Sorry for the lack of updates. We’ve been very busy over here. Anyhoo, some new words for the weekend. And remember…if you have any good links let us know!

Articles

Flow in games - Neat article about adaptive difficulty.
Visual perception - What is ‘pretty’ and what is ‘ugly’.
Will Casual Games Dominate The Future of the Industry? - What it says it describes :-).
Modeling Opinion Flow in Humans Using Boids Algorithm & Social Network Analysis - A mouth full…but a good read nonetheless.

3D

CGtalk started a Wiki for everything 3D related. Hopefully it’ll fill up soon, since it is a bit empty-ish at the moment. You can find it right over here.

Download this nice texture pack from Spiral Graphics. These textures are procedurally made using their software Genetica Studio, however you can render these textures with a free viewer which is also available from their site.

Fonts

Download some better fonts here. From…well http://betterfonts.com/

Other bits and pieces

Listen to pandora using a standalone app. Download here. And if you don’t know pandora…go here and have a look

We added some new functionality to the blog, if you look at the rightside in the menu bar there’s a new section called “Tools”, now if you are a Firefox user you can click those links to install two very usefull firefox searchplugins. The plugins let you directly search the quest3D forums and the Quest3D wiki.

I hope you enjoy these helpfull tools!

The perfect event for the Ship Simulator was of course the Wereld Haven Dagen (World Harbour Days) in Rotterdam 2 weeks ago.

We have the pictures! Loads of people in the booth during those days. Young, old, parents, grandparents. They all sailed away easily and had a good time. Especially when crashing into something :).

Hopefully we will back next year. With an even better version of Ship Simulator.

There also is a new patch available, bringing the harbour-ship-game up to version 1.4.

Any project (game/visualisation/training/simulation) needs icons. Usually loads of them. And you end up doing them yourself. Usually….

So we made a small list of sites with free icons

FAMFAMFAM

YellowIcon

FastIcon

Mini Pixel Icons

IconFactory

Got any more sites? Mail us!

Articles
It seems that “Mario Killed the Fist Fight”

Read here: “why the Wii won’t sell”

Brain Age And Other “Brain Food” Games Set To Revolutionize Gaming

“Natural Funativity”, So what makes a games fun?

Gamasutra column: “How Game Art Assets Can Improve”

Again, what type of gamer are you? An article describing 6 types of gamers from hardcore to dormant gamer.

Protect your quest3D apps with the latest copy protection tools, or at least read about them here.

About procedural terrain: “Realism is no fun”

Tools
Get yourself this “Free DWG Viewer”

Resources and Tutorials
A whole lot of nice Photoshop tutorials

Photoshop, Illustrator, 3DsMax and Flash tutorials

Stock photos from various sources. Free as in creative commons free.