Maybe you know about the AI Middleware from Kynogon. When I look at their demos and papers, it really looks good. Now I came over a page that mentions the Virtools A.I. Pack/Library … this really surprises me, because I really didn't got impressed by the Virtools AI Pack. I played around with it once shortly and it didn't looked like that was worth it's money. I also heard similar thoughts from other users. In case it's really Kynogon under the hood, is it an old SDK? Is it badly integrated? (As the text says that the plugIn was done by Kynogon themselves?) Or was it licensed for Virtools MP and the DEV extension is a completely in-house implementation from Virtools? What do you think? In case you played with the AI Pack, what are your impressions - do you like it?

Btw. - a bit off-topic - on Kynogon's demo section there is also a video showing Kismet, the visual scripting system of the Unreal3 engine. Their concept looks much more like BuildingBlocks than I initially thought:

Guys, have you ever heard about tabbed browsing?? When I parse a page I might open all it's links in the background into new tabs. Middle Mouse button - click, click, click, click… Like this it goes real fast that I have two dozen of tabs open….

Now imagine that at least two of those are playing audio … plus my winamp streaming in cool funky music. What a chaos!!  What do I do? It's hard to find those and it cost time thus I simply close one tab after the other until audio is gone!!! And probably I won't come back to your site.

So don't play audio oder video until explicitly requested by the user! See the embedded YouTube videos? You have to click on them to confirm that you want to load them and see them now!

Moreover offer buttons for stopping playback and muting audio.
Thanks! 

Warning ! Don't go to this site and don't play this game: Desktop Tower Defense 1.5

Initially you had to register to be able to post comments. Then I added an Anti-Spam plugIn called "Akismet". First it worked really well but now it doesn't stop marking real comments as spam.

From time to time I check those but it might happen that the one or other slips through and gets deleted. In case you posted a comment and it does not appear after 1,5 days, please let me know.

Moreover if you have some tips for me about Akismet or any other effective spam filter plugIn for wordpress - then please let me know.

Finally I am finding some time to write about something that I enjoyed ~2 weeks ago. FUNK'N'STEIN - The Band! That's some cool dudes from Israel doing some nice funky music !!

A friend of us dragged us to their concert, here in Berlin. None of us knew them before but after merely 30 seconds I got a big smile on my face and my body started to move. And it didn't end until the end of the show! We really had a great time. Here are some photos. Sorry for the crappy quality, my phone is still more a phone than a photo camera ;) 

Once somebody told me that he thinks that funky music is superficial as most of Funk is about dancing, cheering and having a good time together. I don't think that's superficial as this kind of 'feeling' and 'attitude' is something that the world needs more. In addition to this, as I said, Funk'N'Stein is from Israel and thus the bad situation in that region plays a role in some of their song texts, too.

Anyways, if you like it funky then go and checkout the site of FUNK'N'STEIN which has music and videos.

FUNK ON !

When I bought my Virtools Dev Student version, i think it was in 2003, I paid 300 EUR ( ~ 414$ US). And that was a very special, ultra, unique, hyper mega super deal … because the normal price was still 500 EUR (~ 689$ US). I told them that this price (500 EUR) was completely insane … strangely they didn't agree …

I thought very carefully if I really wanted to 'invest' 300 EUR for a non-commercial student version… I really was into DEV .. I wanted to to become an expert and I dreamed of a full-time job in a company that was using Virtools. But my case was a very special scenario … I didn't know any student that would invest 300 EUR in a student software, because it's a lot of money for a student. Nowadays, it's probably even worse because there was a law-change in germany (also insane) that allows public-schools to ask additional subscription fees. There has always been some fees per semester (6 month cycle) - which were around … i think 150 EUR. Now it can be as high as 600 EUR and if you study longer than the usual time, it can climb even as high as 900 EUR!!! (Depends on regions). 

Study fees, books, computer, software, studio, food … this quickly sums up. That's probably why there are also free learning versions (PLE) like for Maya or Houdini. But even back in 2003 the student version of 3ds max was much cheaper than the one from Virtools … maybe like 150 EUR, but i don't remember exactly anymore, that's a big difference. I was told by Virtools that "students always ask for 'cheaper' until it's free" … maybe … but 500 EUR???

