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

Which started out as an Utopian dream for most Quest3D users just recently became reality. A true Quest3D knowledge base! The knowledge base is a free service maintained by ovos realtime3D and initiated by Jochen Kranzer.

Not only is this a great initiative but it seems to work an behave very good. With a nice (dare I say) web 2.0 touch and feel to it, it’s a breeze to upload your creations or browse through the expanding amount of tutorials, templates, and small tips.

I’d say with this knowledge base a very good foundation is put down for a fast growing and good (alternative) resource for many Quest3D users.

And now go visit http://quest.jowe.biz/ http://knowledgebase.quest3d.com to browse and more importantly upload tutorials and templates. If you want to stay updated there is also an rss feed to get the latest items into your favorite newsreader.

Thanks for the effort and initiative Jochen and Ovos, keep it up!

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.

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.)

This weeks readup comes with small assignment for you. Please fill out the poll below so we’ll get to know you a bit better!

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Further, if you have any opinions on the way we keep you informed or about the links presented below? Please have your say in the comments. Do you have any tips on file naming in general or with Quest3D? Do you like/dislike in-game advertising? Let us and the world know!

Ok, and now for this weeks links!

You might’ve already seen this 2004 BBC documentary about Tetris a while ago, if not go have a look it’s on youtube now!

My_project_final_final_v3.cgr …sounds familiar? Head over to the 43folders site for a quick rundown on best practices for file naming.

Devbump? It’s just like digg but then for game developers, subscribe to their RSS feed or register to write you own stories.

Another fine gamasutra article, this time it’s a series about Multiplayer Level Design, this is part 1 of 3.

If you ever see a line like this “Added Massive Streaming Ad Support” in a patch readme file be warned. These guys started a packet dumper while playing SWAT4, behold the XML soup that went back and forth to the ad-servers.

Article about some of the “Not-So-Bright Ideas from the World of Gaming.”

Hey hang on isn’t that made with Quest3D? It’s a capture from Tale of Tales‘ “The Endless Forest”.

Happy reading,

the Quest3D|Log team

First off, some videos of various Quest3D project we found on YouTube. No need to download the big DVD from the Quest3D website… but, unfortunately, these aren’t as detailed. These were uploaded by our East-European colleges at http://quest3d.pl/ .

Tools

ShowCase - Since Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7, I envied their tab-view thingy, where you can see the content of all tabs at once. This is the add-on for Firefox, compatible with 2.0.

PatchMaker - A tool to create patches for your Quest3D projects as well.

Resources

The Game Programming Wiki! A wiki full of tutorials and articles about programming (basics).

Articles

Nintendo, AILive Team For Wii Remote AI Tool, the technique behind the nintendo Wii controller.

Completely Eliminate Texture Seams with 3dsMax

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

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.

As the Quest3D Conference in Wiesbaden is getting closer, the schedule is now known! Be sure to visit the speaker of your interest, and make sure you ask J.P Franssen some real annoying questions about the text-channels, he’ll love that.

Or ask Ferry about why unicode still isn’t functioning properly. Or anything else for that matter :-P.

Anyhow, the schedule can be found here. *UPDATED* The schedule has changed! Thanks Cristopher!