Back in the summer, I was lucky enough to get my hands on some early builds of Stage3D for mobile. I built some simple examples, including basic geometric shapes and simple 3D bubble charts inside of mobile Flex/AIR applications. I have been asked numerous times for the source code, and I’ve finally given in, and am sharing some source code.
I am not posting the full mobile application source code, since Stage3D for mobile is not yet available. However, I have ported the 3D bubble chart example to run in a Flex application targeting the desktop (Flash Player 11). The bubble chart example extends the concepts explored in the basic geometric shapes example.
Before you say “shoot, he didn’t give us the mobile code”, let me explain… When I ported the code from the mobile project to the desktop Flex project, all I changed was code specific to the mobile Flex framework. I changed <s:ViewNavigatorapplication> to <s:Application> and the corresponding architecture changes that were required, and I changed the list item renderers to Spark item renderers based on <s:Group> instead of mobile item renderers. In the mobile item renderers, all my drawing logic was done using the ActionScript drawing API. For simplicity in the port, I just used <s:Rect> to add the colored regions in the desktop variant.
That is all I changed!
The stage3D code between the desktop and mobile implementations is identical. You can see the desktop port in action in the video below:
Or, you can test it for yourself here:
The source code was intended to be exploratory at best… I was simply experimenting with hardware accelerated content, and how it can be used within your applications. There is one big “gotcha” that you will have to watch out for if you want Stage3D content within a Flex application… Stage3D content shows up behind Flex content on the display list. By default, Flex apps have a background color, and they will hide the Stage3D content. If you want to display any Stage3D content within a Flex application (regardless of web, desktop AIR, or mobile), you must set the background alpha of the Flex application to zero (0). Otherwise you will pull out some hair trying to figure out why it doesn’t show up.
The source code for the web/Flex port of this example is available at:
This also requires inclusion of the Away3D library, available at:
- http://away3d.com/download/
- https://github.com/away3d/away3d-core-fp11 (if you want the latest branch)
You can check out my original posts, showing Stage3D on mobile here:
You can also check out a video of this code running on a mobile device (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1) below: