3D in Flash had remained in relative obscurity until last year, because Actionscript was just not fast enough to power more than some bland, unimpressive 3D-scenes. However, with the advent of AS3, Flash made a major leap. Around February 2008, the three most ubiquitous open-source 3D-engines Papervision, Away3D and Sandy3D published their recent installments, which lead to an explosion in the usage of 3D in Flash. For Coobico, I made an in-depth assessment of these three engines shortly thereafter, to decide which one would be most suitable to our creative vision and our production pipeline from 3D to Flash. 

Sandy3D is the oldest of the frameworks, one of its branches is even available for AS2. Papervision, being a bit younger, was available in its effects- and “Great White"-branches up until now, but it was announced that both branches will be merged into Great White shortly. Away3D originally was a Papervision-derivative, but made some impressive improvements on its own after breaking with Papervision.

In fact, Away3D offers one of the most powerful packages of the three: it comes with a lot of features, shaders and the most different types of parsers (notably an .obj-parser), and does a very good job with z-sorting. However, I found various in-depth tasks (like re-assigning textures on the fly) a bit counter-intuitive to me. Talking about textures, phong-shading of rectangular shapes can lead to funny results, due to triangulation issues (i.e. one polygon of a shape is shaded while the other one stays unshaded). The biggest let-down of Away3D might be the lack of documentation (as usual). By the time I was checking it out, it was hard to find any documentation for any of the in-depth features--I finally decided against Away3D, cause there was not enough time to rummage through tons of undocumented classes, just to find out what they might actually be doing. Please notice though, that this is already a few months ago: if documentation of Away3D has improved in the meantime, I would highly recommend it, if you want to get into 3D.

Papervision, even though having earned a good reputation with a large community of developers, was a bit of a let-down to me in the end. It was lacking a few of the standard-features of the other two competitors, namely native support of 3D-sound and 2D-sprites. Phong-shading had the same problems as Away3D. Again, this was a few months ago, and I didn’t checked back in the meantime. It might very well be that PV3D has already implemented more features in the meantime.

Sandy, last but not least, is not as hyped as Away and PV3D, but its thorough set of features and rendering-capabilities is on par with Away3D (even though it admittedly needs to improve its z-sorting). All of its packages are very well documented, with quite a few tutorials available, because this engine is around just for such a long time already. Maybe this is also a reason why I felt that understanding Sandy was most easy and intuitive. Then there is a neat feature to turn down the quality of shapes from triangular to rectangular, which eliminates shading-artefacts of boxes, very important for Coobico.

Ultimately, I decided that Coobico would be developed with Sandy, because it felt most compatible. There are other solutions like Sharikura, which seemingly encompasses all other engines, but which is not yet publicly available, and Alternativa, a commercial solution, which yet has to prove if it can handle very large scenes with animations. 

This list is by no means exhaustive. Please feel free to leave a comment if you know another noteworthy 3D-engine.

“The study’s numbers show that 14% of gamers currently not playing MMORPGs would be interested in playing them if they could for free, while only 2% of gamers from the same group were interested in playing an MMORPG requiring subscriptions.
According to Parks Associate’s director of broadband and gaming, Yuanzhe (Michael) Cai, the barriers to entry with subscription-based MMORPGs, such as time and money, are too high for potential customers.”(Worlds in Motion)

Wow, 14%… there’s a target-group. Actually, we already talked about this last year in response to an assumption of Guild Wars co-founder Jeff Strain “You must make a game that is so overwhelmingly superior that it can actively break apart an established community”...
“Winter disagrees. “Instead, how about catering to a new target-group which never stuck with a traditional MMO in the first place?” He suggests.” -- sorry for quoting myself.

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.

You can also find the links to the images at our pages at Flickr and Delicious.