Last commits I see in the SVN date back to april... I am wondering if the
project is dead or if we will see other improvements in the future.

*Guillaume Amringer*

Hope PVX adopts the new 3d api by Flash. No news from the PV3D team yet,
while Away 3D and Alternativa 3D are blowing me away with their demos.

--
Taha
Indiana University Grad Candidate (New Media Arts & Science)
www.tahakhan.com
Flash Developer *******

Either its dead or its resting.
Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue. Beautiful plumage!
;)

Ralph took PVX with him when he left the team.
Last known papervision is PV3 on github, which is not updated for almost a year.

In all honesty, we'd love to see PV3D continue to be developed.  We stopped
because the new 3D api from adobe wasn't giving us anything that provided a
better experience over what we already had.  There were no speed increases
or anything magical.   Just an API.

Until adobe makes the experience with PB seamless (ie: AS3 api leverages PB
and at the same speeds), it's just a toy for the few.

So, with that, we didn't see much point in just rewriting PV3D for the sake
of a new api that didn't give us any benefit.  That and being
disenfranchised by adobe's lack of support for hardware is just a killer to
the moral.

I've moved on to products that actually allow me to leverage all of my
experience with PV3D/AS3 - Unity3D being one of them.  They're about 5-7yrs
ahead of adobe right now with regards to a 3D browser based plugin for 3D.
Not to mention you can create for many different platforms of course.

I think the final straw for me was when I realized I was able to do 10x's
more on an *IPHONE* with Unity3D than in a browser with flash.
It's unbelievable the lack of power you deal with when you're doing 3D
flash - it's a joke.  Thing is, you don't know about the joke until you step
out and experience something else.  So when I hear about "incredible demo's"
from away, I think kudo's to those guys for their talent for sure, but I
have to ask - *why*?  It's pointless.  It's like they're all dealing with a
volkswagon - sure, you can put a kick-ass paint job on it, rims, stereo, but
at the end of the day, guess what?!  it's still a freakin' volkswagon.  You
can't change the engine, you can't change the tranny - it's still a
volkswagon.

If the flash player changes, I'm sure PV3D will leverage it.  It may not
have the rims/tires/paint/stereo system that other engines have right now,
but it's fast, reliable and has a great and easy to understand API.

--
[  JPG  ]

btw, that's a 1st Gen iPhone...

--
[  JPG  ]

"So when I hear about "incredible demo's" from away, I think kudo's to
those guys for their talent for sure, but I have to ask - *why*?  It's
pointless."

Uh, it's hardly pointless dude, with Away3DLite they have way more poly's
rendered than PV3D could ever support.  While PV3D dev stopped, Away team
kept moving forward, adding useful stuff for people, improving
performance, etc.  If you don't find it useful that's fine but their work
can't just be dismissed like that.

They also added BSP which runs at good speed in the browser, as a matter
of fact.

Then when the new 3d hardware acceleration comes from Adobe they just have
to change the underlying code to support that and we can just keep using
it and enjoy the new speed.

If PV3D team chose to stop working on the framework, that's fine, but to
disparage/be dismissive of the amazing work the other teams are doing is
sorta crazy.

haha, zing :-)

With Adobe though, i´m sorta glad i haven´t worked on pv3d or one of the other 3D engines who did now not get early access to the next upcoming players´features, else i would have pissed off a lot for years long doing the work Adobe should have done and then its again that Adobe ploy where some get earlier access than even beta testers, hence leading to quite unfair market chance situation.
Next to that i feel like its too little too late from Adobe side, it sounds like they add some new apis but no engine, framework or ide tools to use it and also none of the "old" api, lamguage and in ide made stuff gets accelerated.
Weak sauce to me.

