Thorsteinn  fridriksson (Denmark) , CEO of Soccertrix, originally developed this videogame in Unity3D, and describes his experience of migrating the application to Flash using Flare3D

1. What is Soccertrix ?

Soccertrix is the ONLY online football game in the world that the more users play, the better skilled football players they become in real life. The Soccertrix game has a series of tricks that the players have to complete to get points and medals, and to get access to harder tricks. To complete each trick, the player has to video themselves performing that same trick which are then uploaded and judges by peer players. The tricks are visualized by 3d characters as the 4 best football players of all time; Platini, Cruyff, Pelé and Maradona.

2. Why did you decide to migrate the game to Flash? How was the migration process?

We have used Unity since 2008 for demonstrating our tricks on our website. Unity is an excellent tool, but Flash is better in regards to end file size, user adoption of the flash plugin and web site integration. We found the migration from Unity to Flash very easy as we could re-use all our animation and texture files that we used for the Unity version.

3. Why did you choose Flare3D when there are free or open source technologies?

Before choosing Flare3D, I talked to most players on the market and found Flare3D being very helpful and their tool to be superior to competitors.

4. How would you describe your experience with this product?

The quality of the 3D rendering impresses me and end file size is perfect.

5. Which one was the feature that you liked the most?

I`m not the technical guy. But Flare3D let us reach 99% of the users.

6. Why was Flare3D important for Soccertrix?

Flare3D is very important for improving the Soccertrix game in regards to small file size for the user to download and everybody already have the flash plugin installed. We are very much looking forward to our users feedback on our new 3d engine.

7. Finally what would you recommend to those developers who have apps in Unity and are thinking about migrating to Flash?

I am predicting that with the release of Flash 11 the next generation of web games will arise. I have not yet seen any reason for not embracing Flash 11 as favorite 3d web tool.

And here some interesting links to know more about this great game:

Users video: http://www.soccertrix.com/en/nikolaj_pedersen/video/BounceCross/1

Viral video: http://youtu.be/JeWwGzPgjsM

Teaser video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_uH-qxgdqc

Liverpool player Daniel Agger recording trick in motion capture: http://youtu.be/YJNo_YvrCqs

link to game: www.soccertrix.com (the 4 legends will be launched in Dec. 2011)

Gene Endrody, creator of Sherwood Dungeon, a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) originally developed in Shockwave, describes his experience of migrating the videogame  to Flash using Flare3D

Bio:

As the founder of Maid Marian Entertainment and independent game developer Gene Endrody creates massive multiplayer 3D games you play in a web browser.  Winner of New Media BC’s PopVox 2007 awards for both Best Game and Best of British Columbia, the Sherwood Dungeon MMORPG is played by over a million unique players a month, and hosts up to 5,000 simultaneous users during peak times.

1. What is Sherwood Dungeon?

Sherwood Dungeon (www.sherwooddungeon.com) is a free 3D fantasy MMO that runs in your web browser but with the look and feel of a downloadable client or boxed game. We have been in operation for seven years based on a Shockwave client and currently have well over a million monthly unique players. As we don’t require registration or download, most players can go from discovering the game to playing it in less than a minute. Sherwood is spread over six islands and includes a massive procedurally generated dungeon influenced by classic games like Rogue and Nethack. As a fantasy lover and solo developer, I launched Sherwood to see how close I could get to an Everquest-like experience in a web browser. Although I liked the 3rd person camera and visual presentation of Everquest, from a game design perspective I deviated immediately and went with a skill-based, action RPG style of combat where timing counts.

2. Why did you decide to migrate the game to Flash? How was the migration process?

With the release of Stage3D, Flash is finally capable of handling the kind of GPU accelerated 3D that Sherwood requires.  Although Shockwave has performed well for us over the years, it’s hard to argue with the plug-in penetration rates of Flash. Flash’s ubiquity means removing the requirement to install a browser plug-in for most customers. This can effectively double the number of players and increase the number of potential distribution partners. It also opens up many next-generation 3D graphic features that were unavailable in Shockwave3D.

3. Why did you choose Flare3D when there are free or open source technologies?

With free engines there are often odd requirements forcing you to include links back to the engine developer’s website. The “free” engine is really just a marketing tool for the engine developer to promote their own games.  I evaluated an open source 3D engine as well but found Flare3D’s art pipeline and integration with 3D modeling software the most usable early in the Flash 11 beta. I also found that with open source sometimes sexy features can take a priority over the basic stuff you need. Flare3D’s development team prioritized well and as a result there were no glaring omissions in the engine.

4. How would you describe your experience with this product?

Considering I’m coming from an existing 3D engine on a different platform and language I found Flare3D to be very logically laid out. Functions and properties were in predictable locations and this really helped with the transition.

5. Which one was the feature that you liked the most?

The most important “feature” for us is really just raw 3D rendering performance, particularly with skinned characters. I was attracted to Flare3D initially by the demos that render large numbers of skinned characters. In an MMO there are often many monsters and avatars that need to be displayed simultaneously so this is definitely something we will be taking full advantage of.

6. Why was Flare3D important for Sherwood Dungeon?

As our players know, Sherwood is never “finished” and is always in active development. As we tend to stick with platforms for a long period of time the decision to go with Flare3D for the transition to Flash 11 was not taken lightly. With such a long running game it was important to choose a robust stable platform that would grow with us over the next few years and help us remain current and viable.

7. Finally, what would you recommend to those developers who have apps in Shockwave and are thinking about migrating to Flash?

As a Shockwave3D user I was pleasantly surprised to find that most features operated in a very similar fashion. I was particularly worried about animation and animation blending but found much of the Shockwave code to port very easily. The ability to switch between per vertex and sampled lighting modes at runtime is also very handy for targeting players with older graphics cards. The transition has gone much smoother than I expected and I whole heartily recommend Flare3D for developers with Shockwave3D experience.