Not to be missed! Check out:
Currently weighing in at under 25K, Away3D Lite can be used in projects with the most stringent bandwidth restrictions. No problem for use in banners, widgets, thumbnails… anything where filesize is a priority. But the biggest single feature offered by the new engine is it’s speed. Current tests clock framerates up to 4 times faster than the standard Away3D library. And with more frames-per-second comes the potential for more polygons, more accessible content on slower machines, and more processing power left for other areas of a Flash application.
Away3D Lite is not meant as a replacement for the standard Away3D libraries. Because of it’s use of the native 3D features in the Flash 10 Player, Away3D Lite is Flash 10 only, so the development of Away3D 2.5 & 3.5 will continue as usual. These engines are more of a workhorse for many different purposes and with many different features, while Away3D Lite offers the choice to be fast and small at the sacrifice of features. This is not to say that you can’t do anything with Away3D Lite! The list of main supported features in 1.0 includes:
- 3DS, MD2, Collada & Metasequoia loaders
- Bones animation
- Viewport clipping
- 3d mouse events
- All standard primitive types
- All standard camera types
- All standard material types
- Template classes for quick and easy setup
Plus, you will already know how to use Away3D Lite if you’ve used Away3D! Everything is where you’d expect, and there have only been very minor changes made to some property names, which in time will most likely percolate back through the various engines.
Fantastic work from the Away3D team - congratulations to everyone involved!
Read more, and be sure to check out the demos showing how fast it really is (believe me, if its speedy 3D rendering you’re after, you won’t do better than this!), at away3d.com
