Wow ! Have a look at this - if you are have no patience go straight to 2:35

Even on a normal acustic guitar, he does amazing stuff - it's on a very high technical level but it's clearly about music not technique… great!

If you like it, make sure to see his other videos too! His name is Andy Mckee.

Ten years ago or so, I also created a little guitar piece (but on a E-Guitar, much easier to play!) where I was also doing harmonic stuff with the right hand on the fretboard (tapping and sliding). I got the idea from a promo session with … ops, I forgot her name … she played with Michael Jackson on tour … ah, her name is Jennifer Batten. So on that promo tour for her solo CD and an effect machine, she did those slides with the right hand and so it inspired me to experiment with that. Slides are not so difficult but tapping a triad (accord of 3 notes) isn't that easy and for me doing this cleanly (without unwanted noise/notes) was always also a question of luck .. hehe Therefore seeing him doing this on an a-guitar, clean and with those percussion things … everything in a musical way … just WOW !

Today a played a bit guitar. Nowadays I am doing this unfortunately very, very rarely… the computer is now eating most of the time. But I'll soon see my little brother who started playing guitar too, so I need to warm up a bit I have this Epiphone 335 (?) copy with .11 strings (bigger than usual) on it and after a improvisation session on a backing-track my finger are hurting … especially string bendings were painful at the end … hmmm …  just like in old times

You added a couple of BG/VSL BBs from your resource to your composition. Then you hit play …. and oops … a new console message is there, saying something like "input error!". 

Ok, maybe you forgot to attach a local parameter to one of the BBs … but where? To make a long story short, always prefix you error message with a context identifier. For example, you write a VSL BB that modifies a texture … it might happen that you, or somebody else using that BB, will forget to attach a parameter to it and dang your code creates an exception if you don't check it.

Example:

    if( NULL != sourceTexture  )
    {
       // my code here
     }
    else
    {
        bc.OutputToConsole("BB_NameHere: Input error! No source texture available");
    }

If you want to check for availability of objects using the schematic, you can use my VSL BB TestForNull. 

Big thanks to Pat for the heads-up. As i am mostly launching DevR.exe, I wouldn't have noticed it. Get the 4.0 SP3 patch via the auto-patcher, it's not yet posted on the support site.

PatchReadMe

Why is CG 2.0 of special interest?

Let's have a look at this Nvida PDF_from the GDC2007 that talks about Geforce8 OpenGL extensions. You will see it's Shader 4.0 related… Shader 4.0 is DirectX 10 stuff! Now in this PDF it says the following, too:

Cg 2.0 -> Not a GL extension -> Will support the capabilities 

So when will CG 2.0 be available? Well … it's already released! The CG 2.0 Toolkit is part of the Nvidia OpenGL SDK

Please obtain the Cg 2.0 Toolkit from the full OpenGL SDK 10 installer.

I think this means DX10 features using a Geforce8 are already available under Windows XP!  Now  …. what if Virtools 4.x would come with a CG 2.0 rasterizer?

As Patrick said:

cool shit

Did you know ….

.. that you can reset the current scene with CTRL & BACKSPACE. This is similar to the "IC<|" Button. In case you are using multiple scenes, than you may want to lunch the level instead the scene that was running last which is still active using the button. So, instead of going into the level manager and hit the Level-Button, you can hit the keyboard combo:

CTRL & SHIFT & BACKSPACE

There's a second part of the interview video I mentioned recently. This one shows terrain with foliage rendering and how you edit it. And also a bit more shadowing.

Did you know ….

.. there is another "hidden" camera mode for the 3D Layout. I am using this quite often, when I need to travel in a bigger scene (especially as you don't need to hold anything if you want to go straight ahead all the time):

If you hit the 'Y' key during the author mode in the 3d Layout, it gets enabled or disabled. It's like the old-school VRML Walk/Fly modes: move the mouse to the top window border to go forward, move the mouse to the middle of the screen to stop, move the mouse to the bottom of the window to go backwards etc. There is also  a little trick if you want a bit more forward-speed: move the mouse to the bottom of the screen and then hit the 'y' to enable the mode.

While being in this mode, you can also look-around with the mouse while holding the left-mouse-button or pan using the right-mouse-button. 

Do you know "Texture Shaders"? If not, don't worry as probably very few Virtools users know about it (if any at all). Though it's a Virtools "feature" since 3.x, I discovered them just recently, too. So, what is it? The docs say:

A texture shader uses a compiled high-level shader language (HLSL) function to fill each texel of each of its mipmap level.  It is commonly used to generate procedural 2D or volumetric texture such as wood, noise, gradients or precomputed lookup tables. Annotations on the texture parameter declaration allow you to specify how the texture must be created. It can be used to load a new texture from a resource, create a new texture that will be used locally by the shader, select an existing texture or fill an existing texture.

GPU Shader code to create texture content …. does it ring? Create procedural texture content faster due GPU power! Maybe you know "farbrausch" and their products for procedural content, like werkkzeugTE for texture generation. So this could help in having smaller footprints for webplayer content or faster procedural level generation (i.e. height maps) or creating floating-point texture-content at run-time (currently my intention).

But the title of this article doesn't sound positive, so where is the problem? Well, it's a "at-compilation-time" only feature. Currently there's no way to (re-)trigger it at runtime. In addition to that it does not consider manual parameters, so parameters have to be hard-coded and after each change you need to compile the shader.

At leasts that's how it seems to be so far - I might overlook something.
Imagine Virtools would have created a GUI for creating Shader code like ShaderFX…. do you see what kind of ideas I got when I discovered it this in the docs? 

Unity3D 2.0 is announced to be released this summer. Misterion once told me, that in his tests he found Unity to be much slower than Virtools. Looks like we need to test again:

 (…) Across the board, you can expect a doubling in the frame-rate from previous versions, and greatly increased stability on the oldest of old graphics card drivers. (…)

And some other stuff Virtool users want (partially for ages):

• GUI System
• Terrain Engine
• Solid Outdoor Shadowing (at least that's the impression one gets from the screenshot)

Also nice: Networking/Multiplayer without additional costs. What is Virtools 4.x is going to have new under it's hood … ?

Here's a video interview with Nicholas Francis from Unity3D. Now, why do I mention this?

• it's stated that they are interested to become the 3D equivalence of flash
• you see transformation gizmos
• you see assets hotloading
• you see gfx card emulation
• you see network emulation (in the menu)

I know another tool that would benefit of having such features, too.

Edit: It's actually not with "Tom Higgins" but with "Nicholas Francis"