Citizens Bank of Canada uses TheoWorlds' ecard to sponsor a food drive

Citizens Bank of Canada used our Christmas Gingerbread Cookie Decorator ecard to sponsor its food drive. Here is the link:

https://www.citizensbank.ca/Personal/Products/SendAHolidayCard/

Citizens Bank of Canada will donate a dollar to the Canadian Association of Food Banks for every gingerbread card sent between December 10, 2007 to December 25, 2007 up to a maximum of $5000.00.

TheoAvatar SDK 1.2.2.1 - minor update

There is a small update for our TheoAvatarSDK users. It fixes the bug related to the interface (not to the isometric engine itself). The Room List was acting weird in some rare situations, and would sometimes switch users to an empty room. It has been fixed. All you have to do is to locate the "roomList" movieclip on the scene or in the library (It's the one containing the ListBox with the room names) and then replace a couple of lines (or just the whole code, if it's easier for you):

Here is the new code.

Special thanks to Drew Bennett from BYOB Simulation, who pointed this bug out to us. Drew is working on a very interesting business simulating portal using our TheoAvatarSDK. We plan to review it sometime soon.

If you want to find more about TheoAvatarSDK - visit http://www.theoworlds.com/theoavatarsdk.html

Christmas eCards for web2.0

We updated our highly popular Christmas Gingerbread Cookie Decorator eCard for the incoming season. Now, after saving a new card, there is a new option available to you - copying the code snippet that can be pasted into your own website. So if you have a MySpace or FaceBook page, a personal blog or website, you can display your saved card directly on it!

Besides that, we also optimized our icing engine, so now it will not slow down after you add a lot of icing on the cookies.

Have fun with our ecard and spread the joy of Christmas! You can access it from here: www.theoworlds.com/christmas/.

5pm is officially released

5pm - a new generation project management tool - is finally released.

You can give it a try - there is a 14-day free trial. The registration is quick and easy. No credit card is required.

Visit: www.5pmweb.com for more details.

P.S. To help you get started, we also created a short Video Introduction with Adobe Captivate: http://www.5pmweb.com/videos/5pm_Quick_Introduction.htm

Lego City Builder built with TheoAvatarSDK

MindOrchard team used our product - TheoAvatarSDK - to create the amazing Lego City Builder. It lets you create your own city maps and export them to jpegs.

Thanks to Arran D'Aubigny for the link.


Ever wanted to build your own online world? Try our TheoAvatar SDK - a tool that helps you build multi-user 3D chats like TheoAvatar in Flash. It comes with Map Editor, source code and documentation. It runs on both ElectroServer and SmartFoxServer. Purchase it today and start digging into the exiting world of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO)!

5pm demo goes live

About a week ago our web development division launched the 5pm™ demo - the next generation web-based service for managing projects and tasks. Give it a try here: www.5pmweb.com.

You will notice the powerful and original interface, powered by web2.0 technologies like AJAX. As we mentioned before, the Flash interactive timeline was developed by TheoWorlds.com.

Feel free to play with the fully functioning public demo. The commercial version will be released soon and it will come with a 30-day free trial. Make sure to register your email in order to be notified about the release.

When your AOL friends don't get your emails...

... you may not even know about it. AOL uses extremely aggressive process to filter out the spam. Often, suspicious emails are deleted, without even getting into the spam folder. So the end user doesn't even have a chance to check if it's really spam, and the sender doesn't get any errors or a bounce back messages. It's like an Emails Black Hole. Most likely it can be tuned up through the email settings, but not many bother.

Today we got one of many emails related to this issue: "i can not fu##ing reseve letters from this website from my friend". This is actually the whole email, not a quote. I just had to hash out a couple of letters. No hellos or good buys, not even checking the spelling - straight to the point. But I can see where the frustration comes from. This is just another user who created a nice ecard on our website, emailed it to a friend (through our form) and... nothing happened.

Long time ago I looked into this problem, but gave up. Today I gave it another try. If you are sending many solicited emails to your users - this information is for you. If you spam people, please stop reading and go punish yourself somehow.

