I’m developing a prototype for a waterslide game and would like to use Away3D as the engine. I plan to use a map created in Cinema4D and import the Collada file, however this might not be the best approach. The game view would be 3rd person, with camera sitting just behind the player in the slide.

so I was also thinking that using Prefab3D would be another approach, like in this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-YKdVsO07s&feature=player_embedded

Just wondering if anyone from Away3D or the community would have any tips suggestions on strategies to developing this prototype. I thought it would make a good discussion topic since 3rd person 3d games are so common.

And our target Player is 10.x so we’ll be using Away 3.x

Any thoughts appreciated.

Getting the map into the engine shouldn’t be a problem. The problem will likely be physics. For this I would build a custom physics implementation I believe, where the player follows a pre-defined path. I would personally model the game level and draw the 3D bezier path in Blender and export it to some custom format that the game can read.

I’m assuming the user will be able to steer the person going down the water slide a little to the left and right? This could be solved by offsetting the player avatar perpendicularly to the travelling path. If the offset gets too big, the player will fall out of the slide (or you can just prevent it from getting that big.)

If you don’t want to do the math for whether the user is on the inner curve (bad for speed) or outer curve (good for speed) you could specify in your level data what parts of the path (specified by t in the bezier equations) should favor offsets to the left and right respectively.

thanks for the great reply.

i am experimenting with Blender now, as well as some other approaches using Cinema4D.

yes the user will steer as you described, pretty much similar to this shockwave game by starburst:
http://www.miniclip.com/games/waterslide-slalom/en/

i’m also entertaining the idea of faking the path directives by instead stepping through an array of sequenced direction changes that could be edited via JSON or xml config settings. so perhaps i’d simply playback rendered ‘left bank’ turns, ‘right bank’ turns, etc….. in more high-rez vid clips layered behind the user… totally hacky, but an idea to speed dev time.

i’d love to keep it all in a legit 3d world with real physics, but deadlines are tight and often times the hybrid hacky option ends up being the real-world solution.

hmmm….

http://www.miniclip.com/games/turbo-racing/en/

Guess. What 3D framework did they use to build this game? Very fast loading and rendering.

Shockwave…