Version 4.0.0 released

16th October 2011

Earlier this week I released version 4.0.0 of Flint. This release is to support the new crop of 3d engines that are using Stage3d for rendering. As part of this it was necessary to alter a couple of APIs, hence the major release number incrementing to 4. The core architecture of Flint remains unchanged.

New features

Support for Away3d version 4
Support for Flare3d version 2
Support for Alternativa3d version 8

Big thank you to Michael Ivanov for his work on these new integrations.

Significant changes

A new package structure means the Away3d version 3 and Papervision3d integration code has moved into the integration package.
The ImageClass initializer now takes a class and an array of parameters in the constructor, rather than using a class and …(rest) parameters. This serves two purposes
- The class can be extended and the parameters passed through to the superclass constructor
- The class now takes additional parameters for object pooling, which can be strongly typed and optional
The ImageClass initializer and its derivatives can optionally be configured to reuse images from particles when they die, to improve the performance. This is done by setting the usePool property to true, via the constructor or the property itself.
The documentation has been restructured to enable browsing of just the documentation for a selected render method - 2d, 3d, Away3d, Flare3d, etc.

Bugs fixed

The full list of commit notes is on Github.

All examples on this site have been updated to the new version. I also added a new example specifically for the 3d engines, using a textured sphere for each particle.

If you have existing Flint projects, most code from version 3.x.x will continue to work unaltered. Code that uses the ImageClass initializer or the Away3d or Papervision3d integration will require minor alterations as described above.

Get the new version from the source code page and let me know of any bugs or comments on the forum. If you want to contribute to the next version of Flint, fork the project on Github.