Now, if you are a student in the U.S or in south or central America, then you are lucky because for a really reasonable price of 99$ US (09/2007) you can get your personal student license (which is limited to 2 years). That's ~ 72 EUR - see the difference?

Finally somebody is reasonable. I have no idea who initially put the 500 EUR price tag on the student version, but he must have been from another planet.
I hope this price-drop pays off, but time also has changed with XNA, Unity3D Indie etc. There are more choices and much more 3D real-time development communities than ever before. We will know when suddenly we get tons of new students into the forum coming from America …

You have a complex shader with tons of parameters and you tweak and tweak and tweak …. and somehow an older version might have been better - or you want to compare multiple versions? Of course you could implement something that does store the values etc but here is a simple - not perfect - workaround for this kind of situation:

For each 'tweaked' version, save your material as NMO into the materials folder of your resource database. Ok, now you can drag and drop the material onto your object or level … what do you say? "It's not working!" Yep, it keeps the old shader values … what you have to do to get the ones from the saved NMO is: each time before dragging in the new material NMO, you go into the material and change the shader to "– None –"- Then when you drag in the new material, you'll also get the new values.

Maybe you read about the EASTL (EA-STL) - modifications to the STL that helps to deal better with game development issues. Greggman is asking EA in an open letter to open source their modified STL under BSD license.

Another argument, besides those he mentions, could be that when they hire new people, these might already be familiar with that library which might reduce education/training costs in the long term. 

Last week I saw a presentation from ATI about their new FireGL cards. The presenter said, that the new cards will come with new drivers that have been completely rewritten from scratch. We all know (and they know it too) that their drivers have been a weak point. That's also why I always did vote for Nvidia cards. My experience with ATI cards under 3ds max (i.e. in 2004) have been very bad. Also when I needed 3d acceleration on multi-monitor setups, ATI didn't offer that feature at all. Last time I checked (i think dec 2005/ jan. 2007) they had just release a very new driver having this feature and it didn't work very well for me, which only confirmed my choice of preferring NVidia cards.

An interesting aspect was, that he mentioned a collaboration with Dassault Systemes: as they provide one of the most widely used CAD application in the industry (CATIA) they worked with them to improve performance. He said, that once DS reported of being able to display and handle 90 million faces (? or was it vertices - sorry I don't remember anymore exactly) inside CATIA. This is done via Vertex Buffer Objects.

The cards will have up to 320 unified shader pipeline and up to 2 GB of RAM - these numbers are of course from the high-end version "V8650".

The short answer is: no!

The long answer is:  3ds max hides complexity. Before per-pixel handling via programmable pixel-shaders became available on consumer gfx cards, shading components across the triangle were mainly calculated by interpolating the value between the three vertices. A triangle is flat and thus you can interpolate in a linear/straight way. For example the vertex colors and normals.

Now, if you have a mesh inside 3ds max - let's say a cube in it's default state. It has 6 smoothing groups, because there are hard edges between each face. How many normals do you need for each corner vertex? Each corner has 3 faces - each of them pointing to another direction and having "hard" seams at it's borders.

We need 3 normals for all 8 corners … that's 24 vertices. Ok, now convert it to an 'editable poly', go into the face sub-level and hit CTRL+a to select all faces. Hit "clear all" and then smoothing group "1" in order to assign a single smoothing group to all faces. Export this one and load it into Virtools. And?

Oh, it ain't 24 anymore but not 8 neither? Yes! That's because there are not only normals stored in the vertices but also UV coordinates and color/material information. In 3ds max do then the following:

• add the "UV Unwrap" modifier to the cube
• go into face sub-level mode
• select all
• open the "Edit…" dialog
• select Mapping -> Unfold Mapping ('walk to closest face') -> Ok
• You now have a cross-like UV layout
• go into vertex sub-level mode
• select through each vertex and notice that sometimes another one is highlighted in blue
• right click and select "target weld" form the context menu
• now weld each vertex to it's "blue partner" in case it has one

Import the smoothed cube that has no UV seams into Virtools … … … what does the mesh setup say? 8 vertices, finally !!!

I hope this little tutorial has shed some light on the topic therefore you should now be able to understand better why there might be differences in vertex count between Virtools and 3ds max.