Visualizing your projects on a timeline (from TheoLabs)

Projects exist in a time continuum. They start at some point, exist for an amount of time and then reach the deadline (hopefully). Keeping this in mind, we developed a timeline view to show progress and tasks - you can preview it here. This project is developed as a part of a bigger application - 5pm™. It's a second generation project management tool, developed by our QG|Software division.

We plan to add editing capabilities to the timeline (imagine just dragging your tasks around) and other cool features.

To find more about this project and track its development, go to www.5pmweb.com. The beta release is coming out soon.

SmartFoxServer announces BlueBox - connect through firewalls and proxies!

gotoAndPlay() announced BlueBox today - a new SmartFoxServer add-on designed to allow connections behind firewall and proxies. Once the add-on is installed, the Flash client will be able to redirect its connection to the BlueBox, if a direct socket connection is not available.

Excerpt from their website:
"BlueBox enables players under restricted network configurations to play and enjoy fast multiplayer apps and games with little to no noticeable performance loss. All existing SmartFoxServer applications can take advantage of the BlueBox without any code change!
Just recompile your SWF files with the provided API and you're up and running."

Though solutions like that existed before, known as "http-tunneling", gotoAndPlay() claims to use a better modification that uses less traffic.

Still marked as "beta", it will be a great addition to SmartFoxServer.

P.S. My contact at Electrotank informs me of a similar solution that is in development.

New features added to our 3d world avatar engine (preview from TheoLabs)

TheoWorlds Builder (TheoSDK 2) - a new generation platform for building online games and avatar chat worlds - was updated with new features:

• Elevations support. Now maps can have hills, different floor levels and so on. The picture on the left shows the map in the edit mode - a grid of tiles with different height covers the map, defining its shape.
• New map graphics. We worked hard on creating high quality maps and here is the preview of the first one.
• Map background/foreground support. Instead of covering the whole map with tiles, you can also use a background image. A foreground image can be used too - in this example the disco light installations are always in the front.
  

Here is the link:
www.theoworlds.com/labs/theolabs_02.html

Check the blog posts for other features.


For those who are interested in this product, but don't want to wait for the release, check TheoAvatar SDK and TheoSDK - our existing platforms for creating online games and multi-user 3D chats like TheoAvatar in Flash. Both come with Map Editor, source code and documentation.

TheoWorlds Labs opened

I have good news for those who are interested in how our products are made. We just opened TheoWorlds Labs - a section where we will be posting previews of our projects in progress. You will be able to see steps from our projects, before they reach the final release.

First link is a preview of our new 3d world engine - TheoWorlds Builder (TheoSDK 2) - a new generation platform for building online games and avatar chat worlds:

http://www.theoworlds.com/labs/theolabs_01.html



For those who are interested in this product, but don't want to wait for the release, check TheoAvatar SDK and TheoSDK - our existing platforms for creating online games and multi-user 3D chats like TheoAvatar in Flash. They come with Map Editor, source code and documentation.