I am looking for a way to create a simulated environment (office, factory, etc.) that could be walked through, preferably like Quake, but could potentially use something like AOE.
Has anyone seen anything like this done in Flash?
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I am looking for a way to create a simulated environment (office, factory, etc.) that could be walked through, preferably like Quake, but could potentially use something like AOE.
Has anyone seen anything like this done in Flash?
I have, but it's a pretty complicated thing to do in flash, as it has no native 3D support, so you have to build a 3D engine to fake the effect.
You'd probably be better off using Director 8.5 or MX as they have support for real 3D.
has anyone seen a good example of a practical online 3d environment?
I'm not sure about practical and 3D environment in the same sentence...:)
http://www.coin-op-city.com/ is at least a pretty functional with collision detection and so on. Pre-rendered though.
yeah, it's one of those things that seems cool and a natural metaphor for the web, but in reality, at least until we get to matrix standards, just ain't going to be viable.
it's a bit like the 'desktop' metaphor, I saw a blog a while ago where someone was complaining about calling it a desktop because it wasn't that literal. I think that's silly, you adapt a system for the medium, not the other way round, and I think a 3d system, something that mirrors a process based on movement in real life needs to be adapted to work on the web, not somehow shoehorned into it.
a gallery was always the classic 3d environment people tried to translate to online, mirroring the process of walking through a gallery viewing images. Sounds cool but in reality it's easy to not have to 'walk' anywhere and just pick the images to view from a menu system. Creating something like this online allows you to devise a more user friendly system than actually having to walk around a museum, instead the online version is you enter the gallery, sit down and people bring you pics to look at!
Funnily enough, my dissertation is about the failings of the desktop/window metaphor :D
Basically, my view is that the metaphor is broken because it's so mixed; and also it's just unnecessary.
After all, the point of a metaphor is familiarity, so having a 'folder' that opens into a 'window' is actually a completely obscure abstraction from the original metaphor.
As for being unnecessary, we've just recreated the real world digitally and in the process thrown out half the benefits of having a machine capable of processing any information you can chuck at it.
i.e. why should I have to create a hierarchical filing structure in the first place? why recreate the folders and files of the real world?
My computer is easily powerful enough to manage my filing for me after all...