eRelevant has developed a framework without any custom extensions for platform games à la Mario Borther.

There is a a larger amount of postings on the forum indicating that many people were looking for solutions to make screenshots and/or video captures from their Virtools compositions/applications. Many of them started doing own developments to get this feature (that is requested frequently by clients). In spring 2005 I was one of them and this is how i came across an article about creating high-res screenshots on gamedev . In april 2005 I sent an E-Mail to the Virtools support, saying that it would be a great feature for Virtools (DEV) and I included links to the article and it’s sourcecode. This feature request has been forwared from the support team to the "production team".

The good news is: Virtools has developed these features. Some of you may now think: "Great, sounds like there are great features in 4.0 !!" ….

Sorry to disappoint you - it’s not in Virtools (DEV) 4.0. "Huh, where it is then? A new add-on Plug-In?". Nope … I mean nothing like that is officially announced as add-on for DEV. But on the webpage about the new "3D Office Player, you can read the following:

"Experiences can be exported to both pictures (at very high resolutions if necessary) and video to easily record and share experiences"

(Experiences = Virtools Composition played in a player)

So if you or your clients are into product VIZ and it fits into the "new" PCS paradigm, then you can buy the Office player and have hi-res screenshots. Those who buy a DEV seat to produce a game probally won’t be able to do so … out-of-the-box …

In case you want your exporter to be able to assign attributes to exported entities based on some custom data in your DCC tool, then beware of the SetAttribute method of the Ge2Virtools. In case that you assign an attribute that has no parameter, the Ge2Virtools lib will create you an attribute with a parameter of a type from the font system anyways.

I send that issue to Virtools support over a week ago, but got no answer. I guess they are in holdiays or again they don't have enough people to handle all the input and wait time is 2 weeks (we had that quite often in the past).

So what you got to do is, reimplement the SetAttribute method and check if the type string is empty. If so, use

att = am->RegisterNewAttributeType(attributeName, CKGUID(0,0)); 

I finally uploaded the DLL with *some* bindings regarding CKObjectAnimation and CKKeyedAnimation. The DLL is probally compatible with 4.0 as, so far as I could see in the beta, it's still not bound by default. I don't know why as it's really not much work.

I prefixed the classes with CK like it's done in the SDK for that there ain't any conflicts when Virtools does these bindings finally, too. Then just delete the DLL and see which scripts do not compile anymore and adjust them.

CKObjectAnimation

(Cast, Get3dEntity, Set3dEntity, Shared, CreateMergedAnimation, GetMergeFactor, IsMerged, GetCurrentStep, GetLength, SetMergeFactor, SetLength, SetStep, HasMorphInfo)

CKKeyedAnimation

(Cast, GetAnimationCount, Clear, GetAnimation, RemoveAnimation, AddAnimation)

You can now find information about Virtools 4.0 and the new product line of Virtools on their site . There is a lot of marketing talk and lots of new expressions/symbols - sometimes heavily mixed and overlapping - which can confuse old users. I think I am going comment the one or other thing later, still trying to figure out some details.

Unfortunally between all the pages and PDFs with new product and confusing publishing info, you find no detailed information about what’s new in 4.0. One thing you can see is OpenGL 2.0 with CGFx (currently PC only as far as i know). As I was in the beta program I know more details but we signed NDA and I am not sure if we can already talk about it freely as not all details seems to be public yet.