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.

Secret screenshot:

After launching demo all engine disadvantages came up. Processor loading is not distributed well — say, we had 30-40% without any changes to scene, which in not a Good Thing. Also we had some too complicated optimization methods.

First of all (with thanks to your feedback) we decided to code perspective correction and to re-write “honest” Z-sorting with some new optimization tricks.

After all we managed to create new, 5th version of engine which will have different architecture (not changed since 2.0). It will suppurt multiply cameras, perspective, Z-sorting using BSP-trees. “Changes listeners system” is already implemented.

And sure, we’re also making engine-server integration.

In the depths of the office there is an “Alternativa Game” version for the people with luxuriant imagination.

City demo-scene sketches are in progress. This will help to find out logic and usability issues in territory design.

Programmer’s tables are standing closer more and more, as we progress further.

At the beginning we all decided to choose something simple and re-usable, like Nike. No glamour, no metall highlights, no gothic elements.

We had a lots of signs, and each other was too simple. Then we gave up and stopped on this logo:

Then registration process has began, and we decided to make some (read: everything) changes. We came up with this one:

Is is still in progress, but we have the basics anyway.

here are some screens and pics made at the end of 2006 - beginning 2007.

You can see first engine experiments, avatar animation system, GUI prototypes etc.

Sand tex	Grass tex	Simple 3D-house
Randomly generated cell map and arrows-guided ball. Walls that cover the ball were shadowed	First 3D-polygons	Sceleton animation
Concrete textures	GUI prototype	Stones tex and some walls
Window example	Loaded cells and lighting experiments	GUI prototype
Speedtest using cacheAsBitmap	Edge fill interpolation using points lightness	3D-landscape with lighting and height map-tex. Heights change dynamically.
3D-points transformation test	Animation tests	Concrete cells tex
Trashbox sprite	SOme interface sprites	One more trashbox sprite