You can read all about the 4.1 release in this blog post.

We have also introduced a brand new wiki-style tutorials section, with many new basic and intermediate tutorials. The wiki makes it very easy for any Away3D member to produce tutorial content. We hope that this soon becomes a valuable resource for our community.

We would love to hear your feedback, so if you have any comments, please leave them in this thread.

Enjoy!

The process
The AWD2 file format has been a work in progress for about a year now. Almost since day one, backwards and forwards compatibility have been major goals for the format. Because of this, we needed to be really happy with the format before locking down the 2.0 version, because we can’t make any breaking changes to it after that.

Over the past two months I’ve been working on a 3ds Max exporter, and in the process, have been finalizing the structure of the file format. Part of this work was making a couple of changes to the format that needed to be done before it was locked down. These were changes that will aid in keeping the format backwards compatible, but the changes themselves were not backwards compatible with the work-in-progress state that the format has been in for a couple of months before these changes.

What were the changes?
The changes involved a number of things, some of which are listed below:
- The entire file format is now little-endian instead of big-endian. Big-endian is traditionally recommended for streaming, and this is the reason it was originally chosen for AWD. However, having thought this through again, I concluded that the effect that endianness has on application-level streaming is very small, and since most devices nowadays use little-endian the performance benefits of making the format little-endian outweighs the tiny restrictions imposed on streaming. This will allow for future optimizations of encoding and decoding, especially in languages like Javascript (i.e. for a future WebGL implementation.)
- The “optimize for accuracy” flag for geometry and matrices have been removed in favor of per-block and per-stream (see below) equivalents.
- Data streams (basically the geometry data like vertices, indices, UV coordinates et c) are now data-type agnostic. This means for example that vertex positions can be stored as integers if the encoder wants to. This improves our ability to change the way data is encoded in the future, and it allows encoders to optimize for size or accuracy on a per-stream basis.
- Most blocks that define 3D transformation now use 3x4 matrices instead of 4x4 matrices. For skeletal animation this can reduce the file size with 25%!

What does this mean?
This means that if you pull from GitHub today, you will get an AWD2Parser that will no longer be able to parse your existing AWD files. You will be getting weird runtime errors whenever you try to load an “old” AWD2 file.

Existing content
For your current short-term projects I recommend that you stick with the old AWD2Parser. If you want to stay up to date with the rest of Away3D, pull as usual but check out an older version of just the AWD2Parser.as file and keep that around.

For long-term projects, schedule a conversion (re-export) of your AWD2 files as soon as the necessary changes have been made to your exporter of choice. Right now, the only exporter that is guaranteed to work with the new format is the Max exporter that will be released in the next couple of days. Other exporters (blender, Maya) have not yet been tested with the new AWD SDK after the changes. I will post in this thread once they are stable.

Going forward
This is intended to be the last breaking AWD2 change ever. From now on, the plan is for the format to be backwards and forwards compatible throughout it’s lifetime.

Because the SDK is now “stable” (in terms of the format of the files that it generates) focus will now be on further developing the tools that use the SDK (i.e. exporters and utilities) as well as documentation.

Sorry if this causes any inconvenience in your projects. Thanks for your understanding!

From casual coffee-break to frenetic arcade action, hardcore RPG to social-networked heaven, if any of the above is true, then we would like to hear from you to help us compile a list of eligible showcase material for the upcoming GDC conference in San Francisco (Mar 25th - 29th). Rules are simple - the game must use Away3D in some form and must have an available version to play by the time the conference expo opens (although we’ll need to see something before then obviously). The lucky selected few will get free exposure at the Adobe gaming booth, courtesy of the Away3D platform and Adobe Gaming SDK!

Reply inline below if your game is already in the public domain, or PM me if you are still in stealth-mode and need NDAs signed before any details can be given. This will be a great way to get your game showcased at the world’s largest and longest-running games industry event for free, so if you have something to show, make sure you don’t miss out on this fantastic opportunity.

some cool code
http://wonderfl.net/user/ProjectNya/codes
http://wonderfl.net/user/mousepancyo/codes
http://wonderfl.net/user/romatica/codes

As a bit of an experiment and a way of involving the community more, I would be interested for anyone with a cool demo, site or experiment in Away3D that they would like to see showcased at the conf to get in touch.

As there is not much time, I would need submissions to be made before friday this week, after which I’ll notify those demos who we plan to show. The showcase will take place as part of my “Forward the Foundation” presentation on Tuesday. A URL is fine, just make sure that you include credit to the company and client where appropriate so that I can do the same.

Cheers!

To help you update your projects and quickly step into the 4.0 code,
we have prepared the following for you:

- examples
- integration examples
- documentation

You can download Away3D 4.0 here on our site or pull it from our github repository here.

Read more on the website

We hope you will enjoy the release!

The Away3D Team

J

We are creating our 2012 showreel, and want to include as many examples from the community as we can!

If you have created something cool/quirky/insane/beautiful/etc and would like it to be included, please reply below or send me a PM. From a small personal demo to a high profile game or site, all entries will be considered. (although the latter will require permission from your company)

The cutoff date for showreel submissions is Friday 11th May.

Cheers!

Rob

- General User Forum
- Away3D User Forum
- AwayPhysics User Forum

The idea is that we start separating discussions by software kind. Discussions that are not specifically related to Away3D or AwayPhysics should go into the General User Forum category. Discussions that are specific to Away3D or AwayPhysics should go into their appropriate categories.

Other categories like “Prefab User Forum”, other software that we are working on, or software that might arise in the future, should have their own categories as well.

The tag/filtering mechanism will continue to work but will no longer refer to “software type”, but rather to “software version”, hence, categories will split software types and tags will help differentiate software versions or releases. This refactor to the tag system is not yet finished, but should occur very soon. For now, please continue using the available tags you find most appropriate for your discussions.

We hope that these changes act as a benefit to everyone!
Please let us know if you have any comments about this.

for more info go to http://away3d.com/comments/away3d_4.0_beta_released

for the download, see http://away3d.com/download/

Cheers

The Away3D Team