Finally! Another readup for the weekend, days are getting shorter (at least in my timezone they are) and rain is a daily feature. So what else is there to do in the weekend than to read some articles to kill the time and prepare some smart remarks for coming Monday. So here we go:

Roadkill UV Tool

Get your maps together using this easy to use (and free!) tool. Can’t go wrong with such a name!

GamedeveloperTools

The site gamedevelopertools has a comprehesive list of game dev tools, like engines, libraries, books and other related materials.

AI Gamedev wiki

The site aigamedev has opened up a wiki containing a growing amount of resources regarding the topic of Artificial Intelligence in games. Visit the wiki here: http://wiki.aigamedev.com/

As one of the co-authors of the blog Game/AI Paul Tozour writes a nice article on how to actually “Fix Pathfinding Once and For All”. He shows using video examples and examples different ways to implement pathfinding, and points out the good and the bad. Read it here: http://www.ai-blog.net/archives/000152.html

PatternTap

If you’re out of fresh GUI ideas then you should check out this site http://patterntap.com/ although the site is primarily aimed towards webdevelopment, I’m sure you can get some nice ideas from it.

Sourcemaking

Have you already been enjoying the new OO functionality in Quest3D and want to make sure your code will be readable and logical you should be familiar with software design patterns. You can brush up on your pattern knowledge here: http://sourcemaking.com/. (By the way, it’s not only a good resource but also a pretty looking site.)

Textures

And finally some texture resources, you can’t have enough texture resources I’d say:

• 2textured
• grungetextures
• textureking

Now that the competition is closed I’d thought a roundup of some of the entries is in place. Below are actually just the demos and products from the Quest3D forum, however (and believe me) there are more entries with equal visual quality on the Quest3d ftp server.

If you also want to showcase your work here, just post it on the Quest3D forum (I’ll pick it up from there) or let me know through the comments. And in case I missed one on the forum please leave a comment with the details.

The Plunge by Ali Rahimi Shahmirzadi

Techdemo showing various rendering/shading techniques.

The Enclosure by Ali Rahimi Shahmirzadi

Techdemo showing various rendering/shading techniques.

The Moebius House by 3D capacity

The subject of the demo is the Moebius House designed by UNStudio and located in Huizen (Holland). It among others features projective water, steep parallax mapping, realistic moving tree models and radial bloom post processing.

Dinozaury z Krasiejowa by J&L Consulting

An application where you can watch a movie about dinosaurs inside a virtual exhibition room, where you can also get info on the various dinos from the movie.

{image removed from server}

Avalon by Lukas and Yorick

“It is a tool which let you create your own island.”

Casa de Alvarado-Bracamonte by Isaac Marco Rodriguez

Audiosurf is doing really well, you could say it’s steaming, you may must have spotted it on sites like IGF, youtube, Gamasutra, and Gamespot! And as from the 15th of February available from the steam network, for just $9.95!

A review from Voodoo Extreme concluding with a 4.5 out of 5 rating!

The Conclusion

The Good:

+ Addictive, score-based gameplay
+ Excellent visuals and beat-matching
+ Worldwide leaderboards with friend integration
+ Achievements
+ Cheat reporting system

The Bad:

- Menu music that cannot be muted
- Windowed mode fussy about resolutions (manually drag to circumvent issue)
- Website services currently offline
- Dull gameplay on slow songs
- No Mono-only scoreboards
- Your eyes will melt on Elite difficulty

From gameplay, to presentation to input devices, videogames are a hotbed of innovation. Ernest Adams notes 50 game design innovations, some that have already made their impact, and others that will shape the future of the medium…

Article link

As you might know speed is a very importand issue for 3D engines, a good start for performance is to write highly optimized code. Here’s an article about how John Carmack uses a magic constant (0×5f3759df) to calculate an inverse square root. Article link

However interesting, the credits for this magic constant might not be Carmac’ but someone else’ as you can read in this post on beyond3D. A e-mail from the man himself actually confirms this.

Today (ahem), some references to shaders, which can really bring life to your Quest3D application.

First off, some examples:

The infamous NVIDIA shader library
Some shaders that could be converted to Quest3D
Some shaders from the so-called vvvv toolkit

Most of these can be converted to Quest3D quite easily, if you know the semantics.

