With our first screenshot-gallery out of the door, some may have already recognized something from the shots: Coobico is going 3D.

When development of Coobico started more than 15 months ago, the social game was envisioned as a pure 2.5D tile-based game, in the ballpark of Habbo, Dofus and the like. The power of Flash CS3 was quite unforseeable at that moment, let alone the development of 3D powered by Flash. Fast forward to summer 2008, a lot of really incredible 3D-frameworks have sprung up in the meantime: open-source solutions like Papervision, Away3D, and Sandy3D, as well as commercial products like the really outstanding Alternativa Platform (kudos!).

Since Coobico should be poised to push the envelop of flash-gaming, we finally made the (not entirely easy) decision to scrap our codebase and project-plan and port everything to Flash-3D. Some visitors at our blog already seriously asked when Coobico is going public, since the original beta-release date was set to April. The answer is, that the past 3 months kept us busy switching to 3D, rewriting most of the codebase, editing artwork, creating new maps and textures, just to name a few things, and the work is not finished yet. A new release-date will be issued as soon as we have adapted our project-plan.

What does all this mean to the game itself? Everything will stay pretty much the same: Coobico will still be playable in Flash without any additional client-downloads. It will still be completely free to play. But its new 3D-capabilities now allow for zooming in and out of a scene, as well as turning around a building freely before placing it. We feel that this is a great improvement to the gameplay and makes exploration of the island much more exciting.

Said Paul Glazowski of Mashable two days ago: “Watch out Xiaonei, Xiaoyou, and anyone else taking cues from what is now perhaps the most popular network in the world. The real Facebook has come to town. China, that is. Yes, big town.”
Frankly I’m not so bullish about FB China; IMO Facebook is not going to conquer the Mainland market. How do I know this? Because almost all other western web-services before them failed to do so too, no matter how successfully they entered other overseas-markets before. Even MySpace currently only ranks on place 12, pretty much behind everybody else.

Without a full-scale local subsidiary (including server-infrastructure, FB’s Chinese language cersion links to zh-cn.facebook.com), any business is subject to China’s Net-Nanny, a problem that local competitors mostly do not have–and Facebook especially has to face very strong competitors (or copy-cats, for that matter); Beijing-based Facebook-clone Xiaonei with an investment of USD 430 million from Softbank even has a larger founding under their belt than the original.
While western products still have the kool-aid-factor in China, this is not entirely true for web-services, where intimate knowledge of local cultural norms, values and needs gives the competitive edge.

Frederic Lardinois at Read Write Web contemplates that since “most of Facebook’s growth at this point is coming from outside of the United States, it only makes sense for Facebook to target the rapidly growing Chinese Internet market, which now boasts a larger online population than the US.” What he forgets to mention, though, is that the size of the Chinese internet-market only ranges in the ballpark of countries like the netherlands when comparing general web-expenditures and -earnings (as far as I remember figures from last year).

Let’s see if FB is heading to down the same road as everybody else. Now, please, I’d love to hear some comments to prove me wrong…

Two days ago IT security provider McAfee published the new version of its Most Dangerous TLDs Report, as announced on CNET before. According to McAfee, this years’ most malware ridden TLD is .hk–which caught some commenters and me by surprise after reading CNET’s announcement (as CNET linked to last year’s version of the malware report). Last year, HK was on position 28, in the ballpark of a few European TLDs (like Belgium)–even 20 places better than domains from the US. This means that during the past months the threat-level of .hk-domains jumped by a stunning 27 places, even surpassing Mainland China!

Says research analyst Shane Keats: “Even if the greatest percentage of dangerous sites use the .hk domain, that doesn’t mean they are all based in Hong Kong or that more malware distributors are located there… Many sites, particularly the malicious software sites, choose the most affordable domain registrars in countries with the least regulation, so usually they are not located in that country…”

Last time I checked on local HK-domains, they came at a hefty extra-charge (one of the reasons why Linking People’s web-address is a .com). I wonder if this duty was changed during last year? Anybody any ideas?

Sad news we hear day by day from Sichuan.
We would like to extend our sincere condolences to all who lost friends or family and to all who still have to worry for their beloved ones.
Sincerely. Lutz Martin Stefan

I’m quite suffocated in work, just like usual, so blogging is quite light, as usual… Don’t forget to visit Coobico if you like to see the latest and greatest from our ongoing project. I’ve switched to Actionscript 3 in the meantime and like to share some nice resources for Adobe’s current installment:

Greensock’s TweenMax
I stumbled upon the AS2-version TweenLite when looking for a lightweight animation-framework for Flash-banners. The revamped, bigger brother written in AS3 for me even outbeats the ubiquitous Fuse.

Yahoo’s Astra Components
You probably heard this earlier than me, but Yahoo’s Dev Network offers some really helpful components for Flash 9, like charts and various menu-UIs.

Grant Skinner’s Memory Gauge
Memory management in Flash is a mess — the excellent gBlog offers a simple component which monitors framerate and memory-allocation through drag & drop. Nifty! I was looking for something similar for quite a while.

