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March 21, 2007
Papervision
Papervision is an interesting Flash hack. This engine is roughly as powerful and graphically expressive as a very high-resolution Sega Saturn console from 1996.
As I understand it, Flash's bitmap support is limited to affine transformations, so like 3D engines of yore, it doesn't support perspective-correct "textures". The Saturn lacked perspective textures as well, which led to "swimming" on textures as they come close to the camera.
There's no easy way to fake perspective texturing. What's more, this kind of pseudo-3D is at least an order of magnitude slower than a full-on 3D engine. So expect Adobe to put native 3D into Flash in upcoming versions.
Update: March 23, 2006: Here's a workaround from Andre Michelle to get nearly-perspective-correct textures in Flash by affine transformations of a grid of subdivided sub-images. And a discussion of the problem. For reference, here's a thorough explanation of transformations and matrices as they occur in Flash.
Update: March 24, 2006: Tinic Uro explains why Papervision is as fast as it gets for software rendering
Posted by Devon at March 21, 2007 10:24 PM
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