Away3D can be installed either from the latest releases on the Away3D downloads page or from the SVN repository located on the googlecode site.
I’ve chosen the second method so that I can easily and regularly update the source to be up to date with the latest fixes and enhancements. I’m using the same technique that I showed downloading and compiling Papervision3D using SVN in eclipse. Since I use eclipse as my development environment (with the Flex Builder 3 plugin), I like to keep all my sources together in the same environment and the SVN plugin for eclipse works very well.
In eclipse select Import… from the File menu. You’ll see the following window appear.
Under the SVN item, select Projects from SVN and click Next. You’ll then be requested to enter details for the SVN repository.
For the URL enter http://away3d.googlecode.com/svn. Leave the user details empty - we’ll use anonymous access to obtain the source. Click Next to continue. Eclipse will examine the SVN repository and show the repository structure.
We’ll download everything from the trunk (which includes the source, docs and examples), so select trunk and click on Finish. You’ll then be asked how you want to check out the source.
We want to create a Flex Library project so select Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard.
Under Flex Builder, choose Flex Library Project and click Next.
Enter Away3D as the Project name (or any other name you’d like…) then select Next to configure the source directory.
Click next to src under Classes to include in the library. The Main source folder should show src, and the Output folder should show bin. Sometimes selecting the source folder here doesn’t always work and we’ll have to explicitly give the source folder again after the project has been created, as shown below.
You should now see in the Flex Navigator in eclipse a new project called Away3D with the latest revision number next to it. If you have the error nothing was specified to be included in the library shown in the Problems view, then you need to re-specify the source directory as I mentioned above. Simply right-click on the Away3D project and select Properties.
Under Flex Library Build Path, once again click next to src in the Classes to include in library box. After clicking OK you should see that eclipse is compiling the sources.
The final result is the Away3D.swc Flex library, located in the bin directory, that can be used with other Away3D projects that you create afterwards. Similarly, with eclipse, you can compile Away3D projects by linking directly to this project. Personally I prefer the second method simply because it makes developing and debugging easier as you can directly look at the source for a particular Away3D class.
Hope this is of some use. I’ll be taking a look, as I did with Papervision3D, at producing a few simple examples just to get a feel of the library… more soon I hope!
