On the 18th and 19th of September it’s time again for the annual event where the Quest3D community meets up and shares thoughts, tips, and tricks of the trade. This year the conference location is Aachen, Germany. To join the conference you’ll need to register here. (If you register before August 15 2008 you even get a 10% discount!).

Following are some of the sessions which will be held during the conference:

• Quest3D Basics
• Application of Realtime Virtual Design in the infrastructure sector
• Automation of your workflow
• Writing shaders in Quest3D 4.1+
• The Quest3D knowledge base
• Quest3D OO in practice
• Advanced data structures in OO
• Creating OO GUI systems in Quest3D
• Channel Coding for Non C++ Programmers
• Aspects of a graphics production pipeline in Quest3D

More info here.

See you there!

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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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.

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

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.