These 2 games have been taken from the Papervision3D list. Bowling Buddies (Facebook integrated game) AirShip demos The Bowling Buddies game is made by the very creative Playfish.com company (more on the release at their blog). They have some great facebook/social network games combined with flash. With bowling buddies they created a game similar to Wii bowling (even with customize characters) and the best part is how they have scaled down versions. You can play in 2D, 3D and at different levels of quality to make it accessible to everyone. I think that will probably be needed with 3d flash games (Shockwave Director has LOD (Level of Detail) that helps with scaling down to slower machines but you have to do that yourself with the state of 3d engines in flash so far). Bowling buddies and most playfish games are Facebook/Social Network based. You might say, why? (especially if you aren’t in the US where facebook is the biggest social network). But even Activision’s CEO calls facebook a threat to online gaming as we know it, this is because of the community aspect and the ability to play with friends and multiplayer games easily. Rather than setting up your own player find mechanism, facebook has it built in and all the viral aspects you need to garner more fans. So those into facebook and gaming are possibly ahead, but also it will be extremely competitive.

Airship is a really creative game that has been impressive to watch grow over the last weeks. It is now textured and performs pretty well. The best part is the Airship model and the fans. Very neat and I hope this one is seen through to a launched game. It is a bit like a RTS/Strategy overhead game that would be very cool to play multiplayer with Red5 server as well (just need the TIME!).

The best part is you can see after a year+ of release papervision and the other 3d engines are really changing the way gaming is done online. What was once a Java or Shockwave only capability, flash now has with evolving 3d engines, and there are playable fun games to prove it that are commercial ready.

I have been using Flash for long time, I guess the first time I started to use it, it was still in Beta Version 1; that time I used it just to make simple animation for a cartoon studio. With the years I have seen it growing so much, but, what I really wanted from it was the possibility to use 3D stuff inside my applications; for many years this has been impossible if you didn't want to use Shockwave. Last year something changed with Sandy, for the first time it was possible to see real 3D objects in a simple Flash Application. From that day other 2 major engines were developed: Papervision3D and Away3D. Sandy was pretty good for those who still were using ActionScript 2.0, but, what really changed the cards on the table was Away3D, created by the mind of Alexander Zadorozhny.

Away3D is, in my humble opinion, one of the most powerful engine to create 3D contents with Flash. Easy documentation, lots of tutorials, the possibility to import OBJ 3DS and MD2 files, a very active developers forum where any kind of doubt is solved in less than one day. At beginning I started to use Away3D to create superlative Website at The Adory, when one day I thought: I should try to make a game with this stuff! I made Ultimate Battleship 3D and, well the result was not the best game ever but to be the first game made with Away3D was pretty good, actually I sold a NON-Exclusive License for it of $250 .

After it I made: Pistoleros Cannon Alone Carnival Hammers Fartunes Jumper Miss Primp The last one had lots of success on MySpace.com with the girls audience, because they could create their own avatar to put on their profile.

With the Version 10 of Flash the things will change even more, because the new player will be able to use the GPU of our computer to enhance 3D acceleration, and the men at the Away3D Team told me to stay tuned because big news is coming! I want to thanks Peter Kapelyan, Fabrice Closier and Rob Bateman for all the support they gave to me during the development of my games. Soon I will add some tutorials on this Blog to explain all the things that it is possible to do with this amazing engine.