Welcome to the FFilmation Engine website !

The FFilmation Engine is a free AS3 isometric programing engine, focused mainly on game development. Its name is a tribute to the filmation engine used in some of the greatest games in the 8bit era.

The aim of the project is providing a robust development platform, where game designers can work on the game’s details and forget about the render engine. It is intended to be really usable from a “real production scenario” with limited resources. Resources are money and time, but also the enthusiasm of indie developers or single individuals doing stuff “for fun” in their bedrooms. Projects, specially the “for fun” ones, have more chances of completion if the production process is gratifying to some degree.

Here’s a list of highlited features:

  • One engine capable of handling several isometric scenes of different complexities.
  • Create scenes from human-readable XML definitions, allowing easy edition of the scene’s topology and contents
  • Graphic media can be split into several external resources and loaded when an scene needs them
  • Flat textures. Paint your grahics directly into flash. Walls, floors and celings are edited as 2D graphics and projected by the engine. Elements and animated characters can be animated via flash timeline, no need for complex programming.
  • Dynamic lighting, global lighting, real-time shadow projection. Multiple lights from multiple sources affecting the same objects.
  • Bump-mapped surfaces. Still somehow buggy and a serious performance killer, but already there.
  • An extendable material interface. MovieClip materials, autotiled materials, procedural materials.
  • Automatic zSorting of all surfaces and objects
  • Built-in collision detection. No need to program complex coordinate comparisions, simple listen to COLLISION events generated by the engine.
  • Basic AI API helpers such as “is character A visible from character B’s position ?”

I plan to make the engine open-source, but I’ll wait until I have a release “solid” and documented enough. During the next days I’ll be populating this site with more examples, sample projects, tutorials, API reference and, of course, the classes themselves.

I hope people find it useful and can use on their own projects. Stay tuned for more updates!

17 Responses to “Welcome to the FFilmation Engine website !”

  1. Hi, i’m very impressed by this engine and theirs features. Also the speed and stability of the examples is pretty good for an isometric flash engine.

    Is there a release date?

    ben said this on March 11th, 2008 at 1:18 am

  2. Well done. I will give you support and would love to work with you on a few things. I am working at bridgeware labs and would like to discuss possibly using the engine and yourself on upcoming projects. http://www.bridgeware.com/

    Ryan said this on March 11th, 2008 at 11:17 pm

  3. [...] Flash Isometric Engine March 11, 2008 — drawk Just got word of this great isometric engine similar to the Alternativa engine or zenbullets but with plans for open source. I checked out the [...]

    AS3 Flash Isometric Engine « [ draw.logic ] said this on March 11th, 2008 at 11:57 pm

  4. Hello !

    I plan to release the classes and API documentation within a week, If real life permits. I’m cleaning up the code a little bit, commenting it, and deciding which features are solid enough to be included.

    I will be happy if anyone uses it either for fun or commercial purposes.

    Stay tuned,

    Cheers !

    admin said this on March 12th, 2008 at 12:47 am

  5. How can I send a donation to you? I would really like to see you continue this project and would like to help by donating something.

    Mike Huntington said this on March 12th, 2008 at 3:35 am

  6. [...] ? ?????? Alternativa3D ???????? ????????? ?????????. ?????? FFilmation Engine ????? ????? ?? Alternativa3D, ?? [...]

    ??? ???? "??????????????" 3D-?????? | WebService //Flash said this on March 12th, 2008 at 4:49 am

  7. Hi,

    Very impressive.
    I can’t wait to see new version of this engine.

    Vu said this on March 12th, 2008 at 5:18 am

  8. I like the spirit of sharing the code even for commercial version :)

    We are waiting for the release.

    Ashvin Savani - Arckid said this on March 12th, 2008 at 9:44 am

  9. Really impresive work. Yesterday I was thinking that it would be great to do something like Nox (Westwood) in Flash. Thanks!

    Aritz said this on March 12th, 2008 at 11:55 am

  10. Really, really impressive - especially when looking at the processor loading, omg :)

    Best wishes with this project, I hope you will see really things built on its base! (..and hopefully it will have a good impact on you too..)

    p.s. about the arrows - tried it on two computers, on one of them you can jump only in ONE (R-T) direction, on another you can jump in any direction all right

    Yuri said this on March 12th, 2008 at 7:21 pm

  11. Hi, It would be great if this were released soon. I’m planning on making an rpg for my game design class and I was thinking of having an isometric view for it. I’m not sure though if my instructor will allow me to use this, but it sure would save me a lot of time from having to make my own crappy one.

    denverjs said this on March 13th, 2008 at 2:54 am

  12. Hi,
    Excellent stuff, this would greatly enhance the gaming dimension in Flash. Keep up the great work..

    Thanks
    Ram
    P.S:While playing around I just noticed that the shadow of the character seems to have it’s foot turned in the opposite direction of movement. Probably, you could sort that out too :-)

    Ram said this on March 13th, 2008 at 5:44 am

  13. awesome. no, wait…super awesome. I can’t wait for the classes to come out.

    rey said this on March 14th, 2008 at 12:40 am

  14. The examples look really tight! Magnificent attention to detail. I’d love to try out the completed platform. I have a few isometric RPG games in mind where this would work beautifully.

    BTW - had no problem jumping at an angle (space+up+right arrows) on MAC 10.4

    Briscoe said this on March 14th, 2008 at 11:46 am

  15. These examples are great. I think you really have something here. I’d like to also offer my support, and I’d certainly help out with contributing code once it goes open source. Great Work!

    Jason T Clark said this on March 16th, 2008 at 3:24 pm

  16. Get this up on google code :)

    ryan said this on March 19th, 2008 at 9:29 am

  17. demo’s look great and promising.
    I have been writing an isometric game myself in AS2 (based on the tonypa tutorials). I worked on tile-interaction and text-balloons. Will such a thing be incorporated?
    If you’re interested you can contact me at :koops at learninggames dot nl

    koops said this on March 24th, 2008 at 9:57 pm

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