Hi Chris, This has not been discussed internally to any great extent, but from my personal perspective, ideally there would be little or no need for a Lite version come Away4. There are mainly three reasons for this:
1. Away4 will internally be more intelligently structured than current Away3D. Because of this, only the classes that are actually used in a project will be compiled into the SWF file (unlike previous versions which have a lot of cross-references causing very heavy SWF files for seemingly very simple apps.) A quick test with just a View3D instance in an otherwise empty document class resulted in a 125k SWF with Away3.6, and 25k (!) with Away4. Obviously Away4 is far from feature- complete at this point in development, but this shows a little of what's happening in terms of library structure and dependencies and the result of that on file size. 2. Most 3D projects in the future will be really heavy applications (imagine several megabytes of model data, tens of megabytes of texture data et c) so the size of the library code will not have as big an effect proportionally on the overall SWF file-size. Obviously there will still be projects where you want to have extremely light-weight 3D effects, so Lite might still have a place -- time (and file-size benchmarks of a finished Away4) will tell. 3. In terms of speed and performance, very little will be gained by having a less-features Lite version now that all rendering is off- loaded to the GPU. The stuff that you would be taking out (some material types, animation systems, BSP et c) don't affect framerate that much, especially when they're not used. So as you can see the two biggest reasons why Lite revolutionized Flash Player 10 3D -- file size and performance -- will be less of an advantage with Molehill and Away4. But as I said, this is not an official stance of the team. There might still come an Away3D Lite for Molehill. For the time being we're focusing on the full version of Away4 though, and it's gonna blow your mind! :) Cheers /R On Dec 10, 5:43 pm, McFunkypants <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Away3d devs, > > Thanks so much for your amazing work. I love you guys. > > One question: will away3dlite be ready for Molehill on day one, or > only away3d full? > > Gratefully yours, > > Chris K - aka Breakdance > McFunkypantshttp://www.mcfunkypants.comhttp://twitter.com/McFunkypants
