Sorry, didn't find a better title :P

It's starting to gett difficult for me to track all the real-time 3d technologies market. The things in the real-time 3d market is evolving faster and faster … I suddenly see products I haven't seen before etc … but about this maybe more at another time.

Torque from GarageGames is well known. It initially started with the Tribes Engine and Tools for indies. In recent years more products came up like the 2D engine and editor called TGB (Torque Game Builder). A further developed version of the TGE (Torque Game Engine) is called TGEA (Torque Game Engine Advanced).

On their blog they announced that they are focusing on bringing TGEA to a new level with:

• improved art pipeline
• new editors and tools
• web publishing
• improved scripting
• new "starter kits" i.e. for Racing or FPS games
• etc

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? They will name the new version "Torque 3D". The 2D product will be renamed to "Torque 2D". The current TGEA 1.8 beta adds OpenGL support, I guess it's the first step for cross-platform web publishing. If web publishing is going to be free, is not clear yet … maybe not. You can read about it here.

They also announced that the price for Torque 3D will be higher but it's not yet set too:

So what price makes sense? What's commensurate with the value Torque provides? Again, I don't know the answer to this yet. It's not $150 / seat and it's not $295 / seat. Perhaps it's $1000. Perhaps it's more. I look at products like Flash ($699) or 3ds Max ($3495) / Maya ($4995) and compare them with Torque.

TGE never attracted me seriously. But maybe with their next generation of tools, it might become an interesting alternative too.

For a couple of years now, I am "misusing" Characters for a lot more than "just characters". For those that don't use Virtools, a Character Entity is a 3D entity that has "bodyparts" entities. A bodypart can be a bone, a dummy or a an entity with a (skinned) mesh. You can also add all kind of non bodyparts to the hierarchy.

The interesting aspect is that the whole combination can be treated as one. In the 3D layout window, you usually pick the character entity and thus you translate the complete set. Moreover there is a character parameter type, thus you can search, store, hide etc the whole complex as one.

Office chairs, where you want to be able to change the height or rotate the seat, are a simple example.

Last year I had a combo of particles systems that I wanted to treat as one unit. Easier as asset and easier to create, duplicates etc. Thus I wanted them to be part of a Character.

(Edit: the following passage is not entirely correct, see notice in bold that follows)

The first thing you may notice is you can't easily create any characters or bodyparts inside the Virtools authoring system. Even via the scripting language (VSL) one is not able to create such objects.

Missing VSL bindings is still a problem in Virtools (although things got better). We have a custom DLL where we do our own bindings in these cases, but I wish I would not have to waste my time on this. After I was able to create Characters and bodyparts via VSL I saw that the Level Manager didn't update it's character content. I don't know yet what kind of notification it requires but saving and reloading the file (or asset) fixes the problem.

( EDIT:  as pointed out by Julien in the comments, you actually can create characters and bodyparts using bc.CreateObject - just like in the SDK. There's are only no shortcut bindings like bc.CreateEntity3D )

On my first iteration I simply added the particles system dummies to the character hierarchy, but they also were listed separately when loading them at runtime. Unfortunately you can't attach the particle system components (building blocks) onto bodyparts but only onto so called "3D frames" which are the 3d dummies (/gizmos) of Virtools.

"Hey wait!" came into my mind - 3d dummies in Virtools are 3d entities with an additional flag and bodyparts are special 3d entities. So I did the hack: added the flag to my bodyparts and suddenly they accepted the particle system buildings blocks!

I wrote me a little action script that creates a "particle character" from a set of distinct particles systems. I have no idea how solid this is, but so far no complains from the customer! Hehehe …

It makes it much easier to move, load, store particle-system combos (only textures need to be selected manually in some cases).

Yesterday I came across this :

(…) Canvas 3D JavaScript library (C3DL), (…) aims to facilitate the development of browser-based interactive 3D graphics with JavaScript. It is highly experimental and is still at a relatively early stage in its evolution. 

(…)

Interesting perspective!!

Also interesting to me is "the effort to implement SMIL for Firefox". But 'interesting' in a different way as I actually once did a SMIL project … many years ago during my studies. Hmm … *thinking* … no idea when, maybe in 2000?? I don't know. What is SMIL, you may wonder? It's a W3C standard … 

The Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL, pronounced "smile") enables simple authoring of interactive audiovisual presentations. SMIL is typically used for "rich media"/multimedia presentations which integrate streaming audio and video with images, text or any other media type. SMIL is an easy-to-learn HTML-like language, and many SMIL presentations are written using a simple text-editor

Back then there were no freely available players that actually implemented the whole specification. We tried the Quicktime-Player and the RealPlayer. I know that there was a 3rd one, but I think you had to buy it. Quicktime had support for a really small subset and Realplayer was actually not fully compatible. We had to use not so few 'RealPlayer only' tags, but at the end we were actually able to do a little"rich-media" presentation and watch it using the RealPlayer.

