More good stuff with Papervision…and the more I think about the utility of 3D environments using the Flash platform, the more excited I become…imagine once HTML on a prim hits Second Life if you could be in a virtual world, accessing a 3D space through a 3D object. Hmmm….rabbit holes within rabbit holes.

In the meantime, a spherical version of the previous Flickr box I previously posted:

Source

PaperWorld is an open source project looking to build virtual worlds/multi-user environments on the Papervision platform. It promises the delivery of games such as the following:

Video

According to the PaperWorld site:

PaperWorld3D is an open-source Flash/Java project which provides MMOG functionality for PaperVision3D projects.
“If you can do it in Papervision, you can do it multiplayer over the network with PaperWorld.”

Coverage of a presentation in Amsterdam gives a little more detail of the MMO framework:

The Paperworld framework relies on precalc’d 3d transformations on the server that are pushed to the client – partly for speed reasons and partly to maintain coherence in multiplayer movement. The Flash client smooths server proxy positions and the current local position of your avatar to give a motion that is a little more robust to fluctuations in latency. To get round the problem of larger 3d environments choking on download bandwidth, the Paperworld server does not use sharedobjects, but has relevant set selection – a technique which checks how far away an object is from each player, taking into account direction of movement, to intelligently load content

Aside from 3D MMOs in Flash, here’s one of the classic examples of PaperVision, showing ambient occlusion:

And finally, a nice tutorial on cleaning up text in PPV.