A web designer & developer's blog

Meh, I gave up on my idea of switching to Away 3D, mainly because it’s stupid. While it would certainly make sense considering how papervision is most likely dead, Away3D is probably not that much more productive and better.

Considering how hard it has already been to figure out things like 2D/3D projection, dynamic materials and the insanely god damn uber-annoying animated dae models – besides countless mathematical problems – it would be a ton of wasted effort. I suppose there are solutions for of those most problems, but finding them is probably even more of a royal pain than it was to find them for Papervision3D. I don’t really understand why, but in general there seems to be a bit less blogs and tutorials around and since Away3D uses an archaic mailing list, there’s tons of hardly usable duplicates of every thread. And reaching dead ends means that you have to ask the question yourself, possibly waiting for several days before you get an answer.

While it would certainly make sense on the long run, the idea of having to figure all of these things out AGAIN, before I can continue with even the most basic tasks, completely killed my mood for months. So I’ll better continue with what I have, keep up the speed and maybe consider changing engines once I’m done. Which would probably be best, because molehill is at the horizon and will most likely change everything anyway…

After a day or so, Away3D turns out to be quite a bit harder to get into than Papervision3D, mainly due to the lack of proper documentation.

The support forums are more of a mailing-list, with a bad searching function and very hard to navigate. Google also only seldomly gives proper results for Away3D problems, one reason being that the mailing-list is mirrored several times by different services, which kinda spams the search results.

And often enough, even if you find tutorials, they’re hopelessly outdated. The strong part of Away3D, its frequent updates, is also one of its larger problems, as methods are replaced frequently with no one documenting their use properly (or at all). Whatever problems you’ve managed to solve when using Papervision3D, Away3D has new ones in store for you…

What’s comparable is the fact that they have a book, in this case “The Essential Guide to 3D in Flash” (quite snotty compared to PV3D’s “Papervision3D Essentials”, haha). I’ll look into it.