If you have downloaded the trial version and showcases, you already have seen that Arcade Engine is an ideal choice if you want to do animation with Revolution or Media. You already know that it allows for complex asynchronous motion and collision detection. But what do people use it for? You might look into the arcadeEngine forum to find some demonstrations people are willing to share already. Some users have asked me off list to look at their stacks, some have sent me stacks that are either unfinished or proprietary.

However there are still some things I have obtained permission to talk about. The things you have made with Arcade Engine divide roughly into three categories.

1.) Arcade Engine is the "best of" library of my codebase and has evolved by writing games with it. This is the top category of things I see being done with it. As games are pretty complex applications most of them are in the early stages and are not finished yet. The stacks I have seen look promising though and I am eagerly waiting for final versions to arrive :-). The most promising games I may talk about include a space invaders style game, a football simulation, variations of snake and a road building game that is similar to the classic games "Locomotion" or "Pipemania".

2.) The second category of stacks I see use AE for cool animation. I've seen things moving in ways I wouldn't have imagined before. Really nice. It is incredible to see how useful the new easing functions seem to be for users. Applying easing to moving objects really makes their animations vivid and natural looking. Way cool!

3.) What I wouldn't have expected is the third category of stacks. Some people are using Arcade Engine to create GUI elements like sliders, knobs or mimic sheet style dialogues. I've seen experiments with isometric and/or animated charts, apie chart that is adjustable by dragging handles on the chart and so much more cool stuff. It really makes me happy to see how Arcade Engine helps people get inspired to create beautiful solutions for their stacks. I hope that many of those stacks will be exposed a little more to the community once they are ready, not only because it is good PR for Arcade Engine, but because it is Cool Stuff.

Malte Brill
derbrill Multimedia
http://www.derbrill.de