Inside Development: A look at 3DVIA Virtools

As part of our ongoing commitment to keep you up to date with our development progress and practices during this period of closed development, we offer you a look "Inside Development."

As you likely recall, in order to play Rise & Ruin we ask you to install the 3DVIA player browser plugin. What exactly is 3DVIA player, and why do we need you to install it? Read on to learn more.

Two basic plugins are used to power Rise & Ruin: 3DVIA player and Adobe Flash. 3DVIA serves the 3D Engine for the game, while Flash powers the user interface (UI). All of the animations, effects, and character movements are scripted using software called 3DVIA Virtools. While all of the parts of the game you click to interact with, such as the chatrooms, cards interface, and so on, are coded in Flash.

Programming in Virtools can be compared to Russian Nesting Dolls -- you have to start at the most basic level of interaction and build up from there -- this allows for both heavy customization to be coded, and for building blocks to be saved and used by less talented programmers (see: Burdenday). At the same time, due to the complexity involved in nesting bit after bit, simple ideas tend to take a significant amount of time to code.

Our Lead Developer, Jetono, has high praise for Virtools, "Virtools is a great graphic engine that allows us to serve 3D graphics to your web browser above and beyond what is usually considered possible. On top of that, it works on both Mac and PC at the same time without additional coding needed, thanks to the Virtools Player. We use it to create dynamic characters and battles, and I am working hard on adapting it to our future needs, such as the basic battle server."

If you are interested in learning more about 3DVIA Virtools, you can visit its website here. If you have any questions about Virtools, please feel free to leave a comment in this post and one of our developers will answer it!