk, let me show you what I accomplished over the past of days:

A - move left
D - move right
W - move forward
S - move backward
SPACE - jump
MOUSE - click and drag to look around

Its a small city with random color building blocks and cones. I also made sidewalks to give it a more city feeling ;). Not too much to show, I know, but again, its a new 3D engine that just came out so there is much to learn.