From time to time someone at Three Melons comes up with a great tech demo. This time Adrian Piccioli explores 3D rendering and basic scene management using portals as a culling algorithm in Flash 10:
If you can't play the demo, then you must download and install Flash Player 10
After over three years working with Web technologies, and running into uncountable mistakes in the process, we got to learn a lot about Flash and how to use the platform for game development. As a result of this, we created the Daiquiri Game Maker.
What exactly is the
Daiquiri Game Maker?
It is a set of technologies
and tools designed to develop high-end, social enabled, web-based games.
The Daiquiri Game maker is composed by two main technologies:
In the
following videos you can have a sneak peak to the Daiquiri Game Maker in
action:
A Level of the LEGO Indiana Jones game being edited.
A Flash3D scene being designed with Daiquiri.
So, what's the
story?
As you might know, Flash
wasn't created for developing games. At first, it was rather an animation and
multimedia platform for the web and nowadays (since the release of Flex) is one
of the best options for RIA development, but for sure it's not a professional
game development platform.
Well, after building so
many games on top of it at Three Melons, we gathered a bunch of reusable
building blocks that eventually converged into a flash game engine. We started
using this engine which we called "Daiquiri Framework" for building
our games and in each project it grew and got polished a little more.
At some point in time we
realized that the framework/engine was not enough, we needed a way for rapidly
addressing level design, screen flow, and prototyping, so Barman was born.
Of course nowadays Daiquiri
is much more than a bunch of reusable components. Since December 07 we have a specialized
team of three engineers working really hard towards creating the most productive, powerful
and easy to use engine for Flash and Silverlight games.
In the near future we'll
open a website dedicated to Daiquiri with a detailed feature list, its roadmap
and some more videos. Stay tuned...
For now, this is an
internal technology but we might license it in a future.
Please do not hesitate to post your comments, questions
and suggestions about Daiquiri…
To begin with our Technology Blog, lets start by listing what technologies we use at Three Melons...
We have development capabilities under all the above technologies, but we really stand out in Flash and Unity3D (we are Unity Featured developers).
We usually use Flash for advergames where plug-in penetration might be an issue and Unity for more 3D high-end stuff that cannot be achieved in Flash. We also choose Unity when our customer prioritizes the game experience over the number of people reached, or when the distribution platform is not the web, but is the iPhone or any other Unity enabled one.
This is the way we are working with these technologies at the moment, but we think Unity will be increasing its installation base drastically in the following 2 years (as well as Silverlight).
We've done a lot of prototypes, experiments and demos in Shockwave, XNA, Virtools, Java and Silverlight but haven't released any public game under these technologies yet. We have experience in both Havok and Ageia physics engines. We can create any DirectX or OpenGL game in C++ but we prefer to go for more productive (high-level) solutions.
Some more facts:
We are Microsoft Certified Partners We use .NET for the development of all our internal tools C# and ActionScript are the two most used languages at Three Melons (C# under Unity, AS under Flash) We are under Sony Incubation Program (so we are playing around with some PSP Dev Kits) We are working on projects for the iPhone Platform We totally handle networking in videogames. We have our own multiplayer server called Camarero and we are developing an MMO based on it. We have a custom game development framework called Daiquiri (more on this in future posts)
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