Another week, another weekend to read. First off, some neat technical links.

Facewound HLSL - Some simple HLSL shader language, great for creating simple post-processing effects, these are easy to get into Quest3D.
Making of Shadow of the Colossus - Remarkable how people can squeeze pretty effects out of the good ol’ PS2. Maybe it’s not easy to get these effects into Quest3D, but an interesting read nonetheless. You easily recreate the bloom/fake HDR effect for example.
Tile-based game - How to make a tile-based game in Flash. A nice tutorial on how to create a tile-based game in Flash. You can get some basic ideas on how to do a tile based game, that this site uses Flash doesn’t make the basic ideas less interesting.

Secondly, an pessimistic article about the current state of the game industry.

GameDaily: Opinion: The Video Game Business Is Broken

Which I think is too pessimistic. Sure, creating big expensive games will only become more expensive in the future, but people will play games, no matter on what device or medium. They do not mention cellphones, portable game devices, internet casual games. They do mention Xbox Live Arcade and Nintendo’s Wii as positive examples. So I think the article is a bit contradicting… or just plain wrong.

While Quest3D is great and all, external tools will help making the work on your projects a bit easier.

Unlocker - unlocks files in use, a real lifesaver this one.

ICO format Photoshop plugin - from the links list, create your own .ico files for your Quest3D installers.

AutoStitch - want to create neat wide-angle backdrops of your own backyard? This little program automatically stitches together photos with the press of one button.

TGA viewer - view TGA files in Windows Explorer as thumbnails.

DDS viewer - you don’t need Photoshop or anything to quickly check out DDS-files with their alpha-settings with this tool

Heightmap Generator - from the a post on the Quest3D forum: a neat normalmap to displacementmap converter.

And completely unrelated and untechnical, but handy nevertheless:

MyLifeOrganized - Creating digital todo-lists! Prevent stacks of paper, scribbles on small bits of paper that get lost or scattered .txt files on your desktop.

Eurogamer released a list of twenty games which are free to download. The Endless Forest was one of them (nr. eight on the list). This is what they had to say;

Here’s another ‘game’ that doesn’t involve epic chains of incineration. The Endless Forest is a massively multiplayer screensaver where you and all the other players are man-faced deer in a forest full of flowers and fantasy ruins. There’s no chat, so all communication must be done via the medium of prancing and braying. There’s some weirdness to be discovered, such as communal spell-casting and context-based actions, but we suspect you’ll get bored after about ten minutes. Worth seeing, but it’s one for the cyber-hippies.

I must say I like the style, and also the whole gesture/signage thing going on there! It’s definitely worth checking out.

See full article on Eurogamer

Official website of The Endless Forest

It seems as if Act3D is on a release spree. Again a new version, 3.5.4 this time. Download here.

Updates are always good.

Each week I’ll try to gather some usefull and interesting articles I’ve come accross on the internet. They may or may not be related to Quest3D, but they certainly will be interesting to read. So for all you folks hanging out at the beach or pool this weekend, here’s some extra luggage to browse through! Enjoy!

• (PDF) The democratization of real-time graphics (The basics and ideas of pixel shaders from a programmer’s point of view)
• (PDF) IGDA 2006 Casual Games White Paper
• How to Make Great Games, by Peter Molyneux
• On Gamasutra: The Game Proposal, Part One: The Basics

(Note that for some site’s you need to subscribe, like gamasutra.com)

Do you like tetris, solitaire, bejeweled and the likes? Then you might be a Casual Gamer. A recently released IGDA white paper describes these casual games as;

Games that are easy to learn, utilize simple controls and aspire to forgiving gameplay. Without a doubt, the term “casual games” is sometimes an awkward and ill-fitting term – perhaps best described as games for everyone. Additionally, the term “casual” doesn’t accurately depict that these games can be quite addictive, often delivering hours of entertainment similar to that provided by more traditional console games. To be sure, there is nothing “casual” about the level of loyalty, commitment and enjoyment displayed by many avid casual game players – just as there is nothing “casual” about the market opportunity and market demand for these games.

With tools like Quest3D, Torque, Virtools and 3DGameStudio, developers are now much more able to quickly develop and prototype games. Especially these Casual Games, which (compared to most AAA games) are fairly simple and straightforward to create, minimal or no storyline, few objects, and simple but fun logic (note that “Fun� and “accessible� are key features of a Casual Game). Also not unimportant are short development paths with small development teams and the use of online publishing which reduces costs immensly.

I think there is a huge potential for us Quest3D developers (or any similar breed of game engine user) to jump right into this market which, as the document states, is a market where there is as much room to improve and innovate on the business side, as there is within the games themselves.

Accompanied with a nice list of changes and bugfixes there is a new version of Quest3D available for download.

Download here: http://www.quest3d.com/index.php?id=103

Original announcement [here].
List of changes:

• q3d crashes if you define global, local myTable = q.GetTable(”MyTable”)
• Array channel type Mediatexture, double clicking crashed q3d
• LUA-Array - GetContent(i) does not update in a loop on a text based column
• QPF file is not working correct any more
• Group Tree, removing active channel group, screws up the groupname
• Object Section, Textures list is not refreshed correct
• 3.5 can open 3.x protected projects!!
• Unable to create a new table, table is deteled if you add an array channel
• HDR functionality does not work
• Array channels did not know which channelgroup the table was located in.
• Public Call Properties Dialog, manual typing of target channel, text is reversed

Happy channeling!

From the site: “Ship Simulator 2006 is a revolutionary new ship simulation game, whereby you get the ability to steer various ships in different environments. Both the graphical quality of the ships and their dynamic behavior are completely realistic, so the game is not only fun, but you learn something about ship maneuvering along the way.”

Download the ShipSim2006 Demo or buy the full game here: www.shipsim2006.com

Ever noticed the squashed Finite State Machine interface? This is because the FSM is not build for a spanned desktop setup (it is for widescreen though).

Also when dragging the channelgraph the FiniteStateMachine would scroll along, this is also fixed. (Updated this post with a new FIX, thanks Martijn for also pointing out and fixing the dragging/scrolling part.)

Download this FSM Fix and copy the contents of the zip file into “C:\Program Files\Act-3D\Quest3D 3.5\Config\Groups” and it should be fixed.

The official Quest3D wiki was opened not too long ago and can be found here:

Quest3DWiki Main Page

And the video tutorials made by VSTEP can be found here, they are based on Quest3D 3.0:

Video tutorials

And, just for your convenience, a quick link to the reference manual with all the channels. It is still being worked on at the moment by Peter Wuyts, but there are some noises at the Quest3DForum about allowing other users to add content as well.

Reference Manual/Channels