JSAway is a spin-off of Away3D which provides web developers access to the high performance graphics capabilities of the engine, through JavaScript. Currently based of V2.0, JSAway exposes implementations of the API and provides other supporting functionality to allow complex scenes to be created and animated providing full interaction between the web page and the 3D scene.

JSAway is still in early development but from the examples, you can easily see it’s potential in opening up 3D on the web to different community. All the examples use the same single SWF file, while the underlying web page’s JavaScript code controls what is going on.

Some of the features of JSAway.

• JavaScript only - no ActionScript knowledge required.
• simple command reference exposes huge range of features
• all API basic primitives can be used
• basic 3D event handling
• filter based effects on objects
• simple custom tweening operations
• simple bitmap manipulation, get/set pixel and draw bitmap
• getting/setting of object properties
• material handling
• content (materials and 3D models) loading - bitmaps, sketchup, dae…..
• powerful features including lathe, extrudes, elevations, etc are supported
• custom tweening of object properties
• various automatic camera functions - object tracking, panning, etc
• simple mouse navigation controls - rotation and twisting the scene based on mouse movement

For further details and to check out the examples :-

http://www.geepers.co.uk/jsaway/examples/index.html - The examples

http://www.geepers.co.uk/jsaway/index.html - Full details and downloads

http://away3d.com/jsaway - JSAway details on Away3D

We hope you find it useful.

The Away3d Team

Away3d 2.1 bring some welcome assistance to getting starting with the engine - a revamped documentation section (now included in the svn) and a brand new demos download containing code examples which will continue to be updated as more are written.

As well as this, there are some updates to the engine that should help with general use, including:

• Simplified events model - listeners can be added using the supplied methods or with the standard addEventListener method of the EventDispatcher.
• Event types listed as static classes.
• Simplified BitmapRenderSession use.
• Object primitives have dynamic property setters that can be adjusted after instantiation.
• Merged AlphaBitmapMaterial class (all bitmapmaterials now support alpha and color properties).
• Dot3 and Enviro materials take the bitmap for shading maps as a required argument.
• Improved material access on individual sides of the cube primitive

plus the usual bug fixes and housekeeping updates.

As usual there is a new tag in the googlecode svn, and a new download zip in the downloads section.

Something else that is probably worth drawing attention to is the issues section of the googlecode repository. Our mailing list has been very successful at being used for bug reports in the past, but to prevent any future reports from being accidentally overlooked, we would urge everyone to start logging their bugs in this list.

Also, for those wanting to find a few more tutorials for Away3d, be sure to have a look at the External Site section of the tutorials page.

Enjoy the new release!

The Away3d Team