War of Omens

The Away Foundation at Reasons to be Creative

The Away Foundation is pleased to announce its involvement at this years Reasons to be Creative conference in Brighton, UK. This year, Rob Bateman will be presenting a brand new talk on the emergence of accelerated 3D use on the web.

"New Adventures in 3D" will include a showcase of current areas of research, some forays into the more technical aspects of whats possible with today's technology, and a smattering of insights into the what the future holds for this burgeoning area of web development. Full details can be found in the session description here.

K. O. L. M.

Away3D 2014 Showreel

This year's showreel video covers an incredible breadth of interactive content, from 1st person sports games to RPGs, technically impressive marketing campaigns to perfectly formed indie darlings.

As mere framework wranglers we constantly find something new & impressive in the creative output you the community produce, and so we hope you enjoy this year's homage to the artists & experimentalists of the Away3D world in 2014.

The Away Foundation at Multi Mania

Multi Mania is a conference now in its 14th year, that brings together some of the best creative technologists from around the world for two days of presentations on design, developement and entrepreneurship. We are pleased to announce that Rob Bateman will be speaking on some of the latest work being done at The Away Foundation for the native web.

The conference is free for all attendees, and attracts some 2000 professionals & students to Kortrijk Belgium every year - this year from 19-20th May.

We'll be talking about some of the new libraries currently in development that build on the abilities of Away3D, making them the perfect path for those interested in taking their first steps in GPU accelerated native web applications & games. The presentation is called Introducing AwayJS, and you can find out more by reading the second day schedule here.

Away3D Typescript training at DevGAMM Moscow

The Away Foundation is pleased to announce a second training day for Away3D Typescript will be held in Moscow as part of the annual DevGAMM conference.

The previous training held in Kiev in December last year was a blast, and we now hope to repeat this success in slightly warmer climes

The one-day workshop will take place on the 17th May, the day after DevGAMM. Cost is currently only $100 (£66) for the entire day, but hurry as these early-bird tickets are in limited supply!

The agenda follows a similar pattern to our previous training sessions, with full details along with payment options found on our eventbrite page (For those looking to pay in rubles, we have setup a parallel registration page on Timepad). Location is at the Neuron Hackspace in central Moscow.

Our presenter Rob Bateman will also be giving a talk about Away3D Typescript at DevGAMM Moscow as part of the conference, alongside a selection of great speakers from around the globe. More details can be found here.

FloorPAD

Away3D at FITC Amsterdam 2014

Away3D and The Away Foundation are please to be a part of the upcoming FITC conference in Amsterdam. The 2 day event will run from Feb 24th-25th and includes a wide range of presentations from the world of art, technology and creative design.

Rob Bateman will be presenting a session on the new work we are doing with Away3D in Typescript and WebGL. The talk will be held on Tuesday afternoon in the in the Voodoo lounge, a special innovation track run by the good people at Influxis. You can find full details of the session here.

Away Foundation roadmap 2014

Welcome to another roadmap post, a condensed report outlining some of the areas we will be focussing on over the next few months. This year, we are looking to dedicate time to several new development platforms, extending the Away3D engine's reach and offering more publishing options to our user base. We also have planned upgrades to existing libraries and tools.

Away3D Typescript and WebGL

Late last year, we made an initial exploration of the WebGL world with our Alpha release of Away3D Typescript. The community response has been incredibly positive, and thanks go to everyone who has been involved so far in creating demos, writing articles and assisting with development. Our appearances at Mozfest and Devgamm  gave us an opportunity to collect even more feedback from developers. This has led to expanded thinking around future work and the potential application of the library, based on the requirements we see in the Typescript & Javascript world.

One action we have taken early this year is to split the existing Typescript library in two - a core library for Stage3D and displaylist-related APIs, and a separate library for the existing Away3D TS implementation. We will be publishing more details on the former in the next week or so, but the general idea is to assist the proliferation of graphics libraries on the web by creating a simple WebGL-enabled API for developers to use as a base for custom rich media frameworks. In the meantime, we will be continuing work on the latter, looking to publish a beta with a completed port sometime in March.

An exciting development in this area is a new collaboration between The Away Foundation and Gamua. The creators of the 2D Actionscript library Starling have been working on a Typescript / WebGL port (codenamed StarlingJS) that due to recent scoping priority changes was looking at an uncertain future. After discussing options with Starling author and Gamua co-founder Daniel Sperl, we are pleased to announce that as of today we will be taking over the development of StarlingJS, working with Gamua to integrate the conversion with our newly separated Stage3D layer in Typescript. This brand new project will be managed under The Away Foundation, and we look forward to revealing more about the library in the very near future. You can read more about the motivations for the switch over at the Gamua blog.