Bottomline:
Meanwhile i don´t have the stance anymore to try and get flash to do things its not made for or try to convince Adobe what they should implement in flash, its not worth it cause they will likely do something totally different anyway, best just use what´s a good choice for a particular use case.
For some things that´s still flash, for others its unity and for again other things it could be again something different.
PV3D were the en vogue thing loved and hyped by Adobe etc for a while, now its Alternativa.
The guys can enjoy their time in the spotlight but expect it to be limited and at the end of the day, it would probably have been better spent doing nice stuff with something like unity rather than trying to cook such an engine in flash which in either case will still lead to way worse results on the same box.

Well, John´s point was that its kinda useless when comparing what can be done with flash regarding 3D with what can be done with other technologies.
Nice for flash terms, but yeah, more than 5 years behind other technologies when compared to various other things.

This whole thread doesn't take into account the latest molehill videos on the web, does it ? Does it ? I am ... loosing focale :)

If anyone missed these:

http://jpauclair.net/2010/10/27/molehill/


http://www.flashrealtime.com/max-racer-multiplayer/


Cedric

Wow I missed that zombie one. Looks amazing, I can't wait to get my hands on
this

--
Francis Altomare,

Adobe seems to not be a lot into integrating the new api for usage in visual workflow in the ide, nor does it seem to be integrated with any of the old languages/ apis, so old stuff still runs slow as always.
And yeah, even the nicest demos shown there are still years behind what was doable in unity etc several years ago and is not close to being a match for what other technologies allow doing now.
For example that race game demo, no realtime environment reflection, no skidmarks, particle effects or anything really dynamic or moving besides the car mostly.
Compare it to unreal citadel demo running on iPad to get what other middleware is capable of even on way less powerful machines.
Not even to mention that it isn´t cross platform as in runs like that on anything besides mac/ pc anytime soon and even for those it will probably not be finalized and nicely usable for at least a year and then.
For example propper mobile support is touted so long by Adobe as if it was already live in action anywhere.
How many Android devices can run flash right now and how many of those in propper usable performance besides for the most basic 2D content?
I´m also wondering what Adobe thinks why people should buy Flash IDE anymore if it doesn´t offer any visual editing support for most things introduced api side since flash 7.
Nice people like the alternative guys create engines and frameworks "for them" but yeah..

actionscript API layer above DirectX and OpenGL below. Everything you
mention should be easily doable with the right fragment and vertex shaders.

In my opinion the best selling point for Flash/Molehill is that it will
probably reach +90% user penetrations sometime in 2012. Unity or WebGL?
Do not think so.

Of course Unity may have better tools available and be a nicer and
proven environment for making online games. I would not know, games are
not my market.

As always it will end up with the old saying, use the right tool for the
right job. For some jobs that would be Unity, for other it might be
Flash/Molehill.

seriously, I wasn't putting them down - I like the away3d guys and
flash allows for.  They do a fantastic job, and I wouldn't say anything
against that - we've been down this road before, they know I respect their
work, so let's leave it at that.

--
[  JPG  ]

Wow PV3D guys. Way to sound petty and small.
It's not unreasonable to expect tooling for molehill to come later on as a
big selling point on CSx
Releases.
Just because you weren't invited to the party doesn't mean you can belittle
the work of the guys who did.

you so sure about this?

with the macbook air announcement,

will the flash web plugin going to be as built in as we've grown accustomed?

Ross P. Sclafani
design / technology / creative

http://ross.sclafani.net http://www.twitter.com/rosssclafani
(347) 204.5714

If you don't have a plan B, you don't have a plan.

Until they bring the tools back to a mass user level, it doesn't mean dick.
It means that the smart geeks will continue to get off on their demo's but
in the end - nobody knows about it or much less cares.  Give me the power
wrapped up in the IDE with one API to leverage them all - sound familiar?  (
take your pick, LOR or Unity ;)

and the point about the middleware and citadel - that's an incredible point.

People who are ONLY doing Flash 3D just aren't aware of what they *should*
and *could* be doing.  All I'm saying is - try something else, and see.  It
can only help push Adobe to make more bold steps.

--
[  JPG  ]

You're fooling yourself if you're going with the penetration argument still.

1.  It's not an issue like it used to be
2.  Unity's catching up and being adopted (just like flash was) by main
sites and distribution.

