Hello to all the cool members of the Away3D community! With Away4 coming up, we have injected some steroids into the AWD (Away3D data) file format. We're really aiming to create the best file format for 3D in Flash (and 3D in general) out there. We want better support in all the different 3D software that's out there, and we want better documentation. We also want it to meet the higher requirements for parsing speed and file size that we will be dealing with now that we're storing 100 or 1000 times the amount of geometry that we used to, so AWD2 will be binary and support efficient compression.
One of our ideas has been to separate AWD from Away3D. It's still tailored for use with Away3D, and maintained by the same people, but to position it as an awesome standalone format that 3D application vendors would like to implement, we'll be maintaining it under a separate project, which is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/awd/ . Here you'll also be able to find SDKs for a number of programming languages, and exporters for some popular 3D applications. Another idea right now is to involve you guys in the process, and that's what we want to do here. The file format will need to be backwards and forwards compatible, so once we seal the document, we cannot break it. So we'd like your thoughts early! I have posted a draft of the file format specification (missing some features) to http://code.google.com/p/awd/downloads/list where I'd like you to download the PDF and take a look if you're interested. Any comments, questions and ideas are welcome and even encouraged! If there's anything you don't understand, let me know and I'll try to improve the documentation where necessary. In the meantime I'll be working on the missing features. Take care guys! Cheers /R
