The 3D networked multiplayer space shooter we are writing in Flash/Actionscript is going very well! In the 7 days since we started, we've got 3d ships rendering (with phong shading), the networking system is almost entirely implemented (and the parts of it which are have been tested fairly thoroughly), collision detection should be done in a couple days, and overall, we seem to be on track for the due date of Wednesday.
How is Actionscript taking it? I'm under the impression that it is a lot more refined than it once was.
Fairly well so far as speed goes, though we aren't rendering much yet. The true test will come later this week when we add in a bunch of other objects. I wouldn't really call it refined though. We are using the new
Stage3D (info here) stuff; you have to download an up to date version of the AS libraries to use it, as none of the flash builder versions have it out of the box yet. The rather lengthy setup process for the particular set we are used can be found
here; we're using Away3D to make our lives not hell. Stage3D uses both fragment and vertex shaders, which unfortunately must be written in AGAL assembly language (which btw is a pain to find documentation for, as Stage3D is the only thing the language is for, and Stage3D documentation isn't exactly great to begin with). It's an odd mix of Actionscript, a language meant for beginner level programmers, and 3D graphics programming requiring about the same level of skill as DirectX or OpenGL. The shaders are running on the GPU, making it quite nice for rendering, unlike Flash's previous 3D setup, which was CPU only; and interpreted CPU at that.
For the networking we are using the beta version of
Adobe's Cirrus, which makes it relatively simple. It essentially sets up a network so as to put all your applications into a 'room' in which they broadcast their messages to the other applications in the 'room.' It uses a central Adobe server to find that room, but other than that is p2p.
This quarter's looking into Stage3D and some of the other Flash stuff really makes it look much more promising than it previously appeared to me; that it can be used for fully 3D, GPU rendered games certainly brings it above the level it previously existed on. Though as it is interpreted on the CPU side, it is gimped in that regard.