Archive for May, 2009

Easy Papervision3D space dust tutorial and source

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Many space shooters use this concept where you are the pilot that looks out from the front window, lasering down enemies for bounty, right. Ever noticed spacedust? It’s very subtle when it is used, but it adds to the realism of outer space, making the space feel less empty, less static.

Here’s how you can do that in Papervision3D, using ParticleFields. I’ve used the trunk of the papervision code repository, revision 851, but it should work with the last release without to much hassle. Note that I’m no PV3D guru; I just started to learn this stuff and I’m just sharing what I’ve learned so far.

This movie requires Flash Player 10

(note: space dust uses the skybox from the skybox tutorial)
    Here’s how it works:

  • divide space into a 3d grid and parts of the spacedust cloud on 8 gridpoints directly around the camera (the ship), we’ll call these dustpockets
  • when the camera moves, dustpockets are removed and created to keep only the 8 gridpoints around the ship occupied

read on

JSF is a diamond in the rough, you just need to make it shine

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

[RE: JSF – Still pretty much a steaming pile of donkey turd] – I was replying to Wille Faler’s post about why JSF sucks, when the comment was getting too large, so I made it into a post on my own blog.


JSF is hard to learn yes, but in my opinion it doesn’t suck as bad as Wille says. All the points Wille mentions can be solved by certain libraries or write-once reusable solutions (I’ve included my ‘magical’ combination of frameworks on the bottom). JSF is a diamond in the rough, you just need to make it shine.

read on

Easy Papervision3D skybox tutorial and source

Friday, May 22nd, 2009
This movie requires Flash Player 10

Adding a skybox in Papervision3D is extremely easy. I couldn’t find a whole lot of examples/tutorials about skyboxes in Papervision3D, but I managed to find a skybox tutorial source and learned how to do it. The tutorial I got the initial source from is actually about adding stars using particle fields, but I just used the skybox part of it (and used the textures).

I decided to clean it up and make a nice class out of it. I’ve used the trunk of the papervision code repository, revision 851, but since it’s very basic stuff I doubt it’ll break with future versions.

 

read on