Don't believe me?  I've been doing Unity3D work for 2yrs straight now.  And
we're a company that will do whatever is asked for.  But in all
conversations, when you show the client what's doable, and *where* you can
deploy their content beyond the browser, it's not even a discussion any
longer.

--
[  JPG  ]

again, we're not belittling - take the time to read what I've written.

For the last time - away3d guys are brilliant, talented and have
accomplished much.  End of story.

--
[  JPG  ]

Erm, slow, tiger. First:
I´m not one of the pv3d team members. I´m a longtime flash and other technologies user, artist and developer, that´s about it.
I personally don´t have any benefit or negative impact depending on who of the flash 3d engine developers gets invited to a party.
I have a stance on flash, which is i used to love it, use it for a ton of things and well, it kinda got stuck/ developed in wrong direction and way too slow in my eyes for many years now so meanwhile i use way more other technologies instead of flash for more and more things.
I had that stance way before molehill was announced or anything.

Next up: read John´s previous comment on the topic, i think he put his view nicely, so if you want to have the view of a pv3d core member focus on his comments.

So, ok, you estimate everything regarding flash to turn out in the best possible way imaginable (being able to use DirectX/ openGL capabilities to the max and it reaching +90% penetration in a year of new plugin version release window, despite things like Apple not bundling flash player with OS updates anymore etc) and the worse possible scenario for unity and webgl etc.
Ok, yes, by that logic flash always wins :-)
I agree with the bottom line of use the right tool for the job, but yeah, regarding flash and seeing how Adobe´s prophecies for upcoming versions and features held up (or not) in the past, hm, i´d say don´t bet on that horse before you examined it for yourself for a week or two. And if you have a related project in view i´d rather use what´s available and working great now rather than wait for something tehoretically coming out in a year or more.

--
[  JPG  ]

I didn't know there was a party

I add my comments marked with -->

-->yeah, me, too, several times. At the end i was thrown out of the beta for constantly asking for more improvements before shipping things :-D That was the moment i finally realized: Some guys at Adobe and me just have a quite different view regarding in which state flash really is and towards which direction it should ideally develop and hence no use to argue with those guys :-)

-->Exactly. I couldn´t agree more.

-->Totally. Maybe it takes a few more people getting thrown out of betas, but hey, at least the moaning and publicly leaving flash by seasoned users is forcing them to progress on some ends sometime :-D

Show me someone who is sure about anything in our industry and I will
show you a fool. ;-)

Flash is very entrenched in the web, and all those 2D web pages using it
are not going away anytime soon.  It also have a very easy one click
update path, I see no compelling reason a new version should not spread
like wildfire like the most recent versions has.

But sure? Hell, no. I've been with this business far to long to be sure
about anything ;-)

Someone might come up with a killer disruptive technology next year that
changes the equation, but frankly I do not think the Macbook Air is that
technology, although it looks very nice :-)

how much excitement!

*Beatrix Kruemmer-Frau*
Director Actionscripthero.org
Dipl. Ing. Designer | Multimedia Developer | CEH-LPIG

www.blog.dieanstalt.com | @birikini

Just take John up on his challenge and download the Unity ide to
build/deploy a couple hello world examples. That's the bar Adobe has to
beat. It's a very high bar.

:D so this is what happens when you throw gasoline on embers.

glad to know this list is still being monitored by the same bright minds that started it and made it the original home for flash3D.

i might just have to log into the irc channel and stir it up in there, too.

xo

Ross P. Sclafani
design / technology / creative

http://ross.sclafani.net http://www.twitter.com/rosssclafani
(347) 204.5714

If you don't have a plan B, you don't have a plan.

First time I drag/dropped a model from Maya into Unity I wanted to cry. So
easy.

Anyhoo
Well I'm just glad that John finaly confirmed whats been obvious for the
past year.
PV is dead.
At least those who want to use flash now know which engine not to put the
effort into learning.

