The Persuit of PaperKing - Day 3 & 4 - Getting Going

The last couple of days have been spent looking through the various documentation and getting the environment configured.  The documentation was a little light in some areas, so more time was speant just looking at various examples and seeing how they worked, then looking at the source code to see how it was coded.  This method works great for getting the "feel" of how the code interacts, especially when there are multiple classes from different sources all working together.
Getting the Code:
We are working out of the "Great White" branch of Papervision 3D.  This means that we are working with some unstable code.  This could lead to trouble, but there are some extra performance enhancements in it that are worth persuing.  It appears that some of the documentation is a little out of sync as well, so we will probably need to rely on forums a little more than usual.
There are two other libraries that we will be using, a bending class, and the WOW physics engine.  Both of these are in similar states as the papervision classes.  So we will be using at least 3 unstable branches of code, and probably will look to bring in a tweening class as well.  Not the best environment to work out of, but all the code is under heavy development at this point so this is what there is to work with.  Hopefully the code that has been committed is pretty stable, from what I've seen it is.
Setting up the environment:
When we started this application, we had to decide what tool we were going to use.  The primary two tools are Adobe Flash, and Adobe Flex.  We chose to use Flex as it has some better debug tools built in, especially when working with several different class files at the same time.
Getting started in Flex was a little more difficult than I had expected.  There were a couple different issues that we ran into.

• The first was getting the source files structured correct and starting to build up some namespaces areas to keep the code clean.
• The second (and more problem-matic) was getting the 3D elements to display in Flex.  Flex has a lot of well developed UI components, but they don't like an external class coming in and trying to draw directly to there internal display areas.  Flex components have a UI method called .rawChildren.  This method should allow us to draw directly within the component, but not for us.  We finally found a specific Canvas3D class that was written to work with Flex.  Getting this component added finally allowed us to get some basic primitives to draw.