Some tutorials to help you get started:

Facewound : Basics on post-processing, I do have the feeling I posted this before somewhere…. don’t hit me if I did.
Direct3D basics : Basics on shaders, very, very basic.

Inspirational:
Punkuser : some guy got variance shadow maps working on omni-lights… which is awesome.

I can also highly recommend ShaderFX, it natively supports Quest3D for crying out loud. Although you are limited to creating materials (no post-processing stuff) and the nodes they provide. Unless you create your own custom nodes of course.

Just of the presses, the ink is still wet, head over here to check out this months newsletter and read up on what the guys at Act-3d are concocting for Quest3D version 4.0! If you are in a hurry, scoll down and I’ll show you the highlights!

Some highlights of this months newsletter:

Quest3D is hiring!

Indeed Quest3D is looking to fill the following job positions, Modeler/Animator (full time), Quest3D Developer (full time), C++ Programmer (full time)

2007 Competition!

Yep there’s another competition coming up! Heads up for more info to follow!

Quest3D 4.0

Quest3D will be better then ever, some new features include: refurbished and more user friendly interface, specialized way for landscape rendering, weather and atmosphere system, GUI system, and maybe the most interesting part Quest3D 4.0 will let you develop in a fully object oriented way.

New forum

Well as many of you already have seen there’s a new and improved forum! It features all available updates and downloads, improved search, image gallery, polls, Spell check

And some nice asides

• Available Jobs
• FAQ Highlights
• WIKI Highlights
• Selected gallery image
• Hot forum topics

Words. For. The. Weekend.

Hopefully another informative read.

Articles

Game-industrie stevent af op record-jaar - The first article in Dutch so far, a little news snippet about the game industry heading towards a record-breaking year in terms of sales.
Nice books on the game industry - Related Quest if you want to develop anything close to a game with it.
Don’t Listen To The Fans - Article why not to listen to your ‘fans’ if you have created a game. That’s right. NOT listen to your fans. Quite a fun read.
Women in Gaming - The hardcore gamers’ worst nightmare. A woman. Playing a game :).
5 Principles For Programming - I think some or all may be applicable to Quest3D too, nice read nonetheless.

Tools

Taskbar Shuffle - Tools that allows you to shuffle the programs open on your taskbar.
Launchy - Another GTD and productivity tool, it reduces the times you have to point in the direction of that strange ’start’ button, instead just type what you need and it will open de appropriate tool, like Quest3D 3.5.
Color palette generator - Create a color palette using an image.

Tutorials

How to Create Professional HDR Images - Do you own a camera that allows you to set exposure manually then you are a few steps from creating your first HDR image with nothing but Photoshop CS2

Resources

The Cloud Appreciation Society - So whaddayouknow there is one. Now we can all be experts on the clouds department. But seriously this is a nice resource if you need to create a sky.
Photoshop Brushes - This site claims to be the “Largest Photoshop Brush Resource Site on The Internet”, they may even be right.

Hopefully this is enough to keep you busy for the weekend!And since we’ve already seen all these cool things you could leave us a reply with some more cool stuff to keep us busy in the weekend.

Happy reading,

the Quest3D|Log team

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

Another read-up for the weekend, again with tools, fun game-related stuff, Quest3D links, articles and more!

Filter Forge.com - A plugin for Adobe Photoshop that allows you to build your own filters for creating textures.

Gameproducer.net - Sales statistics are real life examples on how much games can sell.

Telemarketer counterscript - nothing to do with Quest3D but usefull nonetheless!

hugin - another free panorama tool.

Factory-pinball - Factory Pinball, “the ragdoll pinball game�

Toribash - Toribash is a turn-based physics fighting game.

3-D TV That Actually Works - Wired Article about A new line of 3-D televisions by Philips.

kW X Exporter - Another .X exporter. It claims to export animations, 2 UV sets and all types of geometry. Bold claims! (to be honest, haven’t tried it yet..)

xNormal - Normal-map generator

And really nice is the following link, Adobe’s del.icio.us links collection!! http://del.icio.us/adobe

Got some links we missed? Or should include next time? Mail us!