- FastFroots is likely to be the first flash game with a pseudo-3D view. How did you come up with a solution that could be fast enough in a flash player?

<extrajetzt> First of all, hi Marco and thanks for the interview :o)

<am> Before Fastfroots, we did some studies with a gameboy emulator running zelda. You can find there a pseudo 3d overview map to localize link in the whole world. With that emulator (http://vboy.emuhq.com) you can simply display the current grafics in the emulator grafic buffer and the overview map grafic wasn't 3d at all.
So it was easy to see, that the programmersfind a solution to skip the image into a perspective view. I did some studies in Flash, splitting the image into stripes and scale them to have something like perspective and the result was amazing. After some hours we could fly over a textured plane - now the initial idea of fastfroots was born.

<cm> In fact handle bitmap graphics is more perfomant than drawing vectors with actionscript. In due to that we just had to figure out the quality of graphical representation. I would say flash was with us.

- What are the most important aspects of your game engine ?

<am> The first version of the 3dengine, which fastfroots is using, was running with 72 MovieClips to display the 3d effect. This is very processor intensive, but results best resolution and quality. While we developed fastfroots, percypea on www.flashkit.com posted an engine with one difference. The important thing on his engine, was to split the stripes in front of the camera into bigger pieces. That's great to reduce the number of movieclips, but it's also more dirty looking:o)

The current engine, we developed for www.formelgeiz.de is more powerfull than fastfroots in further aspects. We can easily set resolutions and the cameras height. It's in OOP, but the performance is not hardly downed, because we used the AsBroadcaster. It's faster than running the stripes translation by a for loop.

Another point are the collision detection. All tracks have tilemaps to set several properties on the gridpoints. They are coded in bits, what keeps the filesize small. For example, if the tilemap returns '5', we know that bit 1 and 4 is set. Every bit has it's own property (wall,booster,blocker,directionicons,etc.). We are using this for almost all games, we are developing. Getting an entry out of a 2dArray is very
performant, too.

Some words about the 'AI'. The computer opponent cars are simply driving to the next cue point, which is hardly set on the track and switch to next when passed. This passing event can be solved very fast by the crossvectorproduct. The collisions between the cars are also running by a AsBroadcaster. We simply detect on circleshapes, which is more performant and easier to code than real rigid bodies.

- Could you synthetically explain what kind of technique did you employ to achieve this nice 3D effect ?

<am> The result scripting is easy. Attaching the stripes with a for loop, translate them and connect them to an AsBroadcaster. The most work is to find a good OOP Structure to have the accessability in modifying the engine from game to game. For example the game on www.formelgeiz.de was done in 8 days.

- Graphics are really nice and colourful, and the drivers are a lot of fun. It seems you've been using a mix between 2D vector graphix and 3D models...

<dr> Yeah, we used 3D Studio Max to create the charaters and the items in the game. The cameraposition for rendering is like the viewpoint in the game. The tracks were shaped in Illustrator and then colored in Photoshop. The backgrounds are outlined in flash because of the easy handling and then colored and tuned in Photoshop. You can draw really intuitional in flash with getting clean results in a few steps. The main difficulty was getting all the techniques together in one common style. Before we started creating the graphics we did a lot of scribbles to ensure that common style.

- Did you develop tools for editing the game maps ?

<am> The tilemaps (bit-maps) are created with tilemappy (http://www.tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php). The problem was/is, that tilemappy is programmed for grafical tilemaps. We are still looking for a better solution. The cuepoints and the cameratracking are solved with blind movieclips.
Sometime Flash itself is the best editor you can have.

- What about sound fx and music? Did you use sound libraries or did you also produce some of the fx/music ?

<am> We work closely with our music-producer Ralf Noetzel from duesseldorf. At Fastfroots most sounds and music are made by him with reason from propellerheads. It's a great tool! If Flash would have similar performance to reason, we could create what things not :p

- How many people worked on this project and how much time did it take ?

<extrajetzt> We developed 6 weeks with 2 programmers and 1 designer. It was our first racing game, most of the time we figured out how we can do it, how we can reach the best result in performance and look and feel.

- What were the difficulties (if any) that you had to overcome during the development ?

<am> Tons of ideas was dropped in the time, cause in Flash it's always the fight of performance.performance. performance. So, if there was a point, which took time, it only was performance :o) The most beautyfull feature that is missing in fastfroots is the night and fog driving. We had a version, were you could drive into fog/night and leave it behind.

- Working with Flash for games can sometimes be painful because of actionscript performance. Did you sacrifice any feature for the sake of speed and performance ?

<am> Yes, and there comes more and more. OOP does not mean to bisect the performance. A lot of tricks and using local variables mostly can get the speed back, but it's allways critical. The basic thing is that an optimized script is nearly unreadable.

- Tell us a bit about your company, when did it all started ?

<extrajetzt> We started at the end of 2002. We all were employed in the same company and decided to get out of there to make our own stuff.

- What were the first games you worked on ?

<am> It was www.tag-der-arbeit.extrajetzt.de. Our hometown berlin in germany has an annual ritual of violent political conflict at the first of may. We decided to create a game what is dealing with that political situation to finaly give it a sense, haha.

- Have you or your company ever considered the opportunity of trying other tools for game developement such as shockwave, java etc ... ?

<am> If any tool has similar features as flash (timeline,MovieClips, etc) and is more performant and has an easy playerdownload, i would switch immedialty. But of course there isn't. I think making good projects is to have full access to the feature and mindset of a tool. And this isn't to get in a few weeks. We will wait and watch the market. Flash isn't the end. It's a start :o)

<cm> In my opinion by now flash is the best tool to combine graphic and programming. AS is a very young language but already very powerfull. In future, i can imagine that macromedia forces the development process in direction to .NET language scheme. If so we do not need to switch but we could combine different languages and tools. I am looking forward on that.

- A new version of Flash is out right now, and it seems it is not introducing many new features for us game developers ... Did you expect more features ? Any whishlist ?

<am> performance is my highest wish, then 3d supporting MovieClips, loading exported symbols from a swf and attach them anywhere. more sound channels, more sound controlls (pitching,soft sequencer), and much much more.

<cm> I want a new EDITOR. The flash editor is horrible. I go that far to say it is not even an editor it is a kind of notepad or whatever.

- Can you unveil some of your future projects ?

<am> stay tuned. We don't talk about projects untill we released them :o)

for your information, extrajetzt are:
am - andre michelle
cm - carsten müller
dr - david rowald