A web designer & developer's blog

Well, when I’ve gotten pretty far and ran across some random problem I’ve checked the Papervision3D forums, just to, again, stumble across some people asking whether PV3D is still being developed or not. Seemingly not. The last release is from 2009 and this blog post, where one of Papervision3D’s main developers leaves the crew doesn’t look promising at all. Furthermore, the development on PV3D’s Flash Player 10 / CS4-Branch as well as the development of the next version, PapervisionX, seems to have been on hold for about a year. That is especially easy to see at the PapervisionX GitHub, which was introduced for people to “watch the engine grow” and abandoned after the initial commit. Since then, nothing seems to have happened and while there’s no official statement, even the Papervision3D Forum Administrator doesn’t exactly believe that PV3D is sill alive.

Now that I’ve already spent some serious effort into learning PV3D, I’ve got to ask myself whether it still makes sense to continue or not. Continuing could be risky, because it’s always possible to come across a bug big enough that it turns out to be a final dead end, with no hopes of Papervision3D’s developers to ever repair it (because they disbanded long ago).

And even if I manage to get some project done, if PV3D isn’t developed any further, I’ve clearly bet on the wrong horse and acquired a skill that’s going to be completely useless. Oh my.

From a quick scan it seems that Away3D is the more actively developed engine right now. So I guess that, even though it’s quite a hassle to switch engines in the middle of a project, it only makes sense to spend a while looking into it… Meh. This is turning out to be a Duke Nukem Forever, but well, wonders do happen.

Update: Papervision may be dead, but Away3D isn’t exactly a good solution either. It’s neither more stable nor is it faster.