I recently needed to do a little flash app allowing people to draw using the mouse, and then save the data on a server. The most generic and compatible way of doing this I think is converting the shape data to SVG. Below I've listed the code which does this simple conversion. I've stripped a lot of stuff out here to keep this code quite minimal, eventually it would be much better to draw (and save) as curves (instead of straight lines) and do some curve optimization, but that is not within the scope of this post. Also you can add many drawing/painting features to the app like circles, rectangles, text etc.. and just add the corresponding text to the SVG info. Some good SVG documentation can be found at www.w3.org/TR/SVG.

See a demo of it in action here.

Another example of an AS3 3D Sprite based particle system. This one is using my 3D sprite engine but will port this to papervision asap. See it here.

The source code is by no means generic enough to be considered an engine or library, but is work in progress. I will extend the Node3D, SpringyNode3D classes to use Papervision3D and the Billboards for the rendering, and will definitely carry on working on the particle systems. I've also been converting a lot of noise functions to AS3 and will post them soon... its all getting quite exciting in the flash world! :P

I've been using papervision for a short while now and have been very impressed so far (hopefully soon I"ll upload some demos and code), but in the meantime I wanted to look at the performance of the new Billboard rendering and see how much (if any) overhead there was.

After examining the code at http://www.sebleedelisle.com/?p=157 I ported my AS3 3D Sprite Flies demo to Papervision using the builtin Papervision3D Billboard rendering and the results were very encouraging. The Papervision version doesn't behave exactly like my 3D Sprite engine version, I think this is due to difference in units and needs number tweaking, but I didn't bother with that for now, just adjusted it a tiny bit to make it look roughly the same in terms of pixel coverage (also couldn't figure out how to rotate the papervision billboards, dont think you can). But most importantly the performance seems identical, which means the
Papervision Billboard system is very efficient and does not have any
overheads.

A 3D particles system using Action Script 3. See it here. This does not use Papervision 3D or any other 3D engine but just a simple custom 3D sprite based engine. Not sure whether I should spend time enhancing this or just use Papervision for this kind of stuff. I've used it a bit and it looks great (will post some stuff soon), but I don't know if there is any unnecessary overheads for just 3D sprite stuff. When I get a chance I"ll recreate this demo in Papervision and compare the results.

P.S. They are my babies!

Click attachment below to view.

A volleyball derivative flash game posing as a christmas card. Fully themeable and currently includes 2 skins, main skin by Dirk van Dijk, 2nd skin by Jane Laurie.

Play the game HERE.

P.S. Turn the snow off via the menu if its a bit slow.

P.P.S. Instructions on how to create a theme can be found here if you are interested.