We didn’t write anything in the blog for some time, but it doesn’t mean that nothing happens in our company. On the contrary, life is boiling! One of our main achievements of the last two weeks is the organization of 24-hour tech support for our flagship project Tanki Online.

Of course our specialists were always ready to help players anytime but we are humans too and sometimes need to rest. With the old crew some of our members were to get up at night to solve players’ problems. But sleepy staff need a lot of time to deal even with an easy task.

And now there are no difficulties! We’ve got four new tech support specialists. Meet Nikita Chalov, Sergey Nagovitsyn, Victor Soldatov and Petr Vasiliev! The guys get the hang of things extremely fast and already work by shifts, so players can get any help in the 24/7 mode.

Alternativa company doesn’t only create innovative technologies and games based on them, but also gladly cooperates with other developers. Our strategic partnership with Chelyabinsk company iHeroes is a wonderful example of such cooperation. With our help iHeroes works on 3D browser aquarium game for social networks using Alternativa Platform technologies.

Aqua 3D is the next step in the evolution of virtual fishes breeding games. In the Aqua you enter fully 3D underwater world with the huge amount of different fish variations. There are 759 375 combinations available! And you can play with any fish and even interbreed it with other fish. For example, you can interbreed your fish with the fish of your friend from social network. Aqua 3D combines a few different genres: it is a life simulator, puzzle and even action at the same time.

That is how it looks like:

Aqua 3D got its start in life due to close cooperation between Alternativa and iHeroes. And we are ready to build business relations with other potential partners, especially now, when the engine Alternativa3D 7 is ready and it allows to create online games of any genre on Flash. We’ve already told you about its great possibilities. We can also offer unique client-server solution AlternativaCore to our partners. It strongly simplifies and speeds up development of a real-time browser online game.

It’s not a secret that Alternativa company is working on new in-house and partner projects. One of them is the next generation of «Tanki Online».

This fall we will launch «Tanki Online 2.0» for social networks. In future the game will appear in My.Mail.Ru, Vkontakte and Facebook. It’ll be possible to play from any of these social networks and from tankionline.com website simultaneously. All users enter the same game space no matter where they come from.

New graphics is attached. We’ve completely changed lighting system so now you can hide tanks in the shadow and fight on night arenas. We’ve also animated track layers, added camera shaking effect, modernized interface greatly and prepared a lot of other cool stuff.

Entering social space we could not forget about socialization. User profiles, player’s reputation, achievements system and other social features will allow tankmen to communicate with each other more actively. At last we could do something interesting in Vkontakte :-)

«Tanki Online 2.0» in action:

This is how new interface looks like:

Alternativa3D v7 is available at the moment, terms of use are discussed in every certain case. The main criterion which influences the cost is the level of our involvement into the project. As practice proved, the engine has to be adjusted to the needs of each project (effects and picture vs performance, choice of certain features).

For example, Alternativa3D 7 is successfully used in our project Tanki Online; the engine can also be used in projects with character animation.

If you decide to use Alternativa3D 7, send project description and short text about your team to management@alternativaplatform.com — we will contact you and discuss the scheme of cooperation. Collaboration in investment search is also possible.

Technical information about Alternativa3D version 7:
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This term denotes a method which is used to imitate reflection of the environment on objects’ surfaces. For instance, to visualize chromium bumper of a car.

To imitate reflection we use special spherical or hemispherical (fish eye) environment maps and recalculate UV-coordinates of an object according to its position against camera.

Controls:

• Arrow keys, W, S, A, D - camera movement
• Drag mouse - look around
• Q - change quality
• Tab - debug mode

During the last weekend our friends and business partners from Chelyabinsk, company “iHeroes”, visited Perm. The purpose of the trip was studying of AlternativaPlatform technology. During the visit our specialists gave several masterclasses and lectures for “Heroes”.

Vladimir Babushkin - the leading developer of Alternativa3D — tells about the peculiarities of the library.

Alexey Kviring (server programmer) opens the “inner sanctum” to the partners — our platform.

The guests seemed to be longing for new information and got from our specialists as much knowledge as possible. This is not surprising at all: their project is entering the active phase of development.

Moscow company «Brandstudio» developed promo-site which is devoted to a new urban car model Toyota — IQ and in which our engine Alternativa3D was used.

This is a unique example of how to use 3D in website navigation. In the heart of it is a simplified simulator of a car: driving the small but smart IQ the user can view sections of the site just approaching them.

Typical features of the site: the user gets information about Toyota IQ dynamics simply using navigation, in other words, on a native level. One can’t exclude the gaming side of the navigation - view of the site becomes a jovial and pleasant occupation. Rolls and skidding of the car during big turns look rather realistic!

iq.toyota.ru

Though news on blog have become rare, the work is in full swing, tens of tasks are being solved and discussions held. Don’t want to write about everyday routine while really intriguing news are under non-disclosure agreements. Though, everything will become public within several months.

We’re developing and our staff also widens. 6 new stars have appeared in our team since the last month.

	Aleksandra Medvedeva Coordinator of the game Tanki Online. Deals with aggregators and subcontractors, keeps statistics and leads the game marketing.
	Olga Stepanova Server programmer. Worked half rate for 3 months and finally decided to fully join the staff.
	Sergey Spesivov Responsible for 3D-modeling and texturing.
	Mikhail Yarusov 2D-designer — from icons to websites for current and future projects.
	Fedor Kulikov Application programmer of broad specialization.
	Grigory Bolotov Methodologist. Thoroughly studies Alternativa Platform technologies and passes his experience through documentation and other training aids.

Discussions are now held in the office since there’s no space for all of us in the negotiation room.

The tallest person in the team now is not Aleksey Kviring but Fedor Kulikov.

Our good friends from “Multivitamin” combined Tanki Online and their touchscreen, thus organizing multi-touch support on Flash 10.1. The legendary player Sun took part in the video.