Back from Max: Away3D platform roadmap

by Richard Olsson

Max felt like a very complete conference this year - plenty of sessions about future directions for creative and development tooling, some amazing announcements around collaborations (see this epic games article to find out more on the Flash 11 publishing options coming to UDK) and, of course, the official release of Flash Player 11, all of which you can watch on Adobe TV's recording of the day 2 keynote.

Having fully recovered from the festivities, there are a few announcements to be made concerning our own release roadmap. The first concerns our release plans for Away3D 4.0 and Away Physics. Above is a slide that we ran out of time to show in our MAX presentation, announcing december this year as the release date of Away3D 4.0, with a beta release in November. The work leading up to the beta release will finalise library features and front facing code structures. API changes will be kept to an absolute minimum during the beta cycle the following month leading up to our final production release of 4.0 at the end of the year.

This means that the next few weeks will see some much needed library updates, while the time after November will be used to focus on tidying up our documentation, making final API tweaks and fixing all the bugs that our community has so graciously been filing in our GitHub issue tracker. Please keep doing so if you find any issues with the current alpha version!

The result of all this means that over the next two months, you should expect to see a feature complete, stable API version of Away3D 4.0 emerging. At the same time, will be aiming to match these milestones with those of our open specification, compact binary file format AWD. By the end of this year we're likely to see AWD2 ready for general release, with feature complete exporters for Maya 2010, 2011 and 2012, as well as Blender 2.59 and above.

After these releases and into early next year, we will be continuing development for Away3D 4.1, for which we will announce a release schedule at a later time. In parallel, we will be working on finalising the AwayPhysics 1.0 library release that offers integrated 3D physics interactions with Away3D. We are also beginning development on a brand new library that was announced at Max called Away Game Tools, more of which will be detailed in a forthcoming blog post.

We hope you are as excited as we are to be nearing a stable Away3D 4.0 release. Please help us by continuing to file issue reports on Github that keep us aware of the existing problems and bugs being encountered. Also, if you are requiring urgent assistance regarding bugs or features in a project that you or your company are planning to release in the interim, don't forget that our production and consultancy group Away Media offers services for projects working to tight deadlines. And if you didn't make it to Max this year, you can watch the recording of our shared Flare3D / Away3D session on Adobe TV: Flash and 3D: Start your engines!

The Away3D Team

COMMENTS

12 Oct 2011 05:18 PM

SasMaster said:

And what is AGT 1.0?

12 Oct 2011 05:22 PM

Richard Olsson said:

SasMaster: AGT are the "Away Game Tools" which are briefly mentioned in the text above, and which will be explained further in a future blog post soon.

13 Oct 2011 08:46 AM

Euklide said:

The road map is promising and your efforts are highly appreciated, but if you don't include some efforts for documenting (explaining to the public) many obscure parts of the new Away3D 4 version, releasing a final version won't do much unless you know that the road map of a couple of Away3d 4.0 books will coincide too. BTW, classes, methods and properties lists is far from being considered adequate documentation. Architecture, procedural and other semantic info is (traditionally) missing. That's what the books cover usually (if they won't become obsolete by the time they are published), but it doesn't have to be this way. If open community would invest some effort on documentation too, that alone would both spread the software and boost development ten-fold. Not to mention the lives of all of us would be far less miserable...

14 Oct 2011 02:23 PM

mumumu said:

how about Prefab3D in future ?

16 Oct 2011 06:56 PM

Spencer1up said:

I was there for your session at MAX. You guys really needed an hour to yourselves. I was going to ask when Away3d 4.0 would be ready. Could you please put up an example of a project loading a model with texture? The current examples on Github are obviously outdated and it would give the community a much better understanding of how to use your revised architecture. Thanks fellas.

17 Oct 2011 12:05 AM

Rob Bateman said:

@Euklide

We of course agree that documentation (in tutorial, reference and book form) is a very important part of the engine, and of course we will be doing our best to cover the basics before release. However, with any open source endeavour resources are short so we will be making sure that the codebase and architecture is sound first and foremost.

As a community project that is non-profit, the scope of what we can achieve is fundamentally reliant on the generosity of the companies and individuals that we work with. Our current group are a fantastic bunch, and we are always looking for others to join and help out - be it through coding, writing or investment. So if you have a patch to submit, a project to collaborate on or a tutorial to link, don't be shy! We welcome contributions and expect a lot more of it to occur now that Flash 11 is officially out there.

@Spencer1up

For up to the minute examples, please keep an eye on the new examples repo in github: https://github.com/away3d/away3d-examples-fp11 This will be expanded over the next few weeks and will provide a wide range of clearly-written templates for you to use as starting points in your own projects

24 Nov 2011 04:47 PM

JAre said:

Where is Beta?

20 Dec 2011 12:24 AM

funtasma said:

Can you give us any updates on the roadmaps schedule?
Is the project still alive?

-Benjamin-

21 Dec 2011 03:13 PM

Richard Olsson said:

Please see the latest blog post for updated information: away3d.com/comments/updated_roadmap_for_away3d_4.0

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Back from Max: Away3D platform roadmap

COMMENTS

SasMaster said:

Richard Olsson said:

Euklide said:

mumumu said:

Spencer1up said:

Rob Bateman said:

JAre said:

funtasma said:

Richard Olsson said:

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