Away3D 4.2 & Away3D Flash

Our commitment to the development of Away3D in Flash will continue this year with a planned update for the Away3D codebase to version 4.2. Details of the featureset are still being finalised, but some prominant features taking priority include:

• Deferred lighting renderer
• Dynamic 3D Text & Vector tesselation
• Animation system extensions
• Material enhancements & gamma correction

The focus of 4.2 development will be heavily biased towards rendering and speed improvements, while retaining an emphasis on simplified internal APIs for easy extensibility. Further details, including estimates on timelines and release dates, will be revealed later this month.

Away3D OpenFL

Now for an entirely new area of development. We have for the first time been experimenting with code for a Haxe port of Away3D 4.1. For those new to the project, Haxe is an open source language designed to be used in the creation of multi-platform content. You can find out more on Haxe and the Haxe Foundation by going to http://haxe.org/.

While Haxe is a familiar platform to older Away3D versions, previous reasearch into a compatible implementation of Stage3D for cross-platform development left us will a few stumbling blocks. Several recent updates have changed all that, with the introduction of OpenFL being the most significant milestone for improving both the compatibility and reach of native Haxe applications. We've now had quite a bit of success with an experimental branch of the Away3D 4.1 codebase written in Haxe, compiling to cpp, HTML5 and Flash targets. For a demonstration of the current capabilities of Away3D OpenFL, watch this video by core team member Greg Caldwell.

Development is still very much ongoing and currently only a few examples are up and running with the system, but early successes have been very encouraging. You can download a preview version of the source from the official github repo at https://github.com/away3d/away3d-core-openfl. A video of experiments with some of the OpenFL-compatible platforms derived from the cpp target can be viewed here.

We love the direction OpenFL is taking the Haxe platform, and look forward to making a full port of the Away3D engine available for this vibrant community of developers. The flexible approach to multiple platform targets that OpenFL offers is still in its early stages, but we highly recommend anyone with a passing interest in open-source, multi-platform authoring to check out its capabilties at http://www.openfl.org/

Away Builder

The official Away3D workflow tool Away Builder is also in line for significant improvements this year, including additional UI elements for editing and previewing animations, materials and AWD output options. We are expecting new features to focus around data processing tools, designed to simplify the creation and management of 3D scenes, such as:

• Procedural terrain generation
• Cell partition generation
• Pre-baked lightmap handling
• Mesh tools for vertex manipulation

Away Builder updates will be tied-in with ongoing updates to the AWD format, the official file format for Away3D. Last year saw the move from AWD 2.0 to AWD 2.1 with many useful additions to the data storage capablities of an AWD file. To maintain a cross-platform workflow, we will continue the development of the AWD format across all Away3D codebases, ensuring Away Builder is capable of integrating a workflow into any platform utilising the Away3D engine. Parallel to this work, we will be continuing the creation of support material for Away Builder, with more video tutorials, steo-by-step guides and documentation.

Contribute!

We always welcome community contributions, so if any of the plans outlined above sound like something you'd be interested in getting involved with, don't be shy! There are many ways you can help out - on Github through our issues tracker, on the forums with answers and advice on technical issues, on Twitter and Facebook with info about your latest experiments and projects. If you have an idea for a specific feature not mentioned here (and the items above are by no means an exhaustive list), or you are working on a project that may result in extensions you'd be willing to donate back to the community, you can get in contact directly through the comments section below.

Happy 2014!

The Away3D Team

Away3D 4.1.6 Release

The Away3D Team & The Away Foundation are pleased to announce a new update of the Away3D Flash engine, Away3D 4.1.6. This update contains may fixes and optimisations to the core functionality of the library, and we recommend updating any projects currently using Away3D 4.1 to take full advantage of these improvements. The release has also been fully tested with the newly launched Flash Player 12 and AIR 4.0 runtimes (release notes here), 

Alongside the fixes and optimisations, there have been several minor additions to functionality in order to assist with some problems we see regularly in Away3D use. These include:

• Automatic smoothing option on 3DS files with no smoothing group data
• Better event handling for adding and removing efffects methods on materials
• Spritesheet animator compatibility with shadows
• Coordinate system selector on lenses allowing the use of either left or right-handed projection systems

For a full list of fixes and updates, please view the Changelog.txt file in the master branch. A big thanx goes out to all community members who submitted pull requests or issue reports to the github repo - we are truly grateful for the help and support!

As always, you can visit the Away3D downloads page for binaries, source code and examples links. Or you can grab a bleeding-edge build from our github repos for core and examples.

Enjoy the new release!