[web] 3d on web

Since you're looking into Flash already, have a look at papervision 3D.

Hello,

You may want to take a look at O3D. Google has been working on this API and I believe it uses Direct3D on Windows and OpenGL on Mac and Linux.

The downsides are that not many people have the plugin already, it is still in development, and sending/receiving textures will eat up a lot of bandwidth.

I would suggest making sure you know the ins and outs of silverlight. Although it currently doesnt support 3d, it will prolly within the next year, and it will be direct X driven. Same with JavaFX, it demoed 3D at the latest javaone, but it wont be official till next year.

Papervision and O3D are your best bets for now though, and papervision has been around for quite a while.

Unity3D

Quote:

Original post by JTippetts Unity3D

FTW. Completely free for indies, a full engine/editor included. You just can't beat that. Plus their installer for the plugin is incredibly small and streamlined.

It can be done using WPF.
I'm not sure if it would be my first choice on developing a 3D game, but it would work.

If you want 3D in Flash, the usual suspects are Papervision 3D, Sandy 3D, and Away 3D. Check the feature list for each and decide which you like the best. The biggest advantage of Flash for 3D is the immense installed base. The downside is that the performance is extremely constrained. (largely because you can only use the CPU for rendering) If the end-user doesn't have a very fast CPU, your performance is going to chug.

Silverlight is also an option, and will allow you to use C# to do your programming. I'm not as familiar with that scene, so I don't know if there are any engines or libraries to help with 3D in Silverlight.

Unity 3D's web player is very nice, largely because it allows for streaming of content. This allows you to load up your browser-based Unity web games quickly, and have separate loading between different levels. Performance will also be much better on older machines, since it is able to access the user's GPU.

You can do JOGL in an applet (java opengl library).

i made a really simple FPS style area here

http://demofox.org/LiveSite/current/

it wasn't easy to get working but once it was working it was very nice and fast :P

probably not the best option but it is an option