Somebody has already made some code samples available to the Director user community, using the new Aegia Physics plug-in for 3D work in Director. I was glad to find these, since it was a disappointment to me that Aegia did not make any samples or tutorials available upon Adobe’s release of Director 11. I remember when the Havok Physics Xtra was made available for Director back in the olden days, Havok made a nice collection of tutorials, demos and sample code available to the community. Looks like we’re on our own here for the time being.

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There is finally a 3D physics engine for Flash. Called WOW-Engine, it is still under development. It extends Alec Cove’s APE 2D engine, uses the Sandy library for all 3D math and incorporates data structures classes written by polygonal labs. It’s a very promising beginning. The future of Flash 3D programming and game development looks brighter and brighter. At least if Director ends up dying after all, there will now be a viable alternative, especially considering that the Havok 3D physics engine for Director has not been updated since Director MX 2004, and Adobe and Havok do not appear to formed any new partnerships.

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Today I finally figured out how to create a simple hinge in Shockwave 3D using the Havok Xtra’s linear dashpot. In the past, I was frustrated by Havok’s linear dashpot, because by default it connects two movable rigid bodies’ centers of mass. I wanted to be able to connect them more precisely, such as by their corners. I found that it is simple to accomplish this by assigning pointA and pointB of a linear dashpot to the desired vertice. First I attached two cubes using two linear dashpots. Then I set point A of the first linear dashpot to be positioned at the desired corner on the first cube and point B at the desired corner on the second cube. I did the same with the second linear dashpot. My demo source code is nothing but a toy app, but it’s enough to get the concept. Once you get the concept, you can adapt it for your own project. Be warned that when you increase the size of the boxes, the results become unpredictable. To adapt this to your own code, you may need to experiment with the vertex lists of the faces of your own model. Download source.

Playing with Director again is like coming home. Director was the first system I learned to program in. Lingo was my first scripting language. I love Lingo! In spite of being verbose, it’s also concise. Sounds contradictory, but it’s true! I won’t use JavaScript in Director, even though I know JavaScript, and Director supports it. I prefer Lingo. You can do so much with so few lines of code. Here’s what I have to say about Lingo, after having used JavaScript, ActionScript, Visual Basic.NET, and Java: Lingo is the easiest of all! continue reading »

Why Shockwave 3D?

In my long and winding quest to do real-time 3D programming on the Web, I’m back where I started — with Shockwave 3D. Much as I love Sandy, I need at least joints and collision detection, and the only existing Flash physics engines are made for 2D. I’ve put considerable thought and effort into extending Flade (now replaced by APE) to 3D; but I’ve concluded that even if I succeeded, it would take some time for the code to mature. When I first started, I set out to learn Java 3D, but I soon abandoned it for Shockwave 3D. Then I abandoned Shockwave 3D for Flash, once Sandy came on the scene. In my naivety, I thought I could hack out a physics engine the same way I’ve always been able to hack out everything else I’ve needed. Once I learned how complicated physics engines and game engines are, I turned to the Torque Game Engine. continue reading »

I have not been writing much here lately. The reason I’ve been MIA is that I’ve been Martened, Tarted and Torqued. About six weeks ago, I brought home a tiny, new orange-striped kitten named Marten. This occurred at about the same time that I began to occasionally contribute to the ezine Sequential Tart. At the same time, I began to teach myself how to use and script the Torque Game Engine. It’s hard to write much in your blog when you’re Martened, Torqued and Tarted at the same time. My long-term vision for Squirrel Tao has not changed, but it’s going to be slow going for Squirrel Tao to evolve into the blog I want it to be. I work full-time, and it doesn’t take much to disrupt my free time in the evenings and on the week-ends. People would laugh at me if they knew the impact that one little kitten has had on my life recently.

Martened

I picked Marten up at the local pet shop, which sometimes adopts kittens out on Saturdays. There were two cages full of kittens. All of them were asleep except for Marten. He came up to the cage wall and rubbed the side of his face against my finger. Then he swiped at it. continue reading »

The Sandy 1.0 beta has been released. Sandy is a Flash 3D API, and there’s nothing else like it, if you want to be able to do real-time 3D rendering in Flash. I’ve tried almost everything else that is available on the internet for Flash 3D, and nothing else goes so far beyond being a toy demo. I’ve tried out the first and the second releases of Sandy, too, and it just keeps getting better. One change in this release is that now it’s possible to draw curved faces. Another is the addition of an ASE parser. The remaining changes can be read here.

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I think I’ve almost got the hang of 3D math now, as well as simple physics engines, like verlet integration. One online tutorial, Vector Math for 3D Computer Graphics, has been particularly helpful. A webpage on game physics in 3D has also been somewhat helpful. One area of confusion still remains in my mind, and that’s how to make a 3D object rotate in a verlet integration scheme. I think I could easily figure out how to extend 2D verlet integration into 3D in every area I require, besides rotation. The author of the webpage on game physics in 3D that I just mentioned above delves into how to integrate rotations into his physics code, but he uses quaternions. I suppose I could possibly use quaternions. Sandy has a quaternion class. I hesitate to use quaternions mainly because I’ll still be using matrixes for translation. It seems simpler to use matrixes for every kind of transform, rather than using matrixes for everything except rotation. It’s tempting to wait until 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development arrives in the mail, but I’ve played that type of mind game with myself in the past, so I know better. Sometimes, it gets the point of hacking my way through the analysis paralysis – just doing it – albeit not necessarily The Best Way. That may be the point where I am now.

Today I found a good online tutorial on basic 3D math. It’s on an old geocities site that housed the Win 95 Game Programmer’s Encyclopedia. It has what is, for me, the easiest-to-follow explanation of matrix math that I’ve yet found. It’s amazingly concise, and the examples are all very easy to understand – no calculus equations to be found here. Most of the examples are in code. In fact, the author of this website, Mark Feldman, says himself at the beginning of his tutorial on 3D math, “Here’s a secret tip for anyone who has a hard time understanding 3D math: think of it as simply another programming language!”

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I’ve reached the conclusion that I really need to know everything. I actually tried to talk my mother into allowing me to drop out of school at age sixteen, giving her examples of actresses, writers and musicians who had been high-school drop-outs. I finished high school and then college, but I never took more math than I had to take. I used to ask my mother why I needed to know algebra. I would have prefered not to take it at all, in high school. Oh, how I now regret than I never took a geometry or a trigonometry class. Not only is trig heavily used in cool and innovative Flash generative art like that you can find in books like Flash Math Creativity or on sites like Levitated. It’s also difficult to begin to understand the basics of 3D rotation coding constructs, without learning trig.

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