The best place to look for official information on this matter is here: http://postmaster.aol.com. Looks like if AOL treats your IP address as a source of spam, and this is not true, the way to fix it is to apply to their AOL Whitelist. The phone call to their service center confirmed it. So I filled in the form, submitted, confirmed... and got rejected in a couple of minutes. "Your web request has been denied because you do not appear to be the owner of the IP address(es) in your request". That's nice, considering that we are using a shared server - surely I'm not the owner of that IP. Next, I contacted our service provider and they said they will try to fix it... That's where the story ends so far...

So, if you are sending many solicited email, you may want to re-check the situation with AOL. Time by time they are introducing some changes and trying new things. The reality is that you will need to invest some additional time into your AOL users.

And for all those who want to make sure that our ecards arrive to their friends - just copy the link that is generated at the end and paste it into your own email. This way it will not be lost or end in the spam folder.

Have fun with our Halloween Pumpkin Carving ecard!

Get your Halloween Avatar

Is it too early for Halloween? Not according to our stats.

In the past week we've seen a significant jump in the number of Halloween e-cards created through our website (www.theoworlds.com/halloween/).

Web surfers even found a new way to use it, by creating their own Halloween Avatars. It's pretty simple. Just carve your pumpkin, press the 'Print Screen" button and paste as new image into Paint, then then resize/crop.

I'm attaching the avatar we created for our website.

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.

"I got my crabs from Dirty Dick's"

The title drove your attention, right?
I've seen it first on a road side billboard. One of those nice peace of southern humor used for advertising.

Dirty Dick's is a small crab house in Outer Banks, NC. It doesn't looks like much from the road, except for their sketchy slogans (another one - "If you never been to Outer Banx, you don't know Dick").

This clever and fun branding clearly works. I gave it a try. The place was packed and the food was great. After dinner I stopped by their store and bought a set of t-shirts, postcards and other merchandise - all featuring the "Dirty Dick's" theme in various ways. I probably spent on it all more than I spent on the dinner. And now my friends know about this place too.

This is a great example of viral marketing that uses good humor to deliver the message.

"Make your message fun" is our motto here, at TheoWorlds.com. Though we work in a different industry, and are more conservative with our jokes, I couldn't resist bringing you this example. I hope you found it entertaining.

ElectroServer 4 announced! A groundbreaking release.

Yesterday Jobe Makar (Electrotank) told me that they just announced ElectoServer 4 - the newest update of their popular socket server. The release is scheduled for September 2007. You can check the details here: http://www.electro-server.com/es4.aspx.

For those who don't know, ElectroServer is a multiuser server geared toward Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO) made in Flash.

It's been a while since the release of ES3, and their main competitor - SmartFoxServer - looks to be ahead of he game. But the guys from Electrotank didn't just sit on their hands: the new release is the result of a year of hard work.

The announcement page features a multiplayer tank battle game with bots and real users playing in real time. It looks very good, especially taking in consideration that Jobe put it together in ten hours, just a day before this announcement.

The list of new features is impressive. Video and audio streaming is something completely new. Check their homepage - http://www.electro-server.com/ - for an example of video streaming. ES4 is claimed to be tested on 200,000 concurrent players.

I contacted Mike Grundvig - one of the owners and the engineers behind the ES, who works remotely from Kansas City (Electrotank is based in North Carolina). He took his time and answered my question. Below is a compilation of this interview:

Dis: This "200000 gamers" test, can you tell me more about it?
Mike: That was a huge amount of work. We actually had to create a rather sophisticated set of load generating tools that we could run on multiple machines. ES4 supports two modes currently, a "stand-alone" mode and a "distributed" mode. Standalone is just like ES3 or our competitors. The server runs in a single VM on a single machine. Distributed mode uses multiple servers broken down into two types: a registry and many gateways. The registry manages and maintains state, while the gateways handle user connections. This is a LITTLE bit like the origin-edge approach Flash Media Server supports but not quite.

Dis: So how did you simulate the "200,000 gamers" test?
Mike: We used 10 gateways and 1 registry for the server-side of things. We are so confident in our performance results, we are giving away the source to the load generators and directions on how to use it to test in your own environment when you install the server. The load generation required something like 7 machines in the end. The tests were VERY accurate and realistic. When the server is released, we will release some charts showing the stats. The gateways were dual core blade servers. The registry was a quad-processor, dual core server. Everything running Linux.

