I’ve been seeing a lot of cool 3d Flash stuff here and there, mostly on development blogs or forums. When I tell people that Flash can do 3d stuff, I get an impression which is a mixture of shock and disbelief. After checking out an informative PaperVision 3d video tutorial on gotoandlearn.com, I was less intimidated and ready to jump into it. Been looking for an excuse to brush up on my 3d skillz.

cubocc
CUBOCC face demo

Anyway, I saw this demo at http://cubo.cc/ today and it kind of shocked me. Apparently it’s a bit viral already, spreading around the net as it should. Some awesome coding, brilliant texturing and a simple design goes a long way, doesn’t it? The future of Google Adsense? Unfortunately, most likely! haha

But wait… that’s not all!

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I’ve had an exciting week sitting at my computer. Reading all the news and happenings from GDC. Hoping for some great info, some great discoveries to be rained down upon me like liquid inspiration.

XNA Community

The most important news story to me is that on Wednesday Microsoft finally announced that games created with XNA Game Studio will be able to be distributed to ALL Xbox Live members. They’ve developed a system similar to Newgrounds.com, allowing anybody to upload content, undergoing peer review to be approved. This seems like another great way to reach a game audience, beyond Flash. You can read the details of how they plan to “Democratize Game Distribution” here.

N+
N+ on Xbox 360

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Wednesday marked the release of N+ on Xbox Live Marketplace, an upgrade to Metanet Software’s well-known ninja-simulator Flash game.

It seems that making the transition from free Flash game to a commercial product is becoming more reasonably obtainable/acceptable.

In other news… what have I been playing recently?

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Update: The Liberty Engine: Running Clean

I’ve been all damn talk for too long. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the Liberty Engine Demo!

Liberty Engine demo 1

CONTROLS:

-Click the scrolling play button (or press space) to pause the animation.

-“In” and “Out” values determine number of seconds into the animation that the loop will begin and end.

-“Rate” determines the speed at which time will pass (seconds per second).

-“Duration” is the duration of the loop. If modified, it will automatically change the “Out” value.

-All forces in the system are set to enact at the 10 second mark and all calculations end at the 30 second mark.

Aside from the animation controls, this is not an interactive demo. Interactivity will probably be in the next one, but this demonstrates all of the engine principles. You’ll notice a slight lag period just as the swf loads. That’s because it is calculating all of the physics for the entire animation during the first frame. It saves all of that data and then replays it based on the passage of time. That’s why you can scroll back and forth or play at different rates (super slow-motion or fast-forward). The animation is actually set to 40fps, but I guarantee your browser can’t keep up with that speed. Fortunately, because the engine is time based rather than frame based, dropped frames do not effect the rate of movement. Oh, and by the way this is in AS2. I’ll translate it to AS3 later.

I haven’t mentioned the Liberty Engine up here very much, but it’s been a project of mine for over a year now. The concept behind the Liberty Engine is to create a physics engine that ANYONE can use; to liberate the thousands of young game developers without the programming or mathematical know-how to build the kind of games they dream of and provide it for public use free of charge. I hope, with a powerful and easy-to-use engine like this one, to foster a serious indie gaming movement at the grassroots level.

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Daymare Town. I found this gem when someone mentioned it on the Flashkit games forum. Straight forward point-and-click adventure game. Excellent presentation, interesting art style, great puzzle design.

Daymare Town 1

I couldn’t finish this without a walkthrough, but I blame it on a couple poorly drawn props. You’re in for a good hour or so of headscratching.

This game reminds me that there’s nothing wrong with keeping things simple sometimes. Props to the designer.

Check out Daymare Town at www.pastelstories.com.

I just checked out this impressive port of the Doom engine to Flash. It even loads up the original external .wad map files!

Check it out!

Doom in Flash

It might not be the first Flash port, but it’s definitely the first that resembles the original in speed and resolution. I could totally imagine playing some deathmatch in this thing. Can’t wait till something like that is available.

It’s also worth nothing that this was not created using Flash. It was developed on Linux using open-source/free Flex tools.

This reminds of back in 2001 or so when I saw a demo for a Quake 3 looking engine in Shockwave running incredibly fluidly. I recall it being a Q3 port of some sort because it was created by the same company that ported Q3 to Dreamcast, Raster Productions. I’m assuming it was some kind of port because they removed the demo after a short while, I believe because of legal matters.