Awhile back, I did some research on advanced Flash frameworks. The reason for the research was due to the fact that a lot of 3D In-browser effects are achieved using plugins. Several examples for plugins include Unity, Wild Pockets & O3D.
*NOTE* WebGL was recently introduced into the Firefox nightly build, but WebGL is a very YOUNG product and will take awhile before it goes mainstream.
PushButton Engine
My personal favorite. The PushButton Engine touts itself as a robust “modular” game engine. All the basics are covered: Physics enigne, Gameplay like health and stats, sprites, tilemaps and networking. Besides the obvious benefits of modularity, PBE will also have a component library allowing even greater functionality.
Hemlock
Hemlock is an open-source framework that combines Flash & XMPP for Real-Time, multi-user applications.
Papervision3D
The original 3D Flash framework. They’re site is a little hard to navigate, but there is plenty of information out there. Plus, everyone uses it, so Google can be your friend here.
Away3D & Sandy 3D
Both Away3D and Sandy 3D are new to me and I discovered them in the course of writing this blog. In Away3D’s latest release, it leverages some of the rendering improvements in Flash 10, so the results are quite impressive. Sandy is unique in that it supports both AS2 and AS3. That’s great for devs who haven’t learned the new version or who use older modules. Definitely worth checking out both.
Degrafa
Degrafa is a Graphings framework it the core. See this beautiful example of what kind of graphs it can produce. Degrafa is also used for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs,) which can be simple games to robust financial management software.
I hope to spend more time with each one of these frameworks. There’s potential for a lot of innovation here.
Have you tried one of these before? Let us know what it was like!
./BBK