I’m releasing the source code for a Papervision3D game I was putting together. This project was meant to be an interactive visual for a party my friend threw last weekend, Friendly Integration. This game was meant to be projected onto a wall and controlled with a DDR pad for each player. There were also plans to have additional panels that could be stepped on that changed the “theme” of the game.

Below is a sketch of my initial idea for the project. I wanted to play with the idea of 2 people interacting with each other. Being side by side with the pads I wanted to give the players the ability to be friendly, or the opposite. I didn’t get to the point of executing these ideas as I barely had enough time available to get the basic engine running.

Conceptual sketch

This turned out to be more fun than I expected and I look forward to continuing development on it. It’s not a priority right now but I learned a lot about Papervision in the 15 hours it took me to put together. I didn’t get to doing a serious art pass on it which is unfortunate because it’ll look a lot cooler with some polish.

My inspiration for this was Bomberman and Poy Poy for PS1. I lifted the bomb artwork from a Bomberman drawing I did a while ago.

And the important part…

Play it here: http://blog.sokay.net/stuff/friendly/friendly_04.html

Download source: friendly_integration_src.zip

Note: This uses the Papervision3d 2.0 Great White code library. There are some fine video tutorials at gotoandlearn.com if you need help getting started with that.

My Papervision Demo

This scene is composed of 4 planes — the cop, the sidewalk, the shop, and the city. I positioned them within the scene with code. The animation is handled with code as well. I’m using Tweener to move the cop left and right, as well as his jump animation. The camera is targeting the cop.

I’m going to keep playing with this. I want to push it further by adding some movement to the rest of the scene, perhaps tweaking the rotation of the buildings as the camera moves.

If you’re looking to start with Papervision, there are some excellent video tutorials at gotoandlearn.com that’ll help you get started.

The Eco Zoo

This is the best executed 3d Flash site I’ve seen so far. Just check it out. Apparently this isn’t created with any open source 3d engine out there, it’s a custom engine by this guy.

3D on the web is sort of a gimmick right now, as Flash itself was seen as a gimmick in the past (i.e. your site wasn’t cool unless it had a Flash intro). All it really takes is some progressive individuals to define what’s possible with the advances of the medium — beyond spinning cubes and globes. Right now I see opportunities to tell stories in new and exciting ways. I’m hoping to take design elements from motion graphics and create interactive visual masterpieces. Couldn’t you imagine CartoonNetwork.com as a fully interactive playground? Kids would love that stuff. How come we aren’t seeing that yet??

Clint Hannaford’s Papervision Character demo

This demo impressed the hell out of me. It was proof that 3d character animation could be awesome in Flash. I’ve been dabbling in Papervision stuff lately. It’s an extra layer of complication on top of AS3 but the payoff is worth it. I created a model in Maya, textured it, and loaded it into Flash and made it interactive. Unbelievable…

For animation, I figured I could either setup some complicated character rig by separating the character at the joints and linking the pieces together. Setting all of that up and creating a system to animate the keyframes would be much to time consuming. renderhjs, from the Flashkit forum, was creating his own custom system of animating the character in the 3d software and exporting the animation frame by frame and playing through the keyframes. I don’t exactly have time to figure that out either so I found Clint’s post searching Google in distress.

Clint explained to me that his character demo uses .md2 format, from Quake 2. It’s similar to, if not the same as, renderhjs’ method of character animation. He linked to this Papervision md2 parser and recommended that I try loading in some Quake 2 models and seeing how it works.

CUBOCC face demo

Anyway, I saw this demo at http://cubo.cc/ today and it kind of shocked me. Apparently it’s a bit viral already, spreading around the net as it should. Some awesome coding, brilliant texturing and a simple design goes a long way, doesn’t it? The future of Google Adsense? Unfortunately, most likely! haha

But wait… that’s not all!

renderhjs’ 3d texturing demo

A dude that’s always impressing the hell out of me is renderhjs from the Flashkit forums. He’s always doing incredible tech demos and applications and his artwork kicks ass as well. He’s currently working on a 3d engine with a custom 3d format, with UV texturing. Now all he needs to do is an IK animation system. Check out his thread for it.

Papervision3d 2.0 site

Just in case you’re not familiar with what the open source 3d Flash engine Papervision3d is capable of, check out the official website. It’s a 3d underwater scene rendered realtime in Flash. Expect to see interfaces like this more often as developers embrace this technology even further.

Check it out!

It might not be the first Flash port, but it’s definitely the first that resembles the original in speed and resolution. I could totally imagine playing some deathmatch in this thing. Can’t wait till something like that is available.

It’s also worth nothing that this was not created using Flash. It was developed on Linux using open-source/free Flex tools.

This reminds of back in 2001 or so when I saw a demo for a Quake 3 looking engine in Shockwave running incredibly fluidly. I recall it being a Q3 port of some sort because it was created by the same company that ported Q3 to Dreamcast, Raster Productions. I’m assuming it was some kind of port because they removed the demo after a short while, I believe because of legal matters.