Friends and colleagues, we, the AlternativaPlatform company, are five years old. Today, December 2, 2011, we had our first anniversary!

Five years ago, in early December 2006, a team of GRTOV studio completely stopped working on websites and retooled to work on a game called Alternativa Game. This an infinitely ambitious project remained on paper, but instead we launched Tanki Online and a whole bunch of innovative technologies - Alternativa3D, AlternativaCore and others. And indeed the “group” has grown from seven to more than fifty people. Behind - the sea of achievements, ahead - there is an ocean of opportunities!

Happy Birthday, AlternativaPlatform. Thanks to all our relatives, friends, colleagues and partners for their help and support. Go on!

There are new interesting projects based on the Alternativa3D 8 engine.
Recently in the forum there was a link of the Ticket3D project - a web-application for choosing seats in the cinema.

In the current version you can look at the screen from the selected seats and view the cinema hall from different angles.
The project is founded by a group of independent developers from Spain.

Dear friends, our blog participates in «Runet Blog 2011» award. We ask to support us with your voices.

Vote!

Holidays at last are almost over. Soon we will continue to talk about conferences, new technologies and other serious things. But first we offer a little post about something relaxing and entertaining… About a game!

Not so long ago we showed cool racing arcade built on Alternativa3D 7, and now we are going to show you original puzzle Roll the Ball. The name of this game from Turkish Flash developer Yagiz Gurgul is self-explanatory. You have blue ball you should roll around. The aim is to reach a red mark and it is not so easy. Your way lays through fantastic agglomerate of solid planes and unsteady boards. Due to realistic physics ball can easily roll down to the abyss so it’s a little bit tricky to reach the mark.

Well, a picture is worth thousand words. Play it!

In the beginning of December we attended international conference FlashGAMM!. It took place in the giant convention center Kyiv Expo Plaza. There were four of us and we put at a nearby Nivki hotel.

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MAX Racer not only shows modern special effects in Flash, but also demonstrates peer-2-peer multiplayer. Tom Krcha explains how this multiplayer works.

MAX Racer - 3D Flash Game with P2P Multiplayer from Tom Krcha on Vimeo.

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.

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