The project was something like a simple web-based SMIL editor. Very simple. We had a HTML front-end where you were able to add media, transitions etc. Then the data was saved as SMIL. The editor was able to load SMIL back for further editing.

I am not sure, if there is nowadays really a need for this. Flash or the combo "HTML, CSS, JS" does the trick.

Maybe I need to correct myself. I said 2009 is going to be important but probably not a breakthrough year for 3D vision using stereoscopy.

This month I saw a lot of marketing in the online and offline media. Early this month a German boulevard newspaper had the main title on their front page saying that the 'nex-gen TV' is going to be 3D-capable and connected to the Internet.

Online I saw on a lot of places the marketing results from NVidia and IZ3D. IZ3D says to have "the first 3d display for gamers".

It's a passive display that requires glasses. It's a bit of the usual PR blahblah ecause X3D had an stereoscopic display aiming for gamers a couple of years ago! With ~1000€ it was affordable for enthusiasts but still too pricey for the mass market. That iZ3D 22" display is around ~400$ - thus more likely to be a mass product. Still it makes it not the "world's first designed for gamers" A key difference is that the IZ3D is using passive stereo, thus you are required to use polarized glasses, but probably also cut costs.

Maybe you remember the active shutter glasses that came with ELSA gfx cards at the end of 90ies. The problem with them is mainly the frequency and - back then and probably today too - they created headaches as the frequency of screens were/are at 60 Hz and it gets halfed, so it gives you a refresh-rate of 30 Hz - which is not enough for a smooth perception. Today there are some displays that go at 120 Hz.
Passive displays don't alternate pictures but show both at the same time. The polarized glasses act as filter, so each eye just gets one image. Usually if you roll your head too much to the sides, the separation gets lost and you get some "ghosting" or even both pictures. But I think it's less a problem than auto-stereoscopic displays where you usually need to be at a specific angle on the horizontal axis.

NVIDA has now new glasses - they are active and they are able to sync to 120 Hz. They refer to 120 Hz displays from Samsung and ViewSonic. There is also Sony experimenting. Same for Panasonic and plenty other companies … !

We have two autostereoscopic displays in our offices. An old one, single-view, and a more recent one with 5 views.

Puppetshop, the rigging and animation toolkit from Kees Rijnen, is now available for free!!!

Aaaaand … ShaderFX is free for …

[...] individuals and companies smaller than 2 employees

Wow ! Pretty cool !

[It's at the bottom of the page, where it says: download.]

In addition to that, as result of the Softimage acquisition by Autodesk, CAT, another rigging, muscle and animation toolkit, is now available as extension download for 3ds max subscription customers. Here is an old review of the 'Character Animation Toolkit'

I never had a look at these animation packages… what about you?

Aw, this was getting another draft starting to remain forever a draft. So certainly no news for many of you, but for the rest, here we go:

More and more people are involved into interactive real-time 3D. Actually not so few articles of mine (like this one here) are dealing with this aspect, so I am kinda repeating myself … I hope you don't mind too much, hehe

Interactive real-time 3D is getting easier to use and even produce - games are driving the hardware and software industry intensively. Like other technologies that are initially only affordable for few, over years things may become part of the everyday life of many people.

Besides products and platforms of big companies, solutions like Torque and Unity3D from smaller companies are playing an interesting role in all this … 

Gamasutra reported early this month that Criterion Co-Founder Lau-Kee joined the Unity3D team as adviser. He says:

The last several years has brought a plethora of entrants into the video game tools & middleware sector, but Unity is the only company I have found that has the technology, the people and the strategy to be truly transformational

Moreover

Mark my words, the democratization of the games industry has begun

For additional information you can read this interview or David's blog, where he also states

[...] our userbase tripled, there’s probably more than 10 times more games out with Unity now than in 2007 [...] we could afford to more than double the team [...]

There is another interesting interview at developmag, entitled 3D ehr One-For-All.

I like this passage:

[...] they absolutely understand that they are answerable to the community of Unity users. You just need to take a look at the Unity forums – what you see there is a true community, vibrant, thriving and creative. [...]

[...] in this sense Unity is more like using, say, Photoshop than a game engine [...]

This is also visible in Unity3D IRC user channel as it peaks now at 50 people! Compare this to #virtoolsdev's peak which was around 16!

On Virtools forum someone once said, that real-time 3d tech is not like i.e. photoshop. But if you consider where Autodesk is aiming for, we will probably have more real-time 3d applications that will be like i.e. photshop! In Silverlight/Blend 3D is one type of asset like any other. Real-time 3D slowly becomes a standard media asset like video or photos!

Harrison from Atari said last year:

[...] from an Atari perspective… I think we would want to work with creators of all types, and that's why I'm so interested in Unity, because it does democratize development

He also says:

Managing the funnel of recruitment, training, educating, and getting the skills shortage, skills gap closed, is kind of an industry-wide problem…

This is interesting, because I had the same idea for a while about Virtools as I thought that Virtools once was in the position to do the same. Although I intentionally started  to post less suggestions, feedbacks, bug-reports etc. - due my frustrations of how one-sided this all turned out to be - I still suggested Dassault Systemes on their board last summer to use Virtools to get people in the boat, for that there is a recruitment pool for 3DVia mp!
You know, just the idea of democratizing 3D via mass and not premium markets - basically what the user-base actually understood under 3D-For-All!

