The promising and impressive russian 3D engine is available to download at this adress http://alternativaplatform.com/en/alternativa3d/. Usage is free of charge for personal non profit and you must register to download the swc files.

Demos (flash player 10):

API Documentation:
http://help.alternativaplatform.com/en/client/package-summary.html

And tutorials:
http://docs.alternativaplatform.com/dashboard.action, but still written in russian for the moment. It doesn’t matter : AS3 language is international!

Let’s try this engine and compare it with Papervision and Sandy 3D (which are open-source).

Thibault Imbert has just released a new book on actionscript 3.0 in french : “Pratique d’actionscript 3″.

At first, his book was written to be published by O’Reilly but is finally published on the web under creative common licence.

In the 1100 pages he develops events, garbage collector, sockets, bytes arrays, sounds and more and more and more. It’s a really huge work.

Thibault is famous for his blog bytearray, and his work on wiiflash, alive pdf, gif player…

You can get a pdf version here :  http://pratiqueactionscript3.bytearray.org/. A paper version will be available soon.

In my last project I lost some time just to set a textformat to a simple textfield. The font was well linked in the librairy, but the textformat (particularly the font) didn’t apply to the textfield.

I found the reason : flash renames bitmap fonts and adds the suffix : _SIZEpt_st.

- Verdana becomes Verdana_12pt_st
- Arial becomes Arial_12pt_st
- etc.

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My first Papervision project is online, yyyeeaaahhh!!!

With my company, I’ve developped the new Diesel Factory website. Now you can customize your own fragrance bottle and watch the result live in 3d.

Have a look at : http://www.diesel-factory.com.
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In Papervision, the 3D Objects are defined in Collada files. Collada files are just XML files with a specific DTD (or schema). In consequence, colladas inherit the same qualities and defects as XML. One of the main defect is the file size which can be a major problem if you’re doing an online application.

Here a little tutorial to display a zipped collada in a papervision application : demo (more…