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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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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After struggling to master the recently released, open-source Sandy 3D API for Flash, I’ve decided to take another look at 3D programming in Director. Sandy appealed to me because it allowed real-time 3D in Flash. It was also appealing to have access to the source code and thus complete and precise programmatic control. The Sandy 3D API is very impressive. It blows away every other 3D programming effort in Flash that I’ve ever seen. Perhaps most importantly of all, the Flash plug-in has more market penetration than the Director plug-in. But I’ve found Sandy difficult to learn – more so than I had expected. This may reflect more upon me than upon Sandy.

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Sandy’s Blog announced that version 0.3 of the Sandy Flash 3D API is coming soon. Some features from OpenGL may be added to it. It already incorporates some features from the Java 3D API.

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If you’ve ever wanted to be able to do sophisticated real-time 3D programming in Flash, now you can. There’s now an open-source Flash 3D API called Sandy available to the Flash coding community. Currently in its second version, it’s based to an extent on the Java 3D API. Downloads, tutorials and demos – as well as news and updates – are available on Sandy’s blog.