Our application is called "funanbulle". The goal of the application is to allow families to create their own micro virtual world and gather. We wanted to show what such virtual worlds would look like. The idea was to enable people to share and chat in real time with a fun and engaging user experience.

funanbulle, Aerys' #air24h challenge contribution

The application is nothing more than a proof of concept. If we had enough time, we would have added lots of feature like:

• Audio chat
• Photos and videos sharing
• Interactive objects to trigger applications (games, sharing applications, etc...)

In the end, we had just enough time to build a 3D chat. But I think it was a lot of fun and it looks really nice! Here is a quick video to show what funanbulle is about and how it works:

This video was made by Michael Chaize to show the 14 applications created during the contest.

To install the application, just click on the following picture to go to the install badge:

When the application starts, you will be asked to "join" or "create" a room:

• If you don't have a room number: select "create a room" to create a new room. When the room is created, you'll join in automatically join it. The room number will be visible in the top right corner. You can share it with your friends and family to enable them joining your room.
• If you have a room number (because a friend already created a room and gave you its number for example): select "join a room", type your room number and click "Go". And voilà!

You can use the bottom text input to chat with your friends. But you can also launch special actions by typping one of the following commands:

• /jump
• /wait
• /sit
• /use
• /wave

We hope you'll like it and have fun with it!

I would be more than happy to talk about the software, the way I built it and the technical choices that drove its development. I will  also try to emphasize what makes this library different through a few demonstrations.

Depending on the agenda of one of my co-worker, we might also present a very cool piece of software I never spoke about!

You can read more about the event here (in french).

It's been a while since the last post. But I'm back and I decided to release the first DirectFlex demo ever

This demo is quite simple and features a 3D model extracted from the famous Half Life 1 add on Counter-Strike 1.6. The model is made of "only" 740 polygons, which is not much compared to what DirectFlex can do. Still, being able to display Half Life 1 models inside of Flash with a decent framerate brings hope for future developments. Anyway it is a good proof that DirectFlex is (way) faster than any other Flash 3D "engine" out there... but hey! live demo first and then technical stuff... (Flash 10 required!)

First Person Shooter Camera

This demo features one of the camera classes provided by DirectFlex: FPSCamera. This camera mimics the behavior of a any "classic" doom-like FPS game. Simple use the arrows/AWSD to walk forward/backward/strafe. You can also use the mouse to look around. Nothing fancy except the camera class itself which is really lightweight and easy to overload: I actually created a GhostCamera class based on the FPSCamera class by just adding 2 lines of code... All the camera classes are based on the same AbstractCamera class which makes it possible and really easy to switch from one camera type to another in real time in your application. I will release another demo to show how simple the code actually is.

3DS Loader

A good opportunity to show the 3DS loader in action. Loading and parsing are obviously really fast. The 3DS file is embed inside the SWF file which of course makes it even faster. The 3DS loader was built using this documentation.

Texture Mapping

The texture I used is the original one. I just resized it to make the final SWF file lighter. Nothing crazy about it except that it looks perfectly fine without cutting down the framerate.

Embed Assets

The texture and the 3D model files are embed inside the final SWF file. The mesh and texture class provided by DirectFlex can load such embed assets natively. It is very useful when you just want to redistribute your application without taking care of deploying the assets on a web server and dealing with security issues.

Real Time Lighting

As you can see, the back of the model is completely black. It does not mean that the texture is actually black Each polygon is skinned then lighted using a "fake" Phong algorithm. It is a very first draw and a lot of thinking has to be done to make it actually user friendly. Still, because the light and the model are not moving the "real time" part is not really obvious here... I'll try to make it more fancy in the next demo.

About performances

The framerate counter indicates 20-25 frames per second. The application does not force the framerate so the Flash Player runs it at the default framerate (which is supposed to be 24 frames per second). Then, a 20 to 25 frames per second framerate is actually as smooth as it is supposed to be It runs perfectly on my Atom 1.6Ghz processor so I guess any decent computer should run it without any performance issue of any kind.

Known issues

The mouse is not handled properly and its sensitivity will depend on the framerate of the application. If your framerate is to high, looking around might be tricky. I know how to fix that but I'm just to lazy to do it for this first demo

Z-sorting is not (yet) functional and some glitches might appear. I chose the 3D model carefully so that no major visual defects would occur.

Clipping and frustrum culling are not fully implemented. Major artifacts might appear when the model is rendered is the "back" of the camera.

What's next ?

A MD5 (Doom 3 models) loader is on its way and I will certainly try to load Half Life 2 models too. I am currently working with Alchemy v0.5a to build a fast C++ implementation of BSP trees to implement an efficient and reliable z-sorting algorithm. I will definitely post about Alchemy and my whole C/C++ to AS3 work. I will also release a very cool heightmap demo soon, with some source code to show how user friendly DirectFlex actually is. Other cool demos will follow... Finally, the official DirectFlex blog will be launched soon!

Do not hesitate to post any ideas and comments about how smooth the demo runs on your computer for example.