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Coobico is going 3D
With our first screenshot-gallery out of the door, some may have already recognized something from the shots: Coobico is going 3D.
With our first screenshot-gallery out of the door, some may have already recognized something from the shots: Coobico is going 3D.
When development of Coobico started more than 15 months ago, the social game was envisioned as a pure 2.5D tile-based game, in the ballpark of Habbo, Dofus and the like. The power of Flash CS3 was quite unforseeable at that moment, let alone the development of 3D powered by Flash. Fast forward to summer 2008, a lot of really incredible 3D-frameworks have sprung up in the meantime: open-source solutions like Papervision, Away3D, and Sandy3D, as well as commercial products like the really outstanding Alternativa Platform (kudos!).
Since Coobico should be poised to push the envelop of flash-gaming, we finally made the (not entirely easy) decision to scrap our codebase and project-plan and port everything to Flash-3D. Some visitors at our blog already seriously asked when Coobico is going public, since the original beta-release date was set to April. The answer is, that the past 3 months kept us busy switching to 3D, rewriting most of the codebase, editing artwork, creating new maps and textures, just to name a few things, and the work is not finished yet. A new release-date will be issued as soon as we have adapted our project-plan.
What does all this mean to the game itself? Everything will stay pretty much the same: Coobico will still be playable in Flash without any additional client-downloads. It will still be completely free to play. But its new 3D-capabilities now allow for zooming in and out of a scene, as well as turning around a building freely before placing it. We feel that this is a great improvement to the gameplay and makes exploration of the island much more exciting.
So please bear with us a little bit longer, we will keep you posted here, as usual.
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Comments & Trackbacks
Worthstream: 17.07.2008, 07:04 PM
Lutz.W: 18.07.2008, 01:00 AM
Worthstream, you will not need any special 3D-Hardware to play Coobico, a browser with a Flash-plugin will suffice (there is no 3D-hardware-support in Flash anyway).
I agree with you, we are not going to compete with WoW. In fact, I am currently running Coobico on my old XP-Notebook myself without any problems—so don’t worry, we’ve got the “bud rides” covered…
Femur: 22.07.2008, 08:01 AM
Good decision! No good can come from burying yourselves into archiac technology. Not many developers have the courage or the patience to willingly go back and recode large portions of their existing work. Best of luck!
Lutz.W: 24.07.2008, 02:41 AM
Thx a lot Femur. It will hopefully turn out as a strong improvement to the whole game-play…
Cheers,
Lutz
Jule: 30.07.2008, 05:44 PM
Huhu Lutz, ich versteh zwar nur die Hälfte der technischen Details, aber was ich sehe haut mich bei jedem Update wieder vom Hocker! Und ich will ein T-Shirt mit der lila Sau, wenn alles fertig ist 
Lutz.W: 30.07.2008, 09:35 PM
Hallo Jule, danke—wird gemacht… 
This is Coobico's blog, Linking People's official developer's blog about our free to play online multiplayer strategy-game Coobico, flash games, chat and funny internet-stuff we like.
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You just cut out all of those who planned to play while “on the move” during bud rides or other transportations, on an old laptop, or on a new eee pc.
If one has to have 3d hardware to play coobico, he would just play WoW instead.
On top of that, pushing the relese date back by so much is a really bad move with your competitors about to release the full version…