When you have a function wheter it is a ‘classic’ style public caller or a ‘oo’ style function and you want to check if the user provided certain parameters while calling this function, you can use the isChannelLoaded channel to check if the parameter has been provided by the user.

Example situation: say you have a function to create a new class instance of a car, and the parameters you need to provide are color, wheels, manual/automatic, etc.. The idea is if a user calls the function and for instance doesn’t provide a parameter for the amount of wheels, then inside this function you can assign a default value or trigger some warning message.

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Did you know you can show debug information on screen, like the framerate and texture memory, in the editor and/or viewer by setting a variable in the registry?

Before you start though, editing the registry is done on your own risk!

Here’s how: Open the registry editor (start->run->’regedit’) then browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Act-3D\ and then select the Quest3D editor or viewer and version of which you want to enable the debug output.

Once you are for instance in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Act-3D\Quest3D\4.00.000 add a new string value and name it Show_Debug then double click this new value and set the value to be true or false depending if you want to enable or disable the debug info.

Using the channel DebugOutput you can add your own debug values and text to the debuginfo.

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Did you know that the space hotkey not only collapses a group of channels into a folder but can also be used to quickly add more of the same channel to the channelgraph.

Here’s how:

Select a channel/template from the channel list/templates list (you will probably use this a lot on values, text, and vector channels), then hover over the channelgraph and point the mouse where you want the new channel to appear, then hit SPACE, then mouse over (without deselecting the channel in the list) to another location where you also want this new channel and again hit space, etc., etc.

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Did you know…that you can -with the channel selected- press CTRL+R to cleanup the unused childlinks from a channel.

Note: this only works from quest3D version 4.x

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Have a look at these two fine resources. Rhys posted these great tutorials on the forum a few days back, one about shaders and one about matrices. I thought I’d mention them here as well.

Original posts: Shader tutorial , Matrix tutorial.

Thanks Rhys!

Here’s a usefull function to trim (remove leading and/or trailing spaces) a string

function trim (s)
	return (string.gsub(s, "^%s*(.-)%s*$", "%1"))
end

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