Thanks to al the PV devs, I learned lots :)

yeah I think you're saying the right thing, and I'm sure it plays out where
updating / adoption does very well.

But one thing we have to be careful of is keeping the comparison on target.
We're matching up Flash3D and it's gaming ability against Unity3D.  When
you keep topic pure, there is a much different reality in store.

If you're trying to compare Unity to flash's uses - you can't, that's
absurd!  Unity is a game development tool - period.  So, putting apples to
apples - you have to take your comparisons of player penetration and
probably forget about it *until* adobe comes out with something that:

1) competes at a hardware level - but wait, that's not all!
2) gives 1 api, 1 tool to leverage what they're providing.

I'm not even asking for 3D scene editor (which would make it even more
lopsided toward Unity).  I'm simply asking for 1 api to leverage all their
power in flash - just think about what I'm saying here.  I'm not even
comparing IDE'S to IDE'S, just 1 api and let's start there.  From there,
things *could* get MUCH MUCH better for flash.  and I would love to see it
happen personally

--
[  JPG  ]

what's the fascination with calling something "dead"?

It's dead when we've all abandoned ship, but last I checked, we hadn't done
that.

Have fun with whatever you need to do the job for sure, but there's no
benefit in calling PV3D dead to you, so why do it?  It's not dead.  It's
waiting for everyone else to catch up (namely Adobe).

--
[  JPG  ]

Well it has been a rather large discussion with some of our major
clients where the user count is in the millions, and for some of them
anything other than Flash was out of the question. It did not matter
what we showed them could be done with other options. Flash or begone.

And no, we are not only doing Flash 3D. In fact I had not ever worked
with Flash until 1,5 year ago but I have worked with 3D for 10 years now
(mostly low level OpenGL and shaders).

Perhaps if we did games or advertisement it would have been an easier sell.

If I am wrong and Unity reaches anything close to the current
penetration of Flash I would of course think that is a good thing, I
like choice.

on this. But I think your equally overly optimistic on behalf of both
Unity and WebGL.

Flash has in fact at least a track record of reaching impressive user
penetration.

Yes, this I agree with completely.

It HAD an impressive track record or reaching impressive user penetration. I don´t see flash running well or at all on any of my portable devices, the ones on which most people who are not coders/designers will actually probably enjoy the web/apps/games etc in the future. And again, John is right, plugin penetration figures matter less and less in general, things like amount of platforms things run well on is way more important and then, yeah, when comparing this new flash 3d running player with the unity plugin then the unity plugin has a drastically higher plugin penetration number.

As a side note, Adobe did a very smart thing by including the 3d dev teams
on the prerelease. We'll all have some solid 3d libraries to play with the
day it's released.

Hm, totally depends on the angle you look at it i guess =)

Smart, maybe, positive? Quite a bit more discussion worthy.

For example my angle on that is:
1.:  Giving a bunch of developers access to something all others will not have before a public beta is sorta skewing the market and if i´d care to use it i´d find it quite unfair and would be pretty pissed =)
2.: What i expect from a middleware provider is that they deliver the middleware in nicely usable form.
In case of something like flash for me that would mean that any new api introduced works fine in all languages, there´s not just raw low level classes but ideally higher level, if not framework/ engine level things coming with it easing people into using it.  
And yeah, for everything visuals related there should also be a way to edit it visually in the IDE, so people actually usually dealing with the graphics side most times(graphic artists) can actually use it.
Bitmapdata,PixelBender,Alchemy, Molehill etc, all completely useless to any graphic artist who isn´t also coder or doesn´t work closely with a coder.
Nice if you´re a coder wanting to do demo kinda stuff or also do the graphics side of your app in thse things, but really, seriously, in 2010?
How many years did they have for this stuff?

So yeah, to me this move now by Adobe feels like another (maybe final) step towards doing less and less of the work i think a middleware provider should do and leaving more and more of the work to low level "faroited at the time" community developers.

