3D & The Secret Underground Lab

MOSI (Museum of Science and Industry) visits the Lab!

I love meeting and talking with players and creative minds. One day, I really hope for the opportunity to meet you all. Yesterday was a very special day for the team here. We opened up the Secret Underground Lab and allowed 20 young minds from the Museum of Science and Industry's "Summer Science Camp" to personally get a behind-the-scenes look at our crazy indie game development process. We even dressed up! (Probably not what they thought we meant when we said we would be in "suits".) Faith, Miko, and Nythera dressed up too... wow, did they look amazing!

Along with a highly dangerous, potentially deadly tour through every part of the lab, Thyton held a "how to draw" session, Xero showed some of the 3D models he is working on for the new game, and I told enough embarrasing stories that our new friends should be able to blackmail us for years! The only way it could have been better is if you were here too. (Unless you were here, stealthed and roaming around like a Ninja, in which case please disregard that statement.) Judging by the laughter, I think everyone had a good time... and hopefully found the knowledge we shared useful. More than ever I would like to create a movie so everyone can see what we do and allow you to see the world through the eyes of the AE team.

3D Game "Memory Leak" bug REVEALED!

Minimal and Zhoom have giant head-shaped craters right in front of their keyboards from banging their heads on their desk all weekend and yesterday trying to figure out the cause of the 200 MB/s memory leak bug. We talked directly to some of Unity's head hanchos who helped us by giving us a horrifying link. I am in a little bit of a rough spot with this post, because I love Adobe & Flash and do not want to talk poorly about the platform that ALL of our games run on.  But it appears the newest version of the Flash Plugin 11.3 which created many of the new problems in AQWorlds is also causing the memory leak problems in our 3D game. We reverted to the older Flash Plugin 11.2 and everything works fine. These problems with the new plugin are not fixable by us. In our tests, publishing a simple 3D model, with the most basic shader...  leaks memory and eventually crashes. Despite this, we plan to go forward with our chat/movement/item/maybe-combat-if-we-are-lucky "beta release" on time... but testers will be required to downgrade their version of Flash to help us test it. We know that these issues WILL be fixed in the near future, and all of the shaders and things that make our game look pretty will eventually be working in Flash too. So this will only be a temporary situation. Now... with only 2.5 days left this week, we have to put all of our stuff into our game!

Meet Cambell, our first Legend of LORE NPC. You will find him in the town of Ravenshire and he will be selling a small selection of armor and weapons. It is interesting to see how he went from concept sketch to 3D model. You may be wondering, based on his name, manly chin, and the color of his cape if he was based off of some super-mega-awesome-iconic B-movie star that I personally idolize and continously contact trying to get him to make a guest cameo in our games... but of course, that would be purely speculation.

Check back tomorrow for the first sneak peek of the interface... and some photos sent to us from a former special guest!