JiglibFlash is a great physics engine for the flash platform. Combined with Papervision 3D you can do some amazing stuff. The library has been recently updated and now not only contains a car physics model, but mouse constraints. The mouse contraint can add a new level of interactity to your scene.

I’ve been dying to try it out, and finally after moving house i finally got my lil studio / junk room setup. Below I have created a basic scene in which several block fall from the sky on init. These can then be picked up and thrown, interacting with other objects. Just a finishing touch I Though it would be good to have shadows. The code of which is from the brilliant Andy Zupko (Article on shadow casting). Anyway, I’ve provided the code below with ample commenting.

(Please open the article to see the flash file or player.)

Download JigLibFlash

Download Papervision

Download source

So I installed the Air for flash update and though to myself “This shouldnt be too hard”. As you all know these are famous last words for any developer. It turns out that the debugging in flash for air is none existant.

Quickly, I jumped onto google and found Arthropod, a debugging utility and class built in Air. I’m now happily porting my code with great ease. It has some really really useful features suich as color coded output ( customisable), object trace, snapshot, and memory monitoring. Overall a great utility which I cant reccomend enough

Arthropod

PapervisionX will be a complete rewrite of the v2 engiine to take advantage of the 3D api within Flash 10. The Idea is that the engine will be completely rebuilt but retain the same api. This will lead to apparent improvements in speed, quality, and filesize.

This by no means puts a nail in the coffin for 2.0 which will be continued until such a point where Flash Player 10s adoption is sufficient. There will also still be updates to 2.0.

Although there isnt a release dat as yet I’m very excited to see the technology is being developed to use all the latest features available. For more info click the link below.

PapervisionX – what it is and what it isn’t « Papervision3D

If you are using AS3 might want to take a look at Bulk-loader . It has a vast array of features including, but not limited to Connection pooling, Unified progress notification. Events for individual items and as groups.
Priority Loading, Stop and resuming individual items as well as in bulk.

I will be using it more extensively for my next project, so i will report on it after that. In the mean time why not give it a try.

Visit Bulk-loader @ Google Code