Now this really too cool — today Google finally offers an API to its language-tools – it was about time. A certain kind of translation to Coobico’s chat-interface was planned all along, and after pondering for quite a while on the actual realization, we decided to use some kind of automated approach, translating chat-bubbles among players with different language-settings on the fly. There were quite a few free, open-source, unofficial solutions available during the past years which could be queried against Google’s translation page or Yahoo’s Babelfish (and of course the occasional premium services). Now, such hackerish approaches tend to break too easy, so it’s a relief to see Google’s translation APIs finally going live, featuring all languages of Coobico’s prime markets: English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese. While it is not sure yet if such auto-translations will already be a part of the closed beta, they will definitely be added further down the road.
Enough development-chitchat, back to work!

Recently, the announcement of Linden Labs’ CEO Philip Rosedale that “the company he founded has begun a search for a new CEO with more operational and management expertise” was followed by quite some mixed comments ranging from “With Rosedale in a more ancillary visionary role, and a more experienced day-to-day, managerial CEO in place, that’s likely to change things, surely for the better.” (James Wagner Au, GigaOm) to “while Linden Lab insists that the decision wasn’t precipitated by a crisis, it’s hard to ignore the ongoing backlash against Second Life from the mainstream media.” (Prokofy Neva, Virtual Worlds News) to “Rosedale’s resignation from his executive position more firmly solidifies my own perception that it is only a matter of when, not if, the land of bizarre, free-form make-believe takes its final bow.” (Paul Glazowksi, Mashable)

Now, is writing off SL not a bit premature? After all, (according to Techcrunch) Linden Labs has a funding of around US$ 19 million under its belts (which, BTW, wouldn’t keep Gaia Online even running for more than 9 months, as we learned in the recent days). But Linden also faces peculiar problems both from its inside (namely the complexity of its product and its company-structure) and from the outside with growing competition like Hipihi, EA-Land and Multiverse.

SL has to confront a vital question which eventually every social network/massive world these days will have to answer: What is its purpose and unique benefit to its members, after the initial sensation has worn off?

I can’t help but put forward my 0.2 bucks on the current rants on Flash, iPhones and Apple’s latest iPhone SDK-campaign: a few days ago Apple announced that the iPhone is now essentially “Enterprise Ready” and “Developer Ready”, read an article about it at Techcrunch.
At the same time Steve Jobs weighed in on the iPhone’s web-capabilities, to be more specific, how Adobe Flash is not suited for iPhone:

“As Jobs put it Tuesday, Apple’s iPhone, with all its cutting-edge mobile Internet trickery, needs something much better than the current Flash player that Adobe makes for cellphones. The Flash Player option that fits the bill is made for devices like laptops that are larger than the iPhone; as a consequence, it performs too slowly on the iPhone, he said.
“There’s this missing product in the middle,” Jobs said.”

Personally, I don’t buy attempted explanations like battery-life and performance-issues, even though it’s granted that Macromedia never achieved the same performance of Flash-players on a Mac than on Win-PCs, at least not up until the recent years. To me, the iPhone equals an utterly walled, proprietary system and business-model. If Apple would have integrated Flash into the equation, it would have ultimately killed its cash-cow. With Flash it would have been a breeze for developers to deliver third-party apps to the iPhone and circumvent Apple’s revenue-model. Apple rather wants you to take part in its boarded-up developers’ programm, which comes at US$99, and what’s more, heavily restricts access to the device’s functions through Apple’s iPhone Human Interface Guidelines — which somewhat supports my argument. Check out the full specs of the Human Interface Guidelines at Techcrunch.

And while it might or might not be true that Flash was already seen running on iPhones in a lab according to Robert Scoble, this hardly matters to the average user. If the iPhone is really one of the spearheads of true mobile web and as a role-model for future devices, then I see internet on handsets jeopardized.

Instead of commenting on Hong Kong’s latest storm in a teacup, created by the still unresolved celebrity-porn-scandal, let me pick up some more important news:

The brand new Drupal version 6 has been released shortly — there is a screencast comprising its new features, namely a simplified installation, a more user-friendly drag-and-drop administration back-end and support for OpenID (which is the real killer-feature to me).
After building quite a few websites with Drupal, I am personally not shilling too much for it any more. Don’t get me wrong here, Drupal is great with all its networking features and homebrew-plugins; but I eventually grew annoyed of two of its characteristics:

First, I don’t like Drupal’s on-site administration. An admin-area is not supposed to be handled in the same space like the website it dishes out, in my opinion.
Second, and rather unnerving to me is the code Drupal produces, which is cluttered with unnecessary mark-up (like div’s) wrapping each and all of its contents. The bottom line is, I found myself writing preg_replace functions to strip undesirable pre-formatted contents from most designs.

After working with CMSs for about two years, my light-bulb moment was finding that each CMS has its own philosophy; Drupal’s approach then to me is, you only need a few clicks and you already got a (pre-formatted) site. While this is useful in some situations, it’s counter-productive in others. A CMS with a completely different attitude is ExpressionEngine, which I’m using quite a lot at the moment (I’m building Coobico with EE, for example). EE’s unique strength is that nothing is preset by default. You need to build every detail yourself, giving you unmatched control.

There is nothing else to it but to keep yourself familiar with two or three different CMSs for different specifications, I guess.

Around christmas-time articles about the popular Chinese MMORPG 征途 Zhengtu Online circulated on Chinese websites (they supposingly got a userbase of several million, and a net income of US $39 million in Q3, 2007). The issue didn’t seemed to be all that interesting at that moment, but it reached several large US-blogs like Kotaku around new year, and thus was getting more and more coverage in the past days. Before leaving comments scattered here and there, we can also discuss the issue here, right?
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