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… :-)

If you also take “heightmap”, you can create so called parallax effect, when texture is changed depending on view angle. We don’t need this for the game engine ’till we’ll got Flash Player 10. It will have an ability to write texture crunching scripts on Adobe’s Hydra language (they say it will use hardware acceleration). So it will be more like pixel shaders then.

Размер: 1Мб

Controls:

• Mouse — move
• Click — change light color
• Wheel or +/- — change specularity
• Space — nextex

Normal maps can be used to lighten sprites in the game. They have to be rendered or paint, but the effects worth it.

Controls:

• Mouse move — move light source
• Mouse wheel or up/down arrows — change specularity

We also managed to build bump using normal maps. We use prepared image with “relief normals” to pass “surface curvature” info to the engine. Geometry is not changing (we’ll not see this features at the very edges of an object), it works like bumpmap.

This deature is not engine integrated yet (we’re busy with texturing optimization), but you can check quality/speed already.

Size: 1.6Mb

Controls:

• Move mouse cursor — move light source
• Mouse click — change light color
• Mouse wheel — change specularity
• Space — next texture

Just finished one of the most complicated stage in 5.0 engine development — dynamic BSP-tree rebuilding. Let me remind, that BSP lets us to save and establish all the “who behind who” correspondences between polygons. Thanks to it we now can divide any complex objects and get nice performance in sorting (even during camera or objects moving).

To compare, we took an old 3d-model with house and landscape from 3.0 engine demo.

Controls:

• Arrows — camera movement
• Mouse drag — look around
• Mousewheel or +/- — change FOV
• Spacebar — animation on/off
• Enter — change BSP-priority
• Q — change quality
• B — show BSP-tree

Most of the integration work is done: there are 3D world editors, users run and chat, world is uploading dynamically, and the object actions system is working good.

Further integration will be done when 3D engine 5.0 will be ready to go.

Full-size screenshots: