I know classes are being worked on in a queue and are appearing one at a time, but these are the two I’m really after - in fact they’re probably the only remaining ones I’ll need.

If there’s any chance of them appearing sooner rather than later… please?

Big up to the team and thanks for what you’ve delivered so far.  It really is an awesome piece of work and soooo much fun!

Hello, and thanks for you comments.

Why do you need the wumedia classes, and what prevents you from adding them to your project yourself? Are you really after vector drawing in 3D? Because that’s a very complex feature (that doesn’t work as well on the GPU as it did in Flash “fake 3D”) that we are researching.

Hi Richard,

I need them because most of what I’m doing involves loading swf files, pulling out vector data and MovieClips and rendering them in 3D.  Vector is nice too because there is a lot of zooming involved and it keeps it nice and clean.  I know I can grab the bitmapdata from the movieclip, but that’s not ideal.

I don’t actually need the GPU to render the MovieClipSprites or the Wu MovieClips as I don’t have many of them - the GPU is only needed to render a load of LinearExtrudes.

I could try and implement these classes myself, but it might be biting off more than I can chew!  Fabrice indicated a while back that a port was being planned, but if this is no longer the case then I’ll look into doing it myself and seeing how I get on. 

Does the increased complexity of vector drawing in Molehill mean this is going to be difficult or can I just draw them “old-skool” without involving the GPU at all - bascially just taking the classes from 3.6?

Cheers.

Vector drawing is indeed a planned feature, but like I said it can’t really be done in a good way on the GPU (without tessellation, or some really odd shader techniques). Of course one can do them on the CPU instead, in the regular display list, but then the problem is that they can’t be properly sorted and composited with the “real 3D” content, which means that you would always have the vector 3D in front of the mesh geometry, regardless of their relative positions in the virtual 3D space. There are of course ways to work around this with masking and whatnot, but those kinds of solutions are all hacks that we would not put in the engine, but that you would have to build yourself (because they are not general purpose and, well, hacks.)

So although you might feel that you don’t need vectors to be drawn on the GPU for this project, we need to build it that way, and that is something that is being researched, but will most likely not make it into 4.0. So don’t hold your breath, because you’d might have to wait a couple of months or more before anything like that even begins to make it into the engine.

I’m sorry that we are not able to meet these exact needs at this point. Vector graphics is something that we got for free in older versions because we were doing all our drawing with the Flash Graphics API anyway. It’s also something that you will rarely (if ever) see in game engines et c, so there is not much information on good practices on this subject, meaning a lot more research work for us.

Thanks Richard - that’s probably saved me a lot of time going down blind alleys. I still have to do what I have to do, but I’m just going to have to think of another way around it.

There is one possibility for me when it comes to hacks - there are two bits of vector drawing I need to do - one is always behind the 3d content and one is always in front.  Is it possible to layer vector graphics in this way or am I restricted to putting the vectors in front only?

There is no way to draw Stage3D content in front of the display list, but you can of course draw the back part of the vectors to a bitmap data and use it as a texture on a plane behind everything in your 3D scene. If that plane always faces the camera, the effect will be that of having a display list behind the Stage3D content.

That sounds like a sensible approach.  Thanks a lot - I’ll proceed in that general direction.

Maybe there is still less cost solution of this issue if possible, by converting all vector shapes to flatten 3d meshes geometries with solid color material applied for each mesh ..... as I think.

I hope this could be possible and easy ... please.