After over a year of not listening to my nagging collegua (Away3D-team member Fabrice Closier) telling me to start working with (Away)3D, I caved…
I started to experiment a little in Away3D and turned my 2D jellyfish experiment into a 3D version. You can watch the result here: http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080603.htm

I added a couple of tricks I learned way back when I created levels for Unreal Tournament.
For example I added a second viewport for the skybox (in this case a sphere), because the Away3D Skybox-class is in fact not a real skybox but just a really huge cube rendered in the same viewport as the rest of the scene.
The camera in my skybox viewport points in the same direction as the camera in the main viewport but always stays at point (0,0,0). This way the camera will never approach the side of the skybox, giving the illusion that everything in this viewport is really far away.

All-in-all a good start in Away3D if you ask me. I hope to do some real projects with 3D in the comming weeks…

Very smart Adobe!

Fortunately I thought of an easy way to get this problem solved; simply copy the remoting classes from Flash 8 to some other directory and set this directory as one of your default Flash 9 – as2 – classpaths. (Copying it into the default classpath with all other default classes didn’t work for me somehow.)

To make it easy for you I extracted the remoting classes and put them in a zip: as2RemotingPackage.zip

PS: I coudn’t find any info about this on the internet so either nobody ever needed it, nobody ever bothered to try and find a solution or this solution is so simple nobody ever bothered to write about it.
Anyway I bother to write about it for those of you who couldn’t find a solution or just didn’t bother to find one.

Hope this will help you…

After reading Den Ivanov’s post I wanted to make a comment but it became so big I decided to make a post about it myself;

Apart from the bug Den describes there are tons more. I also have troubles with the panels who very often lose their “titlebar” in which case it’s impossible to close them or switch to other tabs in that panel. The only way to restore them is to close and open the panel (hit F4 twice).
There also is a bug in the sizing of the help window as it often resizes to the height of the screen making it impossible to read the complete content.

It’s a shame they release a version that is even more buggy than it’s alpha version. Flash 9 is almost the same as version 8 (apart from the as3 compiler) and yet they manage to screw up the IDE.
Too bad the alpha version of Flash 9 couldn’t handle components because it was much more stable than this buggy crap.

I really hope they fix these bugs (they are definitely not eastereggs like Den said) in the next update…

When I load an image using the Loader class and unload it later on. It won’t be disposed by the garbage collector.
There are no references to neither the Loader nor the (weak) eventlisteners. After loading the image a couple of times the memory goes sky high .

Here is a (simple) example: loadertest.zip

Does anyone have an explaination on why the GC doesn’t clean the loaded content? I would be very grateful!

UPDATE 1 (2007-06-19):
I made the example even less complicated by using the same Loader instance when loading new images.

As I work around I tried to dispose the loaded BitmapData but unfortunately it had no effect.
I assume the leak is somewhere within the Loader (or even deeper in the code) and that the loaded (binary) data is not removed after it’s converted into a BitmapData.

UPDATE 2 (2007-06-19):
I found the solution on in this post:
http://www.webforumz.com/macromedia-flash/42690-memory-leak-when-loading-swf-in.htm

It seems that the unload() method has a bug when used in the flash IDE. Once I ran the test in a browser there seem to be no more problems and the GC nicely clears the memory…

Lets hope Adobe fixes this problem in the next Flash 9 update.