Maybe you remember the Multicore-Demo from INTEL using OGRE3D which used 8 hardware threads ( 4 hyperthreaded cores). The "threaded task" framework for doing the distribution etc is called SMOKE and there's now an article about it on Gamasutra entitled:  "Performance Scaling With Cores: Introducing The SMOKE Framework". On the last page there is a link to the downloads of the demo binaries and the framework sourcecodes.

Here is a screenshot from the demo running on my Intel Quad Core Q9450 @ 2.67 Mhz under Vista

25 FPS with 4 threads - one per core. With one thread I have 7 FPS and with two threads 16 FPS (using the same perspective).

Little bugfixing update:

• fixed: crashes with "Animation Slider" dialog under Virtools 4.1
• fixed: Canceling the "Add Group" dialog for the "Fast Cam Switcher" crashed Virtools

Thanks for Patrick (aka Hightree) and Antoine (aka Feranti) for reporting them!

I replaced the old file on the server with the new one. The readme and the directory should say "beta 2". Otherwise try a refreshing click on the download-link ( shift+click (?) in firefox ).

Dom's Interface Extensions for Virtools

Let me know if you have any troubbles with the download or the plugin itself. Btw. did you know that you can use the arrow keys in the "Fast Cam Switcher" to move up and down in the cam-list so you can switch between the listed cams really fast?

Surprisingly only a few months after start, Google now announced to stop Google Lively. On their blog it says:

[...] It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. [...]

This is understandable but also a bit strange. Maybe they re-did some maths and came to the conclusion that this topic doesn't pay the bills or identified stronger competitors? I've no idea …

Surely, with Second Life's Hype plenty people jumped onto this bandwagon - and now after the initial euphoria, people maybe realize that it is not that easy - as promoted - to make money with 3d online communities? One thing is sure, the most successful online (3d) communities are actually MMO games! 2.8 million units sold in 24 hours, while the german industry suffer a deep crisis due the lack of car sales, crazy!

Autodesk seems to follow a strategy to go deeper into the "real-time, interactive 3D authoring tools" market.

The acquisition of Softimage was completed before yesterday (18th Nov.). In a public FAQ it says the following (emphasis added):

[..] It is hoped that this acquisition will promote Autodesk’s growth in the fastgrowing games market, and accelerate its strategy to deliver real-time, interactive 3D authoring tools for games, film and television. As well, it is hoped that the acquisition will broaden the appeal of Autodesk products into the hobbyist/game ‘modder’ segment. [...]

[...] it is hoped that the acquisition will accelerate Autodesk’s effort to build the next-generation of real-time, interactive 3D authoring tools.[...]

 One of the key competitors is Dassault Systemes. But also the overall evolution is that interactive 3D becomes part of other products - as seen in Photoshop or Microsofts XAML/WPF. Autodesk clearly mention this in that FAQ too:

[...] The 3D competitive landscape is fast evolving. Relatively new competitors, from Google to Adobe, are entering the 3D market, and others such as Dassault Systèmes are reinforcing their position. The production pipeline is rapidly expanding beyond simple digital content creation (DCC) tools. [...]

A bit strange is this statement:

The Softimage product line will benefit from Autodesk’s scale and research and development (R&D) investment capabilities, providing new opportunities for innovation and interoperability

It is said that XSI 7 with it's new ICE technology, was a nice release. Do they really need the R&D teams of 3ds max and Maya? They probably wanted to say that they can now do a big remix with the hope of heavy synergies.

So we have some big key players going into interactive 3D, but what about the smaller ones? Gamebryo expands to the casual game market … and tiny Unity3D expands to the MMO market. CryEngine2 goes into architecture and public viewing. Interesting times, everybody expands to other market-segments.

A few days ago I fixed some documentation that was compiled to CHM. There where some images missing when opened on other machines - it worked fine on my machine but that's because it found those images on my hard disk. So I added those images and created a new CHM file.

This time I copied my new CHM to a network machine for testing so I could detect if still some images were missing. Double clicked on the new file and …  bang - no content at all! Huh?!!

I thought I broke that thing now completely and started investigating …. but after a while I came across this webpage where it says:

if you attempt to load a CHM file remotely from another machine (mapped-network drive for instance), the security policy will place a restriction on loading the HTML content

Doh!

Don't waste your time with this kind of #@!§ !

I wanted to expand an import pipeline for characters, so they use GPU skinning. Unfortunately there is no BB and no VSL binding for this. Luckily it's possible using a custom BB.

You need to add this flag to bodyparts:

CK_3DENTITY_HWSKINING

I am surprised that this is not bound to VSL. Nobody ever complained about it?

Friday I was composing some object shaders and integrated them into the project. At some point we realized that under-water objects where reflected as they were above the water although I was using clipping panes. I thought I screwed up something but an idea made me check everything without the shaders and I found the trouble maker: the default shader of virtools is setting ClipPlaneEnable to zero! 

After the initial shock, I thought: interesting, can it entirely be setup and used inside the HLSL technique definitions? Soon I dropped that idea, because I would have to do technique-switching and that requires manual bookkeeping as Virtools offers no help with that. So how could I get back my correct reflections?

I thought about an old workaround I did somewhen in end 2006 or early 2007 but for this scenario it wouldn't work. This time I really would need some kind of "texkill" instruction that I did not found back then. And you know what? The HLSL counterpart is

Clip(x)

Probably you all already know about that, but for me it's my new best "HLSL  friend"!

All fine now

(Btw. in regards to the default shader, it might be a better idea to omit that state overwrite. Don't know how this is helpful in the way it is right now. )