I like it when the community comes up with nice stuff, but when it goes to the level it has with flash, where people create entire 3d frameworks, code editors etc cause  these and many other things are lacking in the ide for way too long, hm, dunno.
If Adobe releases the next Flash IDE as freeware, ok, that´s reasonable, otherwise, weird..

Ok, thanks to the folks over at LucasFilm for confirming this just now:

If you go to StarWars.com, you'll see the games section.  There are nine
titles.  2 of which are Unity3D games, the others are Flash based.  4 of the
Flash apps are actual "games", 3 others are not.

Out of the "games" it was confirmed that Trench Run and Quest for R2-D2 are
by far the leaders in their traffic per month.  They can't disclose the #'s,
but it's in the millions for both those titles.  The Flash games?  not so
much.

StarWars.com is a very high traffic site and their mailing list is in the
millions on a monthly basis.  They're very picky folks as well.  I've worked
with them for several years now (nearly a decade) and I've done Flash
marketing sites, flash games and Unity3D games for them.  When discussing
Marketing efforts, Flash wins hands down in the discussion - we don't even
bring up Unity because that's not it's job.  When it comes to game titles,
LucasFilm doesn't even flinch - they ASSUME it's in Unity3D these days.  The
Trench Run (written by yours truly) is also deployed on the iPhone/iOS
platform and is likely to see the android market as well.  If we had the
budget and time for it, we could put it out as a native iPad app, but as it
is, it runs just fine on the iPad.  There's been talk about wii and other
consoles.  That's penetration when you're talking about games.

This is a perfect illustration on how "plug-in penetration" doesn't factor
when we're talking about 3D Game development.  It's not an issue.
Deployment, stability, speed - those topics DO matter.  When Adobe DOES
come out with something that supports hardware for 3D, they're going to be
faced with the same challenges that Unity's already dealt with for many
years now.  And Unity's pretty good at it already.

--
[  JPG  ]

Well if PV3D is dead, I'd just like to say to the dev team: much respect.

I never expected anything, much less demanded anything and have been
continually grateful for the time and effort you guys put in over the years
to allow me to make shit that simply wasn't possible before your tools.

I owe you since '07 - if you're in London at all, look me up - beers on me

so long... and thanks for all the fish

U know it - ask anyone, I always collect on free beer ;)

Sent from my iPhone

"It HAD an impressive track record or reaching impressive user penetration"

Bullshit.

This is only true if you count in platforms, not if you count in users.
The total number of users on iPhone + iPad (+ Android) is still
microscopic compared to the number of users on PC/Windows + Mac/OSX.

Of course your statement *might* be true in 2012, it certainly is not *now*.

I am not doing games and entertainment so please have me excused if my
world view is dramatically different from yours. Real work will still
mostly be done on real computers in the future, not so much because of
technological limitations, but human limitations. Try sitting 8 hours in
the office working on a minuscule touch screen, you will now what I mean.

The selling point for Flash on the PC platform was and still is its
market penetration. We see no signs of this changing this or next year,
only hype and speculations. We do not make business decisions based on
hype or speculations.

The customers of my customers are mostly (70-90%) business related use.
But most of those people will be getting a smartphone comparable to
iPhone/Android or some other hand-held device *in addition* to their
computer, the majority of them already has. For that reason we are also
doing apps for the iPhone, iPad and Blackberry, the iP* apps are done in
objective-c and OpenGL ES and the Blackberry version is Java with OpenGL ES.

I agree with Jobs, if you do apps for a mobile unit you would want to
work as close to the iron as practically possible. At least for us,
Flash is not a viable option without HA support and we cannot wait for
Molehill.

Am I the only one here who attended Max and went to the 3D sessions?  Seems like there is a lot of misunderstanding going on in these threads.

