Ahh, March. The long and dark winter (you don't know how dark it really is untill you've visited Scandinavia) is about to give way to spring and we'll see the sun once more (for my fellow Scandinavians, it looks like a big fireball and is extremely bright).

And March will hopefully see the unveiling of yet the biggest software release from Adobe. CS3 in all its glory is speculated to be released around March 27th.

In related rumors Leopard will also most likely see a March release.

Cant wait to spend 55.000€ upgrading our software ;)

Permalink | Comments (1)

There's been a lot of buzz around 3D in Flash since Carlos Ulloa decided to decided to go Open Source with Papervision 3D (as a side-note, if you plan on going Open Source, why wait to release the source code and enable anyone to contribute?). And as promising as it looks and as much as the guys earn respect for creating something as complex as PV3D I must say that everybody is a little too excited.

I'm not saying that PV3D wouldn't find it's way into many projects down the line. It'll definitely find it's place in a number of cool (yet simple) UI's.

Aral Balkan even went as far as to say that we finally have PlayStation quality 3D in Flash. Now quality in my mind means speed, when you talk about 3D. Although the original PlayStation was not equipped with a GPU for 3D drawing to what we're used today, it did have a Gemoetry Transformation Engine, which increased the speed of 3D calculations required to draw flat, shaded or textured polygons and was able to draw 180.000 texture-mapped and light-shaded polygons per second. Thats still 6000 polygons if you want everything to run 30fps. PV3D is not going to be able to come even close to that (with the average PC that's out there).

Now jump back quite a few years to almost the beginning of the century and look at one of the most popular graphics cards: The GeForce 4 MX series. Even in its lowest configuration its able to paint 31 million triangles per second. And all with anisotropic filtering, pixel shading, multitexture rendering and lot of a heck more that wouldn't be possible (and is never going to be possible) to achieve with CPU rendering.

What's my point? Well, my point is that we are Flash developers (at least the ones still reading...). We're amazed by what guys like Carlos are doing, since we know what we're up against. We know we don't have hardware acceleration. We know that AS3 is still a scripting language. That's why we tend to go whoaaa whenever a new 3D engine or C64 emulator sees the daylight. But our end-users, the ones that use the end-result of our projects and in the end truly matter, don't know what constraints we have. They use hardware accelerated 3D all the time. And they will pitifully laugh at any 3D game created in Flash we can throw at them. The engine that turns us on will look embarrassing in the eyes of someone who has played a few 3D games.

What we need is a hardware accelerated Flash Palyer, because with the introduction of AS3 the bottleneck in the player is again graphics rendering. Not only will hw-acceleration give us awesome 3D, but accelerating vector & bitmap rendering should also give the Player a performance increase that'll blow your mind (You know, bitmap rendering with a decent gfx-card should increase performance some 10 000%).

I'm sure the the Flash Player team is looking closely what Microsoft is doing on that front, and am quite certain that we'll see a fully accelerated Flash Player 10.

Permalink | Comments (11)