Today is my birthday, and that is all this post is about - its just an fyi for everyone out there.
I am still programming like crazy the past couple of weeks with Flash and PHP, brainstorming on an story for an exciting RPG game (which I am currently partnered with Dhryn, who’s site is still in the works), designing the graphics, etc. So I have been keeping busy but will share the next steps in the RPG game development shortly when things begin to settle a bit.
Anyways, the other day I had a spare minute to play with Papervision3D and come up with a “possible” 3D isometric game in the future… hopefully not to far off future. Here is a quick demo with some ugly looking graphics (sorry I didn’t have too much time to polish - but you should get the idea):
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.
This sort of method is very useful for creating a star field. With a lot of stars. I thought of this method when reading through the book “Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development” by Glen Rhodes. In his book he provides an example of creating a star field with a effect called “parallax”. A parallax effect is created by multiple objects moving at different speeds. For example, a small ball in the distance would move very slowing and a large ball would move more quickly. Both the balls are on the same level/depth, but the appearance of the different sizes and speeds give it the effect. Parallax effect is highly used to create a 3D environment.