Dis: Tell me more about new server API.
Mike: The server API for developing games is similar to the ES3 model, but very different in
implementation. For instance, I'm sure you are familiar with the problem of Flash recieving too many messages inbound per second. This can cause wierd lag-like behavior in the client. To combat this, developers usually have to write code that aggregates and queues messages
dynamically. In ES4, we have a very simple way that your plugin can automatically specify an outbound message to be queued for delivery and the server aggregates for you. The plugin can even specify the queue drain speed and the rest. If a message is named, then the server will only send a single instance of it. In ES4, we have a very simple way that your plugin can automatically specify an outbound message to be queued for delivery and the server aggregates for you. The plugin can even specify the queue drain speed and the rest. We always keep the message size as small as possible. The speed at which the queue drains is up to the game developer but can be changed on the fly and it is plugin specific. ES4 supports two basic protocols to keep message size down. A highly condensed text-based protocol and a tiny binary protocol for AS3 clients. Of course, we also have enough RTMP support in there for audio/video too.

Another cool feature you might be interested in, is the fact that we support strongly-typed objects spanning languages now. So clients written in java can send native data to an actonscipt plugin and vise-versa. We have this ability interspersed all throughout the server so that public/private messages, room/user variables, etc. can contain a payload of typed data. The data is sent over the wire in a neutral format but we convert it to the appropriate data type
on the recipient side. So a "long" sent from a java plugin becomes a "number" on the AS2 client.

Also, we built the server intending to support multiple languages easily and now we just need to add some.

There are lots of other kick-$$$ abilities in the server too ;). For instance, we are now a fully web-based administration. It's rock solid and supports everything. Like we support the ability to upload extensions (groups of plugins/event handlers) via the web. So you create an extension, zip it up and you can upload it to the server from the admin and deploy it. Also extensions support hot reloading. We will have a big article on the exact behavior of reloading. I think people will understand what we are talking about when they see it.

Another huge plus: we now have multiple language filters/flooding filters and they can be
specified uniquely per room, and users can be in many rooms/zones at once. For instance, you have a MMO game where people need to be able to check with each other while running around the world.

There is a lot more under the covers and we are documenting it as fast as we can.

Mike also revealed that they will be launching a new redesigned website, so it looks like ElectroServer is up for some big breakthrough.

In light of this announcement it makes sense to mention their competitors - SmartFoxServer. Interestingly, the SFS is behind the major hit Club Penguin, while ES is powering Webkinz. Those two major MMO are going head to head, and the later one may even have the lead, according to compete.com - read our last blog port about it. This makes this competition even more interesting.

I contacted Marco Lapi from SFS team, asking about their latest plans, and got this reply:

"The next release will concentrate on firewall proxies, we're releasing a new SFS module that will extend connectivity to all those clients who can't establish a direct socket connection. This is probably the request that has been asked more frequently, so it was about time to focus on the issue. We have evaluated various "canonical" solutions but none of them offered a good-enough performance when compared to a speedy socket connection. Finally we seem to have solved the problem.

We're currently in beta and results are really promising. A public beta should follow during September."

So, with both major players announcing new releases in September, it looks like it's going to be a busy month for MMO developers!




Ever wanted to build your own online world? Try our TheoAvatar SDK - a tool that helps you build multi-user 3D chats like TheoAvatar in Flash. It comes with Map Editor, source code and documentation. It runs on both ElectroServer and SmartFoxServer. Purchase it today and start digging into the exiting world of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO)!

Webkinz vs Club Pinguin

Some of you may be familiar with Club Penguin - a virtual world built in Flash. What you may not know, is that this nice portal is being purchased by Disney for... $700 million!

Compete.com takes a look at other leaders in this field and compares them using their own metrics. Check the original post here:
http://blog.compete.com/2007/08/09/webkinz-club-penguin/

Thinking about building your own virtual community? Take a look at TheoAvatar SDK - a kit for building avatar chats. It comes with documentation and source code. It's the fastest way to have a demo for your potential client up in no time!

Running TheoAvatar on SmartFoxServer

In order to run TheoAvatar 1.2.2 on SmartFoxServer, you will need to use 1.4.x version or older, which is available for download here:

PRO Win:
http://www.smartfoxserver.com/products/download.php?d=11

PRO Linux:
http://www.smartfoxserver.com/products/download.php?d=13

Basic Win:
http://www.smartfoxserver.com/products/download.php?d=15

Basic Linux:
http://www.smartfoxserver.com/products/download.php?d=16

Here is the 1.4.2 (for SFS PRO) patch page --> http://www.smartfoxserver.com/download/beta/

Note that if you purchase SmartFoxServer 1.5.x license, it will
also work for 1.4.x, as it's independent from server version.

