Stage3d plus flash player 10 backwards compatibility

Posted by Pete Shand in 3D Flash, Actionscript

So while there are hundreds of cutting edge tech demos, sites and games being produced with flash player 11′s stage3d, it’s not always practical to develop for a player version before it’s reached a mature penetration rate. Given that flash player 11 was only released a few months ago it’ll probably be another few months before we see the 90% mark being hit. http://riastats.com/ puts it at about 63% at the time of writing this post.

That aside, it’s still quite tempting to disregard the above and set the minimum player version to 11, but we all know the client just isn’t going to let this fly. The obvious option is to create an swf for each target player containing the 3d engine code, then have your main application swf load the appropriate 3d engine swf. It’s a bit of a drag, as it’ll increase your work load, but it’ll get the job done.

a basic example of this can be viewed at:
http://labs.peteshand.net/stage3d_fp10fallback/

source can be downloaded from:
http://labs.peteshand.net/stage3d_fp10fallback/stage3d_fp10fallback.zip