We’re glad to announce that we’re already working hard to make Alternativa3D availiable ’till the end of May. We’re planning to open SWC-library for non-commercial use, and also preparing licenses for commercial use in any projects. We’re also creating developers portal, useful support system and on-line documentation.

Thank you everybody! Your feedback gives us energy to move forward.

First of all we would like to say that some silence in blog was connected with very hard work, part of which is our beloved 3D-engine at its 5th version. Now we can tell that new architecture was worth working on it. With a great pleasure we created these two small demos for you, to show engine abilities.

Alternativa3D tech specs:

• Signals system — only nesessary calculations;
• BSP — quality polygon sorting, “sharp” crossings;
• n-gons support;
• reusing layers (only changed regions redrawing, polygons are independent);
• objects hierarchy;
• only necessary matrix, coords and UVs recalculating;
• perspective correction — dynamic triangulation;
• collision detection.

Isometric mode was also optimized and now works much faster.

And this is not all. In a future we’ll create and implement some new features::

• dynamic lighting and shadows (point and directional lights);
• bump lighting;
• parallax mapping;
• automatic UV-mapping;
• sprites, 3D-sprites;
• sprite lighting;
• texture objects;
• Global Illumination imitation;
• sprite pre-render system (phases render on server using uploaded 3D-models);
• animation system (including inverse kinematics);
• 3D-objects interactivity;
• physics simulation.

Besides that, Alternativa3D engine is already adapted for coming Flash Player 10. Texture correction and lighting will work faster.

This technology applications are rather wide::

• 3D online first- and third person games;
• architecture visualisation;
• multyuser entertainment media;
• promo-sites;
• advertising (including “3D-banners”);
• science фand educational interactive projects.

We hope that you share our passion. It is spring outside, everything grows and develops, so we are.

We’re growing and just began to set against each other’s chair hacks. A month ago Alex Khusainov started to work with us, and yesterday we got a new face again — Andrey Kopysov.

	Alex Khusainov — java-programmer. He did server software development and support for “Uralsvyazinform” company. Now he’s working at platform server core for us.
	Andrey Kopysov — beginning but promising AS3-programmer.

In a next couple of weeks we’ll introduce another new face to you.

As you probably know, interface is one of the important parts that let user interact with the system. Here is a small demo, a working example ouf our GUI library, which is being developed for “Alterernativa Platform”.

Size: 0,56 Mb

Main features:

• fast and useful windows-based interface system;
• working “hotkeys” , Tab support;
• easy-to-develop “skins” with “on the fly skins switching” (including cursor);
• fast builder, full control of window components;
• all other base windows-based interface functions (snap, drag’n'drop, resize etc.);
• smooth ability to revision and add functionality.

First of all, thank you for patience and comments. This post is about last year results and future plans and about our changed vision.

The most important thing is that we don’t consider our project as a game anymore. Making a game, we were making a platform — powerful system which can be used to create games or any other multiuser media in the Net. Things that happened and following situation analysis led us to a new vision, more scaled and simple at the same time.

Okay, “Alternativa” is a platform, which allow users to create, apply and support multiuser browser media in Internet. Platform includes server core (data exchange, synchronization, servers load management), client side (3D-engine, GUI and other client’s apps), admin tools (payment support, through user registration, statistics), documentation (”how to create and apply projects” guide, public methods and classes reference book etc.), support system (portal, forums, FAQ etc.), and of cource applications made on the platform. Part of this work is done already, part has to be done.

Alternativa Platform — simple and usable integrated dev tools, “world editors” and free resources to use in projects too. Every user (single human or a company) will be able to create its own personal 3D-world and tune it according to own preferences. We’re aiming to let talents grow, to allow developers making money, to give business a new opportunity promoting products and services through connected multi-user interactive services.

Every technology is good by its applications, and is judjed by this point of view. One of the first apps on Alternativa Platform is a multi-user browser action game, it is being created by ourselves. We’ll give you some details later, this project is on its pre-production phase now. Making this game, we’ll “cut” all the tech we have, see the platform from application development point of view, test our methodology, and we will improve dev tools, editors and other convertors for users.

We also carrying on negotiations with a lot of people about creating many things within Alternativa Platform — from casual games and promo-spaces to educational and social projects.

Alternativa Game is now a subproject, which will be implemented later, on a ready platform.

Thank you everybody who is reading us. Your support is giving us energy to move forward.

P.S. By the way, we’re getting ready to move in a new bigger and more comfortable office… Hurrah! :)

Thanks to this blog we got in touch with comrades from Oddcast, and in a middle of January, with no fear about -26 C’ (-14 F’) weather here, they flew from NY to meet us in person and to exchange some thoughts.

Oddcast is in virtual Flash-avatars business and they are very successful.

2 days past in a long conversations about technology, virtual worlds, avatars, markets and distribution. We also paid some attention to local places — ice town on a big square, russian restaurant with some good vodka, and so on.

As an experiment we just tried to visualize an avatar using latest magically developed features (parallax-effect and bump).

Controls:

• Mouse move — move light source
• Mouse click — change light color
• Mouse wheel or +/- — change highlight curve

Despite all the russian holidays and clear Karpovich’s directive to forget about job and have some rest, I couldn’t let go an idea to make fast “bump light” not only from directional light source, but from spotlight too. This is relatively hard because light goes in all directions, so it seems that you’ll have to count lighting for every pixel… or not? I came up with an idea to modify normals map, to kinda “bulge” it in spotlight coordinates. Main issue is that it is not so hard to count it pixel by pixel, but it is slo-o-ow process. So I was forced to cast a spell find a way to modify normals map using standart Flash filters and blending modes.

We will use that in engine for sure, because our bet is do-it-once counting phases with further maps “baking”. When Hydra will come out with new Flash 10 we’ll just have to pass this routine to shaders.

Size: 1.6Mb

Controls:

• Mouse move — move light source
• Mouse click — change light color
• Mouse wheel or +/- — change material’s highlight curve
• Ctrl + wheel or +/- — change spotlight size
• Spacebar — nex tex

I hope now I can finally turn loose now :) Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!

We just finished log collecting and viewing system. Log analizing problem was very actual, because we have not one server servers — game, resource, generator. During test stage we’ll have to handle clients messages too.

Architecture

Logging server is based on OSGI platform. We recieve logs via RMI using JAAS authorization (we had to write an appender for Log4j). Logs are saved with Hibernate into PostgreSQL database. And we wrote some plug-ins for Eclipse for viewing too. Basic features — log filtering with different criterias and filter save function.

There are still 8 steps to testing… :-)