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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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.

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!

Yet another readup for the weekend! Each week we scout the web for the most freshest content out there, but we might miss that one great tool, link or article you think should also be included in our list, then please don’t hesitate and enlighten us! (mail your links to questlog[at]rgb255.nl)

Casual Games Research - Casual games relax! Research proves it.

Pixsy - Search pictures

Make it Big in Games - Blog with the do’s and don’t in the game industry

Silo 2.0 Beta1 forum thread - Beta version of my favourite modeller has been released.

Iconaholic - pretty eyecandy for fancyfying your desktop

Google Video - History of Videogames - Enjoy this documentary of the history of videogames

LUA Tutorial - LUA Programming Basic structures and more resources on ozone3D.net

Public Gaming Article - Why We Need a Corporation for Public Gaming

GFX Artist - GFX articles and tutorials

FRAPS - Fraps, a must have, can create screenshots and video captures of all your Quest3d projects

Del.icio.us - Online bookmark / network / Web 2.0 website, once you got an account, you can’t stop. You have been warned.

The official Quest3D wiki was opened not too long ago and can be found here:

Quest3DWiki Main Page

And the video tutorials made by VSTEP can be found here, they are based on Quest3D 3.0:

Video tutorials

And, just for your convenience, a quick link to the reference manual with all the channels. It is still being worked on at the moment by Peter Wuyts, but there are some noises at the Quest3DForum about allowing other users to add content as well.

Reference Manual/Channels

Quest3D has it’s own way of creating timers, however sometimes you just want to create your own. Here I’ll describe a quick way of creating a timer using ExpressionValue channels.

[download source]

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