Thanks to Marco Lapi (www.smartfoxserver.com) for providing this info.

Easy fundraising for non-profits on web

If you are a small (or not so small) non-profit organization, looking for new fundraising ideas through the internet – this article is for you. Web can be a very lucrative ground for fundraising. The organizational costs are low, and you can reach people across geographical borders.

There are many ways to collect money for your generous purposes on the internet, besides the traditional donation form on your website. What if I tell you there is a way to easily collect money through the internet without asking people for hard cash? A fundraising campaign that runs on good spirit and a little bit of technology. Easy to set up, maintain, track and… free. And no, it’s not a scheme of any sort. Not even a big secret – I’ve found mentions of it around the internet. I’ll just go into a little more detail here.

So what are the ingredients and how does it work?

Clicks on the internet are worth money. If they wouldn’t – we would not be invaded with banners and spam. But not all of it is evil. Small and big businesses are struggling to get their message in front of potential buyers, and they are ready to pay for it. Last time you were “googling” on the internet, looking for some product, you probably noticed the non-intrusive ads on the top and on the right side of the search results. Those ads are relevant to your search. It’s just a way for companies to appear within the first pages of that search.

It’s such a big business for Google, that they make now much more money on selling advertising than their search engine. Google has extended the idea of contextual advertising to the whole internet – everybody can register and start placing Google ads on their own website, making some profit when people click on those ads. This model is called AdSense.

You can find more details on AdSense on Google’s official website: https://www.google.com/adsense/ . But all you have to know is that it’s free to set up and the more visitors you get to your website – the more money you can make. Google takes care of the rest, like matching the ads with your website content.

The key is to generate enough clicks on those ads, usually by having a very popular content. So how can it help a non-profit? How can you bring more users to your website?

We, at Theoworlds.com, came to this idea by accident. In order to promote our brand we developed a set of highly interactive ecards for Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

Ecards are a perfect viral marketing tool for the internet. We took extra time to create original ecards, investing a lot of time in it and, at the end, it paid off. We got a lot of attention and even got mentioned on CNN Headline PRIME news. At this point, as a way to cover our traffic expenses, we decided to give AdSense a try. The results proved to be very good for such a small website.

For our Valentine’s Day campaign we decided to share a part of our modest AdSense income with The Salvation Army. And that’s when I started to think about how this model could be used for fundraising.

Events like Christmas, naturally, generate a huge amount of traffic for Christmas-related ecards. People exchange them with each other, across geographical borders, spreading the spirit of holidays. It’s also a good time for non-profit organization to appeal to people’s best qualities. All you have to ask them is to keep sending those ecards to their friends and family and anybody they know, because every single click generates a small amount of money for your organization. This will make them even more willing to do so. It’s fundraising driven by good spirit (do not forget the technology).

Setting such campaign takes a couple of easy steps:

1. Setting up a page on your website with an ecard from Theoworlds.com. Sure, it can be any other ecard, but quality and originality will set you apart from many others. At this point we have Halloween, Christmas and Valentine’s Day ecards. We are also working on a birthday one right now. You can get more info here: http://www.theoworlds.com/ecard_campaigns.html . The best part is that we license our ecards to non-profits with no initial payment. You can pay the cost later, from money generated from your campaign. If it never works for you – you don’t have to pay us. But we know it will work. Setting up the ecard(s) takes 2-3 days maximum.
2. Setting up an AdSense account. Though it’s free and simple, Google uses a snail mail registration, so you may want to start this process in advance. We can help you with that or offer alternatives. The ads can be placed anywhere on the page, usually beneath the ecard, like on our website.
3. Sending your ecard around and tracking the AdSense income. Easy like that. The data is updated hourly, so you will be able to track your campaign step by step.

Besides the cash generated from AdSense campaign, you will also build awareness of your organization, and this can bring more donors through traditional channels. So it’s a win/win situation. A free promotion that actually generates money, while asking people nothing more than greeting each other during the holidays.