Molehill has a low-level AS3-based 3D API (using something new called Adobe Assembler Language or something like that, I have the actual name in my notes, but not with me at the moment) to talk to the GPU.  That API is not for 99.9% of the Flash developers out there, it's for the people who build Flash-based 3D engines. What it enables is engines like Away3D, Yogurt3D and Alternativa3D to do hardware rendering of 3d on a new layer. These teams already have a Flash player 10.2 (Molehill) developer preview release they are using to demo their use hardware acceleration. Molehill is NOT for your

So Molehill will have 3 rendering "layers" (these are not the same thing as the layers in the IDE).  The topmost layer being what you use now, the regular old display list that is not hardware accelerated (Papervision and everthing else 2D like Sprites and TextFields).  The middle layer being hardware accelerated 3D via the new APIs, and the third bottom "layer" being stage video, which is also hardware accelerated.

Check out these YouTube demos of what Molehill will allow 3D frameworks like Away 3D and Alternativa to do with your GPU.

Hardware accelerated Alternativa3D using Molehill:
&feature=related
&NR=1

Hardware accelerated Away3d using Molehill:


Molehill/Flash 10.2 is scheduled for public release this summer.

Jason Merrill
Instructional Technology Architect
Bank of America  Global Learning

Sounds like a funeral...

-->No, its not bullshit. First, let´s take something like unity or unreal (multiplatform middleware used to create3d games, you know, what flash is trying to go up against now).
Let´s see, unity is available on an runs at great feature set and performance on: Mac, Windows, Android, iPhone, Wii, PS3, Xbox 360.
That is a healthy count of users. Its also users on platforms which are likely to play 3d games to a big portion.

-->Again, in my comments i implied that people like developers and designers will probably in the forseeable future still use pretty similar to today computers, just the masses of people who are not designers/developers and neither need a propper highend desktop for their other kinds of work, for that huge majority its quite likely they will use something different than a big whopping desktop machine in the future for their casual computing needs. Like smartphones and tablets as can already be seen more and more.

-->well, that all would be nice if all you do in flash would get accelerated. But if you do any of the non molehill api stuff (so all you do now in flash) and all besides video does not get hardware accelerated, well, bad luck.

No, there is not a lot of confusion, people already discussed those points. That several dislike it that not all existing IDE and api/ language made stuff gets accelerated but only video and molehill using things is what many dislike. Just like that Adobe leaves the work of integrating it, doing a framework/ engine, doing editors etc to the community.
You´re fine with all that? Nice for you, but yeah, that doesn´t mean that others who are not satisfied with that don´t understand it and are just confused.

PV3D will evolve, not dead.

I will make a chorus with Slopester. Thank you very much.
Any time in Brazil, beers on me.

I am not interested on that new unity x molehill battle at all. Each  
project has its own needs and it is nice to have a lot of plataforms  
to choose which one fits best.

Cheers,
--
Pablo Cabana
(21) 9465-2125
Cabana Criação
(21) 2707-7020
www.cabanacriacao.com
Visite também o Cabanoblog:
www.cabanacriacao.com/blog

Em 28/10/2010, às 22:10, slopester <slope*******> escreveu:

The sticking point seems to be the lack of development on Adobe's part.

What does Unity do, that Adobe should do?

John

Most of your claims are valid enough, only they are mostly valid for
your line of work.

That is a count of platforms and not a count of users. Your also listing
3 platform that is mainly interesting for the gaming industry.

Define masses of people. I think you mean the masses of game players.

You are also talking about the future to try to defend your claims about
todays number (that Flash does not have great market penetration longer).

Exactly.

But all we do in Flash will not get accelerated. BTW: We left
papervision about a year ago and made our own custom engine that do
exactly what we need and not more. I expect we will most likely look at
porting our OpenGL stuff directly to Flash when Molehill appears, unless
Unity or some other technology magically get the same market penetration
at that time. This is a decision we will have to make in the future, not
today.

They aren't. Adobe will also be releasing a library code named Proscenium which will be a 3-D framework for developers.  They are focusing on making 3D accessible - it may not be as high-end as say, Alternativa, but that's OK according to them because they want to focus on making 3D accessible for basic functions and for people who don't need something as high-end as Alternativa.  This is according to one of the Adobe people I spoke to after the Flash Player 3D Future session. This seems to be a smart approach to me, focusing on the hardware acceleration and providing hooks for 3D engine developers who are years ahead anyway, while also providing a basic 3D API for developers who need nothing more.

