Quest3D 4.0 has got an update, the current version is now 4.1.2.

New in 4.1.2:

The weather system has been improved and made available in the Power Edition(Previously it was only available in the VR edition) and provides an out-of-the-box weather and skies solution. You can configure weather using an easy interface and you can use the OO (Object oriented) system to control its parameters. The system supports configurable day, night, sky color, latitude/longtitude locations, time zones, wind, rain/snow, different cloud types, thunder/lightning.

The nature painting functionality in Quest3D has been optimized. It now is completely hardware accelerated. The new nature painting system comes with 8 different trees complete with shaders and moving leaves. Various plants and grasses are also available.

A new technique called ‘variant shadow mapping’ brings fantastic real-time shadows in Quest3D. Shadow mapping is a flexible, fast robust method to create convincing shadows. The benefit of shadow maps is that it does not require any  special geometry topology, it can do soft shadows, self shadows and the performance is configurable by changing resolution. Quest3D was expanded with customizable render buffer formats to make this technique possible.

Quest3D 4.1 introduces the new Firefox plug-in so Quest3D projects can now publish websites for Internet Explorer and Firefox. 4.1.2 supports new motion tracking hardware (TrackIR, Animazoo and revised support for 5DT Data Gloves) and XML DOM and SAX parsers.

The files system has been reworked so published files are now much smaller (~25%) and channel groups are now saved as a single CGR file, dropping the IGR file that was saved by previous versions.

From the Quest3D site:

Version 4.0 of Quest3D® is now available from Quest3D resellers and the Quest3D website.

With the release of Quest3D 4.0, Act-3D™ B.V. lifts its flagship to an even higher quality level of real-time 3D application development. New functionality contains real-time support for COLLADA, Newton Game Dynamics, Advanced Weather Simulation, 3D GUI Support and a fully Object-Oriented development model.

The new release is a giant leap forward in real-time 3D software development. High-end 3D software projects, such as 3D architecture visualizations, product and design presentations games and training simulators benefit from the newly supported technologies in Quest3D.

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

Lumonix released ShaderFX 2.0. You know, the plugin for 3dsmax that allows you to visually create shaders using nodes and export them to Quest3D.

It now supports all kinds of cool new features, like better shadermodel support (3.0 and 1.1), workflow improvements (all hail copy-paste!) and lots more.

Check it out on; http://www.lumonix.net/shaderfx.html

It’s also definitely worth it’s money. Thank you, weak dollar.

For those of you using the firefox plugin to search the forums, there is a new version available which now searches the new forums.

It should update automatically but if this fails you could do the following:
Select “Manage Search Engines” from the search engine dropdown list, now delete the old “Quest3D|Forums” plugin. Now click here to download the latest version.

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

First of all, sorry for the lack of updates. We’ve been terribly busy. And now, without further ado, this weeks words for the weekend.

LostGarden - Content is bad : Nice article about the pro’s and cons of developing a procedural environment for your projects (or games). I must, I also quite like the blog.

RoadKill 1.1 : Nobody could have ever made up a better name for an unwrapper-tool. EVER. Anyway, it’s a LSCM unwrapping, which is all the hype nowadays. This is also supported by 3dsmax (pelt-wrapping), C4D (LSCM), Blender (LSCM) etc. Readup about the technique here.

Will Wright interview : Speaking of procedural content, this man would have invented it, if it didn’t exist before. Designer of The Sims and Spore had an interview with Popular Science. Good read. Bit low on facts though…

BlamBot : A site dedicated to comic fonts. No worries, no comic sans to be found here.

Vincenty : If you truly want to know where exactly you are on this globe, this is the script for you. It has an accuracy of 1mm (yes, a millimeter!). Which is ridiculous. Cool nonetheless.

And if you haven’t been following the development of the CGR-exporter for 3dsmax, no worries, it hasn’t seen any major changes in a while. Some minor bug fixes can be found in the latest 0.2.15 version here.

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures, for your everyday traveling salesman problems have a look here.

In depth notes about Newton buoyancy and buoyancy in general, maybe you can use this to create some floating items.

Free professional quality audio samples. Zero advertising. Check out sampleswap.org.

Some new icon candy from famfamfam, a whole bunch of flags (The flag icon filenames follow the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes.)

Another fine production from the hands of Dylan Fitterer, the Custom Geometry Channel, a welcome addition to Quest3D. Now you can create any mesh in realtime! This channel works with Quest 3.6.3

“You can use it to make anything. And THAT, of course, means it’s a little complicated to use”, Dylan Fitterer

In case you’ve missed the big news, Quest3D 3.6 is out now. Including the SDK and the latest exporter for 3DMax.

See the forum announcement here or download 3.6 here.

Congrats Act! We’re pretty confident that this will be the most solid version yet!

A new version of Quest3D is released today, with the following improvements:

This is a list of changes in “developer language”:

• Media texture would always start playing fixed it
• Lua now has a SetWString and GetWString note that lua is NOT compatible with Unicode strings so you can only set it in another wstring but you can’t analyze string in lua other then == etc
• The command channel interface has a bug fix with renaming the channel
• Opening a text channel interface will not set the focus also if there is no text
• Multiple additions to nature painting
• Some bug fixes to advanced motion set
• Added some workflow improvements to the parameter creation
• Fixed a bug where new windows would not be initialized
• The selector channel now has an option to revert back to -1 when nothing is true

Nice list! And I bet not everybody has read the full ‘fixlist’, which you can actually find in your very own installation folder: C:\path_to_quest\Quest3D 3.x.x\readme3.rtf

The final release is getting close now, congratulations Act-3D!!

Download RC1: Quest3D_3_5_5_rc1.exe

Download the SDK: Q3DSDK355RC1.exe