“FDT is simply the best and most powerful tool for Flash game development. Writing 333% awesome code for Delta Strike is what we love, FDT helps us do exactly that!”
– Michael Plank [CTO/Founder Pro 3 Games]

The Challenge

Developing software is a challenge, developing games an even bigger challenge. Games and especially 3D games need to have great performance to run at a constant and high frame rate. A robust and scalable architecture of the game’s code base is a must have requirement for growing the game and adding additional content later on.
Tools and IDEs help us being more productive and get the job done faster. Since there are tons of tools out there it even became a challenge to find the right ones!

History

The project Delta Strike has quite a long history already. It all began with the vision of a realtime-multiplayer strategy game for the browser in 2005 as a students project. Flash, ActionScript 2 and Red5 but most of all FDT 1.5 were the keys to success (Screenshots)! At that time there was no other tool for professional AS2 Development out there but FDT.

A completely new version of Delta Strike using Molehill, Away3D, AS3, Flex 4.5 and FDT 4 is developed by pro3games.com at the moment. Check out the Delta Strike Benchmark DS3Mark and the latest tech-demo:

The Solution

Coding, coding, coding, it’s all about writing code. No drag and drop stuff, not even touching the mouse. Writing code as fast as possible getting instant feedback, that’s what FDT stands for and is loved for by the Delta Strike coding geeks.
Having a huge code base with hundreds of classes one of the most important features is to navigate through the source code. Features like Quick Type Hierarchy, Quick Outline and Open Type make it possible.
Delta Strike is built upon a component-based game architecture. FDT 4 has great tools helping keep the architecture as well as dependencies between classes and packages clean. Type and Package Dependency Viewer are your friends! With the awesome new Project References feature the source code of external libraries like Away3D can now easily be added as referenced project. Refactoring like renaming and moving works across projects.
For improving the performance of the game in terms of memory consumption and code execution speed the Profiler greatly helps to detect memory leaks and “expensive” functions. The Apparat FDT integration is just awesome for flash game developers! In Delta Strike Apparat is mainly used to reducing the file sizes of SWF asset bundles.
Sharing formatter settings, launch configurations and code templates is a huge bonus for working in a team.

The Benefits

Developing with FDT is just fun! Features are constantely added! It simply seems to be made for Flash game developers.