Pixel Farm Digital Chooses WebORB for .NET to Deploy Live Multi-Player Business Simulation Games

Aug. 24, 2010 - PRLog -- Pixel Farm Digital  (PFD) has created a wide variety of custom business simulation games meant to emulate real-world decision-making environments for participants.  Past simulation games have included sales dialogs, collaborative process engineering, project management, leadership skills and more.  While single-learner LMS-access to SCORM-compliant courses is a frequent deployment option used by their clients, PFD also co-facilitates live training events.  These events stage business simulations as a cornerstone live training event that is formatted somewhere between a gameshow and a business-oriented LAN party.  

Participants are broken into teams that pit against each other in a real-time struggle to work within their team to prove that they’ve got what it takes to stay ahead of their competition. In many cases, the winners take home prizes.  “We aim to transform what’s ordinarily a passive keynote or powerpoint experience into an energized, interactive exercise that puts the fun first and hides the training inside,” says PFD Technology Director, Matt Weier.  “We love to see the way that participants work together and are driven by the element of competition.”

To manage the game state and ensure that the facilitator can control players’ screens and access to the simulation at any time, the game clients’ Flash Actionscript codebase must communicate with a central game server SQL database via Microsoft .NET.   The game server is also responsible for tracking all participant game data and driving the game leaderboard.  PFD’s simulation backbone has always been .NET, but required a layer of XML encapsulation in order to communicate complex game data between Flash and the server via SOAP requests.

Says Weier, “With WebORB for .NET, we no longer need to parse in or out of XML.  All of our Flash objects can be sent as native serialized Flash objects.  This saves a huge amount of development time.  We’ve evaluated other remoting solutions including AMF and Flash Media Server, but Midnight Coders’ WebORB for .NET has by far provided the most accelerated workflow we’ve found.”  

WebORB for .NET is an integration platform that is used to remove the complexity of multi-tier architecture integration.  It has been shown to significantly reduce development time and cost, while improving application performance and business ROI.  Midnight Coders also offers WebORB for Java, WebORB for PHP and WebORB for Rails, enabling both client-side and server-side applications to be interchangeable, which preserves a business’ investment in technology.  Download WebORB for .NET Datasheet here: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/fileadmin/Datasheets/web...

About PFD
Founded in 1995, Pixel Farm is the Midwest’s premier full service, post-production studio offering a unique culture that fuses technology and creativity to build high-value solutions that connect people to the brands they love. PFD specializes in visual effects, finishing, animation, design, film transfer, color correction and music and holds a leadership position in the digital training and human resources community. Capabilities include HR, eLearning, Production and Post Production, Branding, Integrated Campaigns, Branded Content and Social Media.  Visit http://www.pixelfarmdigital.com or http://www.pixelfarm.com  to learn more.

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About Midnight Coders:
Midnight Coders specializes in solving complex integration problems, by streamlining workflow processes using technology. Midnight Coders is the creator of WebORB – the most robust integration/runtime server the world over, along with RIA AppPuncher, which is used for application debugging and load testing. Midnight Coders products destroy traditional development bottlenecks, enabling rapid, cost-effective development of the most creative, engaging and responsive online applications that are built with Flex, Flash, AJAX, Silverlight and HTML5. Visit http://www.themidnightcoders.com to learn more.