Hi

I have an idea and I think Away3D will be the right tool to use for realizing my idea. But I’m not 100% it can do all the things I want so I’m going to list the features I want and it would be nice if you can say if it is possible to do with Away3D, and Flash, or not.

I want to create a .. “realistic” view of an island, the third largest island in Sweden, named Orust, to be exact. And I want to display it how it looked thought the centuries. How hoses, farms looked and where the roads where and so on. I have reached a deal with the Swedish mapping, cadastral and land registration authority so I get access to all the maps from 1900 and backwards. They are more or less bmp files of hand drawn maps. Going to use Inkscape to convert the maps to vector files.
I’m going to create a 3D surface from a Topo map over Orust, and its surroundings and use it as a base. The island is 150.20 sq mi small…

Needs:
a. I want the user to be able to walk around on the island and see how it looked at, say 1789.

b. I want to display trees, farms, fields and more.

c. I want the user to be able to change year/date so the surroundings will “morph” to the new date.

d. I want to display events, like fires, disasters and so on..

e. I want them to be able to click on a house, or an object, and get a list of persons living in that house and with links to other pages in my website.

Optional
1. Can I alter the island to display seasons, winter, summer ..  ?

2. Can I create it to be “multiplayer” (Better to leave out weapons here :) )

3. Can I add an “in game” chat?

4. Can I have moving animals? Birds, cows, horses..

5. Sounds, bird songs, wind, footsteps…

All 3D building will be created with Autodesk Inventor (I use it daily at work) and all information, persons who lived where and when will be available in a mysql db and php.

My background:
I’m extremely experienced with 3D games..  playing them. From Ultima Online to The Secret World. Are good with php and mysql and have taken a course in flash. Did a very advanced flash on halloumi cheese :).
Working with 3D as a profession, mostly Autodesk Inventor, but also Catia, Solidworks and a few more. 
Have made some Orange maps for Day of Defeat and some players actually liked them :)

I’m going to use Away3D and FlashDevelop when creating this. With GIMP, Inkscape and Notepad++ as a backup.

So, do you think it’s possible to create my dream?

Definitely one of the more interesting project ideas I have come across recently, but also certainly a very ambitious one. If you are on your own and having a day-time job, I believe it will take you years to realize.

Challenge is definitely the sheer amount of assets. Sounds like something you want to distribute old-school on CD, or as downloadable package (e.g. AIR app).

Another challenge will also be target hardware. As ActionScript is not necessarily the most performance / memory optimized language you will definitely run into problems in that end. That is, unless you use C libraries via alchemy or wait another year until ASNext (aka. ActionScript 4) comes available. Or simply ditch laptop computers altogether.

Definitely possible, but boy, does this sound like an incredibly huge project!

Hmm

My alternatives are using 2D maps on Mapserver or even Google Maps/Earth…
They might not need that much coding but the end result wont be as nice as with Away3D.

When you are talking about preference is it due to the map size or the “prettiness” of the rendering or is it all about triangles in view?

An other alternative is creating a desktop program but then I’m stuck with support of either one or two OS only.

Desktop wouldn’t be that big a deal using AIR. Deploys just as nicely and on the same OSes as the Flash Player Plugin.

Talking about performance I’m thinking more about memory management and streaming content than actual render performance. Away3D is a very capable render engine, but you need to continuously feed it with assets, and most importantly, with textures, given the “open-environment” nature of your idea. In your case, you have actually two asset dimensions. Not just location-based assets, but also time-based, which makes it somewhat exponential :D Still doable, but needs very clever asset/memory management.

Anybody with good ideas, be welcome to join this thread!

Where do you think I should start regarding this project?
Dive into the 3D creation or work on the time feature, or something else?

hi

sounds very interesting.

i would start with a smaller project. like a very small island and only some assets. this way you will get a feeling, how your assets should be made (in regards of teturesize, trianglecount, texturebaking etc…) before you start building a huge set of assets.

generall thinks like first-person-controlls and renderSettings should be easy to port over to a bigger project (island) later.

as alex pointed out, you will need a very good asset-managment to handle all the data you need. keep in mind that reusing stuff (textures/geometryData) is way to go to minimize memory.

i think displaying models for different times is one think to implement, displaying models for different wheater/seasons another, but both together they will be hard to achieve, while keeping performance up.

As others said performance and memory management will be serious challenge here, and if you want it to look “realistic” you may need to write some materials and shaders yourself.
I’d say if you’re familiar with C# or Javascript, give Unity engine a look, It will save you lots of headache.

Hi

After reading some tutorials and forum posts here and there I have noticed that some/many having problems with their scripts not working on some browsers or some OS. Is this a common problem, like IE incompatibility with the rest of the world, or is it just “bad scripting”?

Do I have to implement several hacks so Mac users can use it, see it, as same as Windows users and so on?

It’s both “bad scripting” and “bad flashplayer support”. You may experience problems on iOS and Android but it usually works without problem on Mac or Windows. Test showcases made with Stage3D.

1. It is certainly doable to the full extend you described it!
2. It will certainly take a lot of time and effort.
3. If you make it ‘scalable’, users with less powerful computers will be able to use it too -with some compromises of course.
4. As others wrote, you’ll need an advanced asset-management system which means an additional highly-optimized ‘engine’ made by yourself.
Everything is actually depended on the level of performance optimization of that asset engine in order to push literally millions of triangles and detailed textures and/or give the impression that your virtual world is huge without sacrificing the little detail.
5. If you plan to implement more projects, then it will be worthwhile -if you take care to make your engine and code in general, consistent, adaptable, scalable, modular, fast.

[ I’m actually doing exactly this, (huge world, highly detailed, database etc) but I’ve chosen an even more difficult path -to make my own 3D engine and custom database from scratch -with pure AS3 and Stage3D for maximum optimization and customization and because I couldn’t find the info and support I needed. After about 1 year of almost full time occupation, I’m slightly ahead of the point you are now with Away3D.
BTW I do not participate here anymore, I was just closing some old pages in an alternative browser when I saw your post…]

Good luck!

Regarding the asset management I found this:
http://code.google.com/p/bulk-loader/

Was reading this post at stackoverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1281946/howto-extend-loader-class-and-return-cached-assets-in-actionscript-flex-3

Do you think it’s something I should use in my project?