Sometimes coming from only one side of a problem restricts your view on the best way to evolve. In recent experiments with the latest Flash10 player, we have been testing how starting from a native cs4 approach fares when constructing a 3d framework, and have discovered a few interesting facts about Flash 10’s renderer. Some of these nuggets include the following:

1. DisplayObject sorting is a much faster option than triangle sorting.
2. Fixed length Vector data stores are faster than linked lists when it comes to manipulating large data sets.
3. Sorting using index references is much faster (and easier) than ordering screenvertex vectors
4. …

The above demo is one such test, and nicely illustrates where we feel Away3d is going after the textfields/shapes merge that will be version 2.4. Click to add more globes – speeds vary between machines but it seems most that have tried the test can manage up to 20,000 unsorted triangles, still running at 30fps.

Moving you mouse to the right or left side of the screen will switch the current z-sort algorithm on or off, and you can see with higher numbers of triangles there is a significant performance drop when sorting is activated. This uses a brute-force method  – in more recent tests it seems a better approach is to sort in convex groups, and we will hopefully be able to post more on this soon.

The Away3d Team

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