AdventureQuest 3D to run in Flash!
As you read this the AdventureQuest 3D project has made a much needed breakthrough. The front end of our 3D game is now running in flash! It is not perfect mind you... the framerate dropped by 80%, there are tons of glitches, and our custom pixel shaders which give the game a professional and "heavenly" look... all broke. Terribly. Minimal and Zhoom have had more stress than I have seen them endure since the recoding of AQWorlds from actionscript to to Actionscript 3 -- but we expect these things to be fixable.
The goal has always been to use Flash's new hardware accellerated 3D ability to run AQ3D. Our time table was pushed up A LOT with the announcement of Adobe's new licencing fee structure which will take an additional 9% on top of our other rediculous server, payment provider, software licencing and other growing costs. So, our goal is to have the walk, chat, and equip part of AdventureQuest 3D online and playable, even if it is bare bones, before August 1st so we can be grandfathered in before this new licensing fee takes place. We are going to finish the Flash conversion before bringing the alpha chat test back online. Which should be interesting... because both the Flash and Unity versions of the game will both let you access the same game server. Please wish us luck. (We are going to need it.)
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of LORE project, I <gulps> organized all my notes. Which is to say... I sifted through a literal mountain (easily 4ft tall - what I did not throw away is pictured to the right) of unorganized papers, sketch pads, notebooks and half torn paper napkins filled to the brim with my ideas, sketches, forumulas, interface designs. Everyone has their own way of communicating with others. How do you do communicate complicated ideas? I am very visual, so I keep a notepad close and draw my ideas as I am talking about them. But it is not the filled pages I wanted to talk to you about today... it was the pages that had nothing on them. The blank pages. While organizing I found MANY sheets (120 to 150?) of empty, white, perfectly clean pages. Sometimes, when the notebooks fill up you grab some paper off the printer, but the bottom ones end up unused and somehow get left in with the used ones. So I started a pile of "unused paper." Most of them were from the days I was working on DragonFable with Zhoom. They felt like unused artifacts. Were they blank pages... or unfired ammo from an ancient battle? Sure, I could have just thrown them away, or put them in a printer. But instead, I took the giant stack of paper and placed it on my desk and made the paper a sincere promise. "You missed your opportunity to become a part of the design for DragonFable, MechQuest, AQWorlds and our other games since... but you have not missed your chance to be part of our future and you will not be discarded. ALL of you will be made part of the new projects we are building. Every single one of you!" (does anyone else talk to, and make promises to, their paper?) It has been 6 months and nearly every sheet has been used on this new game project. So, I wanted to share with you... my kept promise... and a photo of last sheet of paper -- whose destiny today, is to help design AQ3D's "talk to an NPC" interface.
