Maybe you know Matthew. He was a very active Virtools user for many years and also published some casual games using it. Roughly a year ago he started to use Unity (for diverse reasons) and ported 'I hate clowns'. Now he released a new game using Unity, called Splume. It's a color-match game with a springy physics aspect.
While having a short look at it, I see some usability problems - it's a bit off-topic as it's partly due the Unity webplayer
- I can't see a quick way to mute audio
- it tracks mouse clicks outside the window or even when I am in another browser TAB
- I can't pause the game or even better the Unity player. Thus it takes resources while I am at other web pages
- where do I adjust fullscreen resolution and AA?
I haven't look at it in depth yet, but it looks very interesting: UnitTestCg by Aurora
UnitTestCg supports both Cg 1.5b2 and DX9 HLSL
Several CG places are reporting that the 3ds max trial version you can download from autodesk is the new 2008 one. Haven't check it yet … but will do so soon too.
Thus 3ds max 2008 is shipping …
Yesterday Unity 2.0 was released!
Here's a quote from the press release
With Unity 2.0 developers can now take advantage of great new features like the Terrain Rendering Engine, DirectX 9 Renderer for Windows, Built-in Networked Multiplayer Support, Web Player Streaming and Improved Web Player Compression. Developers can also start using a new companion product, the Unity Asset Server, which allows teams of developers to easily stay in synch and provide project source control capabilities.
There's also a new section on their website presenting many of Unity's features (old and new ones ).
Download the new webplayer and walk around in Tropical Paradise:
For Virtools users it's interesting to read about Unicode support, easy front generation using TrueType fonts, ability to create keyframes in the editor, PSD support, asset hot reloading, GUI system, multiple mipmap generation methods, terrain engine and editor including foliage rendering, a modern shadowmap system, streamed loading in the webplayer, custom loading bar for the webplayer, GfX card emulation, texture atlas generation, assets postprocessing, networking api and Ageia PhysiX without additional costs.
Unfortunately the authoring environment is Mac OS only and this probably for another year until the PC version is ready. I know all the posting about "buy a mac, you won't regret it". Maybe that's true, but for over 10 years people are telling me how great Macs are. I heard a couple of false stories like Mac and it's OS are made for photoshop and will outperform a PC - but from my personal experience - which was ~ 6 years ago - this was absolutely wrong!
So until Apple does not add more RAM and a better Gfx cards to their mid-range products, I am not really motivated to buy any.
UPDATE:
You can also download and play the demo FPS game that we saw in the interview videos I mentioned in older postings. Avert Fate
I have the honor to announce that Flavio Rodriguez has now a blog, too !
Those that are active in the Virtools online community already know him from his famous Multi-Resolution/DetailTexture Shader, his Heat Distortion Shader, and his DoF Shader.
Maybe you also know about the WW2D prototype he did with Frederic Markus from eRelevant using Virtools.
You can read more about him (including his resume) on this site. Don't forget to subscribe to his Blog RSS feed (bottom of the page), because he already told me the topics of his next articles and it sounds very interesting !
