g.wygonik's flash experiments

Ok - so - I've spent the past several nights playing with some of the new features in the Flash 10 public pre-release ("Astro"). The most exciting for me is the 3D transformations, as they create a whole bunch of fun new UI options (or, rather, new ways to implement fun UI options).

I was very happy to see that you can use all the standard display object hierarchies to build single Sprites filled with child objects in 3D space, then perform transformations on the parent Sprite. However, one thing that the player doesn't seem to do is perform any sort of z-depth management - you still need to track layers and depth as you normally do. (Truthfully I would have been surprised if it did, as I didn't think this was a replacement for a full 3D package like PaperVision).

A question this brings up in my mind is if there are/will be methods for determining a clip's position in 3D space per the display area. Something akin to localToGlobal/globalToLocal but using 3D points. Basically, if I add a Sprite to a parent object and rotate the parent, the child object stays in the same position inside the parent, but it does change in 3D space per the display. So - any way to figure out the 3D depth of a clip? It's totally possible I'm missing something, or that there will be info when final release comes out, but I'm impatient and want to go as far as I can now.

I'm going to start playing with the new sound manipulation features later this week -- I'm looking forward to trying to build some ambient algorithmically-generated music.

Good, good stuff.