Away3D is an awesome 3D library for Flash. Flod is an awesome library for replaying tracker music in Flash. Throw those two things together with my inner-geek upbringing of the 80s and you get DarkCubes. I grew up drip-fed on ST/Amiga demo effects, and this random little 3D game is what I banged out during a couple of lunch breaks and some hours last night.

I actually wrote DarkCubes back in 2000 on the PC/Windows using DarkBASIC (hence the title of the game). So I had the code and figured it would make a good first experiment for Away3D. A bit of messing around, a bit of swearing, and lots of fiddling later and this tiny puzzler was born.

The logo is from the original PC game and was made by Yann ‘Kohai‘ Parmentier. The music is by Adam Sikorski (DSX of TRSI), 505 of Checkpoint and Toodeloo of the Dead Hackers Society. The rest by yours truly.

Lots of keys do stuff in-game, so have a fiddle! (1-5 changes the music for example, D turns on Debug info, 7-9 change texture, etc. Read the scroller for the full list).

I make no apologies for this beating shitty spec  Netbooks / PCs over the head with a giant CPU grinding axe. Deal with it. It’s hardly the end of the world.

Click here to play (sorry no pre-loader, but it’s only 1MB in size)

Enjoy

Aww this is just too much fun! Take a 2D sprite, extrude it into 3D and then shave and tweak as required.

Voila, you’ve just described Q-BLOCK and created your first piece of 3D pixel art:

It’s cool pixel art, in 3D (rotation under you control). And you can edit any model you like, change the colours or just add on new parts.

I had a very similar idea to this years ago, and never bothered to do anything with it. I built a small prototype app in DarkBASIC that would build a 3D model from a 2D sprite. But the Q-BLOCK guys have gone a whole step beyond that, and it rocks.

Check out their blog for some excellent examples of insanely good Q-BLOCKery.

Quite out of the blue I received an invite to the SourceBinder project tonight. I honestly couldn’t even remember what it was, but after a couple of minutes playing I was hooked!

If you are experienced with node based creation tools, like FilterForge for example, then you’ll have a good idea what this is about. Basically it’s an FP10 visual creation tool – you can create your own nodes (or use many of the public ones up there) and chain them together to create stunning visual effects. Loads of libraries are built in already like JigFlashLib, Tweener, Flint and PV3d, so nodes can be created using these.

Nodes can perform tasks such as colour changing, mouse input, sound handling, PV3D creation and loads more. They are simple AS3 classes (which you can edit live online). You chain them together using a neat drag and drop interface, the final “display renderer” node being responsible for the output.

It’s just great – I urge you to try it!

http://sourcebinder.org

The awesome Alternativa 3D demos released a while back blew the Flash blogosphere away. Now the company behind them have released the full AlternativaPlatform package as an SWC for you to play with. It supports Flash10 out of the box as well. This is great news if you’re after a monstrously fast 3D engine for Flash.

The only downsides (and they are quite significant) at this moment in time are:

1) If you don’t speak Russian, the documentation is non-existent. Even the ASDoc dumping is fully Russian, so unless you can figure out how the whole system works from a couple of demos and a huge list of method names, you’re going to have to do some SERIOUS trial and error!

2) The Commercial use license costs thousands of Euros. If you can absorb this cost (or rather if your client can!) then it’s not an issue. But I wonder how things will fall with regard to people who make the games for free, then try to get them sponsored, or put adverts on the front via MochiBot / GameJacket. I’m guessing that would breach the current license policy.

I’m also very interested in their GUI tools and the Multi-User system, both in development. It could turn out to be a seriously powerful all encompassing suite when complete.

So, given these two things I won’t be jumping in just yet – but it’s certainly something to keep a VERY close eye on!

Just check this out! Click the shots for the two demos. Definitely the fastest 3D I’ve seen done in Flash yet. Really state of the art, it blows everything else away. Apparently part of the Alternativa3D Engine. I really hope they release it!

Everyone seems to be on the PaperVision hype train at the moment (and for pretty good reason), but it isn’t the only Flash 3D engine out there. Today the Away3D team released a new interactive 3D demo called Green Planet. I tested it on Firefox 3 (Beta 5) and was blown away. Graphically it’s rich, with nicely animated objects and a planet landscape to fly around (it’s under your control). There are interactive objects to pick-up, and the sound fits the whole thing perfectly.

In short, you HAVE to try this out!

More pics after the jump

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