Jason Merrill
Instructional Technology Architect
Bank of America  Global Learning

Hey Jason, did they talk about PB and it's role?  Just wondering if they
addressed shaders and access to that end of it?  if they're making a higher
level api for the general public (which is a very good thing), are they
planning on making standard shader sets as well in that same api?

--
[  JPG  ]

Fash Player 3D future Molehill on AdobeTV http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2010-develop/flash-player-3d-f[..]

Theres a pixel blender3d coming out, cant find the talk yet but theres this.
&feature=player_embedded

Just got this in the mail from Unity:

Our plugin install base passed 35 million

Again, penetration is NOT the point when it comes to 3D Game development for
the web.  People *will* download and install, especially when the install
for Unity is so painless (unlike other plugins).

--
[  JPG  ]

I see this all as a direct, long-needed volley into the hardware acceleration world that Unity is already in.  One of the Adobe Molehill engineers told me the reason they haven't done it yet is because it's very difficult to do, and they want to do it right.  Whether that's the right approach, I can't say, but I am glad to see them do this, it's LONG overdue to have 3D support in Flash done properly (and natively for that matter).

So kind of a bad time for Papervision3D team to give up. :) hahha - just joking John (half seriously).  But I will admit I nearly abandoned PV3D because of the z-depth sorting issues and lack of things like dynamic shadows, but I'm really excited for the future when Molehill takes off.  Really, the demos they showed in the sessions blew me away. The Away3D guys showed a tree they generated at random that had 40,000 polygons and then they duplicated the tree several times to bring the total polygon count on the screen to several million (I think they estimated about 4 million polygons) and the rendering was smooth, and the animation around them was smooth. It was very impressive.  They also showed a dynamic waving flag that showed cloth material could be dynamic and respond to things like wind or touching or whatever, and have little effect on performance.

Really, even with Unity already out the door, I think the future is bright for 3D on the Flash platform. Molehill by the way will also be supported in AIR and mobile.

Jason Merrill
Instructional Technology Architect
Bank of America  Global Learning

yeah, I'm glad they're finally taking these steps too.  I'd harped on 3D
back in MX beta and it was all met with contempt and mockery.  So, I'm a
little jaded now that we're on the other end of the spectrum and I'm looking
in say "I told you so."

Yeah now I wish I'd seen the demos, that sounds REALLY nice indeed.  That's
definitely where they need to be going.  As long as away's api is easy to
use/understand, you can bet I'll use it if need be.  They do some great
work.  I wasnt a fan of their untyped work, but that's been well over a year
if not 2yrs now.  I would hope they've changed that.

--
[  JPG  ]

Yeah, looks like that particular session is not up on Adobe TV (or at least not yet), but here are some YouTube links of some of them they showed:

Hardware accelerated Alternativa3D using Molehill:
&feature=related

(pay attention to the dynamic shadows and lighting effects produced by the monsters)


&NR=1

Hardware accelerated Away3d using Molehill:


Jason Merrill
Instructional Technology Architect
Bank of America  Global Learning

Slight diversion but thought some speculation on the code name.... I  
doubt it relates to

http://code.google.com/p/proscene/source/browse/testingprosc[..]

but seems interesting when reading this processing libraries

    "Proscene not only means a "pro-scene", but it is a two-phoneme word  
pronounced similar as the Czech word "prosím" (which     means "please"),  
obtained by removing the middle phoneme ("ce") of the word pro-ce-
ssing. Thus, the name "Proscene" suggests the main goal of the  
package, which is to help you shorten the creation of interactive 3D  
scenes in Processing."

It did make me wonder when following some links off the landing page..
http://codeanticode.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/glgraphics-0-9-[..]
http://www.libqglviewer.com/

anyway slight diversion you can go back to arguing about what's dead.

KK I think this pretty much answers my question... thanks guys !

*Guillaume Amringer*