Ralph Hauwert pointed out some very cool 3D Flash demos that fit in under 32kb. Go take a look at what Flash can do these days. It's also amazing and inspiring to see what people are able to do with ActionScript. The demos remind me of some of the old demos on the Amiga or Atari, where people were trying to cram as much eye candy as possible in as small a footprint as possible. Good stuff came out of those demos, and I'm betting what some of these folks learned in the process of making the demos will end up being used again for profit and much fun.

If you're yearning to try your own hand at some of the 3D Flash action.. but not quite looking forward to digging through code.. well.. take a look at the 3DEnvironment component that lets you build 3D environments without having to learn all that code. It's from the folks at Flashloaded who've been known for cranking out quality components and pixel fonts for years. That page has some examples of what can be created with 3dEnvironment, and while they aren't on the same plane as the 32kb demos they're still quite nice, and you can view them with that old Flash Player 7 you have collecting dust. Try that with those evo engine demos. bah!

Here's the docs with tutorial and stuff so you can see how it works.

I was looking through the docs and remembered waaay back around 6yrs ago when I was tinkering with 3d web stuff and had a Flash video feed running in a 3d web environment. That was some trick stuff back in the day. I'm betting that with this 3DEnvironment component I could have done that in no time, and without all the hassle that I had to go through to get it to work before. From looking at the tutorial I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot of 3D Flash UIs and such in the coming months. The classes to do 3D in Flash have been around for a while, but this makes it so non-programmers can have some fun.

Oh, oh.. and you can configure your 3d environments from an XML file. sweet. So you can have your PHP code spit out the XML and generate these little 3D evironments on the fly.

What gets me is the price.. just under $60. That's cheap fun. Well, and the 15kb footprint is nice too.. oh, and they put a little jingle in my pocket for going and taking a look and putting their component on your radar. I like that too.