If you are interested to give it a try – email me at info@theoworlds.com . I’ll be glad to talk to you.

- Sergei

Creating avatar chat characters

Our artists at TheoWorlds.com just finished creating a new set of characters for TheoAvatar chat - they can walk, sit and even dance. Each character's animation is made from 32 frames with multiple matching layers of clothes. It took about 400 images to assemble each character.

In case you are planning to create your own The Office Space game or the next Habbo-like online community, here are some tips from our animators on drawing avatar characters in isometric view:

• If you are trying to draw realistic human avatars with high level of details, you'll need to use references. There are two options here: 3D and photography. If you choose 3D, the easiest way is to use characters libraries from Poser. If you are more comfortable with photography, you can just capture your co-workers on the camera. Just make sure they know about it. We used the latest approach as it was more fun. Doing it in 3D would, probably, be faster.
  After you resize down these reference pictures, you can draw on top of them, adjusting the details on the pixel level.


• Use minimum number of frames to represent each animation. Try to keep your total files size small and also reduce the amount of work. To keep it as smooth as possible, make the differences between frames smaller. For example, if you draw the walking animation - try smaller steps and less arm swing.


• Animate the characters in Flash early. Don't rely on animated GIFs. Moving the characters around in Flash will help you test the animation early on. You can do corrections while it's not too late. It also helps you find the optimal animation speed.


• Draw symmetrical characters so you can "mirror" their animations of opposite directions. For example, our characters are moving in 8 directions, 3 of them being just "mirrored".


• Less is more. If you are using multiple layers of clothes (for customizing the look) you will have to animate each of them to match the character's animation. So more character animations you have - more clothes animation to create. It grows almost exponentially, so stand the temptation of creating a lot of "cool moves".

For inspiration, check devianART gallery on pixel art isometric characters:
http://browse.deviantart.com/digitalart/pixelart/characters/iso/?order=9&alltime=yes

New Google Analytics comes with Flash flavor

This week Google Analytics subscribers will notice big changes. Google spent a year working on the new update, and, finally, it's out.

One of the biggest additions is new graphs made in Flash. They are auto-resizable and take the full screen width. I say, it's about time. Seriously, it isn't too difficult to implement something like this in Flash. But the difference is huge - I found it very handy on my widescreen laptop. Compare the old and the new Flash visitors graphs (actual proportions from my screen):


Now you see the difference. It's like trying to watch a movie through a keyhole and then getting a HDTV!

The sole fact of Google using Flash is worth mentioning. I'm not going to give a big propaganda speech on Flash. But there are some things this technology is good for besides web games and "flashy" animations: data visualization and interaction. Google graphs are packed with nice features: rollover hints, draggable timeline range picker, overlapping graphs and more. It's light, fast and informative.

I don't even know why you wouldn't do such things in Flash. Still, I find other companies trying less obvious paths. For example, Yahoo Pipes pushed javascript to the maximum. The same solution made in Flash would be much more "native". I think it's about the skills range in such companies. There is historical alienation of "pure" developers from technologies like Flash. It's still more on designers side. Macromedia, now Adobe, is changing things through Flex, but it still needs time to become mainstream.

When companies embrace Flash for what it's good for, the results are amazing. Check, for example, Digg Labs with their BigSpy, Stack and Swarm tools. Those things are not developed in-house, which is not surprising. But their partnership with stamen design has proven very productive.

Sure, development and design is not about the tools. The results are what matters in the end. At the same time, some tools are just better at some things and when taking advantage of it, the outcome can be very rewarding.

-Sergei

TheoWorld's Birthday Cake Decorator wins Adobe Site of the Day

I just got a notification from Adobe about being selected as an official Adobe Site of the Day for tomorrow. Our Birthday Cake Decorator brought us the 4th SOD award.

All four awards were won in a short span of 1.5 years with our line of original interactive ecards. Check the rest of the ecards here:

• Halloween Pumpkin Carver
• Christmas Gingerbread Cookie Decorator
• Valentine's Day Cake Decorator

We've been licensing these ecards to our clients and the results are very positive. It's an out-of-the-box viral marketing campaign than can be set up in 24 hours!

Find more about licensing our award-winning ecards here: www.theoworlds.com/ecard_campaigns.html

- Sergei