Flash Multi-User site “I Prophesy” goes live!
This one is a long time coming folks. A massive undertaking we started at the beginning of ’08 for The Secret Location. The site was another Bell New Media Fund project for a television series on the Vision channel. www.iprophesy.net
What is it? Here’s our technical, geek speak blurb about it. I Prophesy is an avatar-based Flash multi-user experience. The site encourages users to explore the future of the human race through video, mini-games (multiplayer and solo) and most importantly via chat and forum posting. The Flash app works in conjunction with a customized forum installation featuring a unified registration and login system synching Flash and bbPress. Avatars see recent posts in any one of the massive thirteen parallax worlds via an rss feed fed right into the skies of I Prophesy. The site even tweets to a Twitter account set up specifically for publishing postings on the forum. The site was developed for Flash 10 (as the player went into beta) allowing the development team to explore PixelBender among other things, for improved bitmap data performance used in the custom physics/world engine(s).
SmartFox multi-user server proved to be worthy, and allowed us to code a Java extension for some of our heavy lifting and network optimization strategies. The avatars themselves were created in 3D, rendered, converted into PNG sequences and then in order to control bandwidth usage and CPU resources a Java application was writen to process individual avatar frames into 2800px wide image strips of frame sequences separated into color data and PNG alpha channel for better compression, it would then create files ready for batching to produce swfs. Overall, the project was a year in the making and employs serious memory management, frame rate, and optimization techniques that allow this massive site to perform within the Flash player. The final result is an experience like no other with an undisclosed number of codes and easter eggs!
Adrian out.
_Posted in General
_Tagged Bell New Media Fund, Flash, I Prophesy, multi-user, pixelblender, smartfox
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