The GarageGame guys share the vision:

In 1999, myself and my partners started GarageGames with the goal of democratizing development, and brought a low cost game engine to market. We started calling shareware authors Indies, and changed the landscape of Indie and low end development.

I already mentioned InstantAction, the web3D game portal. It's something that once would have been possible with Virtools too - in theory - but the vision lacked and pricing model was not permitting 3rd party teams to do so. Now InstantAction has

[...] managed to cross the 1 million members mark only 9 months after we covered their launch [...]

[...] 2009 will be a big year for this service. IA will increasingly become a great place for Indies to make money

Happy new year, my dear readers!

I hope you had relaxing Christmas time and a smooth transition into the new year.

2008 has been a mixed year for me. End of 2007 and the first quarter or half of 2008 I worked a lot on the biggest Virtools VR Cluster. It's a 50-nodes cluster installed in a shopping mall in Berlin. When the cluster boots it's really impressive, feels like starting the engine of a space craft! It was a pretty intensive time. I did a lot of analysis, tests, refactoring, bug fixing and fine tuning and extensions. I had to do small iterations because the system had to run at daytime, giving me only the night time to test and deploy. Was not easy but I managed to complete the job for the customer, so that's very cool because it initially was a project from another company thus not my codes. For example, in one scenario, there was a serious out-of-sync for many character-animations and I wasn't sure if I was able to fix it. I had an idea and took a couple more days to go through the whole application changed plenty of places. I was very relieved and happy that it finally worked after that session (as I was running out of ideas hehehe ).

We also wrote a surveillance systems that automatically recovers the  system when something fails. You need to know that the system runs like 10 hours a day, 6 days a week!!! The VR pack is a useful framework but very obviously not adjusted to these kind of tasks - so much missing or "sub-optimal" for this kind of scenarios. I had to develop a couple of tools and plugins to facilitate surveillance, debugging and development. It's easy to see how much more sophisticated tools would speed up the production by a large chunk. Anyways, this is something I actually wanted to talk about in a separate posting, but never had the time to do some - besides that I unfortunately have no real good pics of it.

Actually there are plenty of things I want to blog about, but it always takes a lot of time! There was a moment where I only posted some news I picked up here and there and the amount of comments seemed to drop. (Btw. thanks a lot for those who take time to comment regularly!!). There are plenty of drafts in the backend but over time they get obsolete or never finished.

During the second half of 2008 I made some interesting prototyping but I can't talk about this right now. Besides some other projects, I made some research in how to have plenty more of animated characters in Virtools. Some things works fine out-of-the-box, some other needs custom plug-ins. I ll write about it one day.

Something else that hit me in 2008 is that I become ill. We still don't know that the cause is - I am much better, but still not totally ok. Some kind of burn-out is certainly part of the mix, thus one word of care for you: health is more important than wealth!!! Seriously, take breaks after work-intensive periods! (Or avoid them! hehe).

2009 is going to be an interesting year, I think. In a lot of ways … there are some "changes" on the horizon ….

Last year Dassault System re-picked up 3dvia Virtools (Dev) and formed a new team to work on release nr.5. Although many other big companies like Autodesk, Adobe or Microsoft have blogs and "lab-sites" where they openly speak about their roadmap and experiments, Dassault Systemes is pretty secretive about what will happen. Only rumors from time to time. Anyways, somewhen in the first half of the new year, we will know. Something pretty annoying is the amount of spam on the forum- the board needs upgrades in a more regular interval!
About mp there is still not much public. It's certainly a very interesting product but targets big budgets and either the experienced Virtools users need to hire at different, bigger companies or will not benefit from a new, modern architecture.

The team of Unity3D is working intensively on a PC version for their authoring system. I consider Unity3D as a real alternative to Virtools or Quest3D. Every packet has it strength and weaknesses, but it has now some years under the belts and looks pretty good compared to newcomers like DXStudio, Blade3D, Shiva3D and plenty of others. I think the PC version will create a big rush towards Unity3D - among them certainly Virtools users, too.

We will see what Autodesk will do, now that it has nearly a monopoly on 3D DCC tools. As already said in previous posting, that they announced to expand further into the market of real-time 3D tools. One of the first appearance might be "Project Newport " a

… real-time 3D story building technology for architectural visualization and presentation. With breakthrough game-engine technology, …

Maybe somebody saw the collaboration between Crytek and a French company that were using the Crisis engine for architectural purposes. Autodesk's Lab seems also to experiment with all the cool stuff we see: multitouch, augmented reality via marker cards and stereoscopy…

This brings me to the new topic: stereoscopic displays. During the first half of this decade I worked a couple of years as content producer for interactive, passive stereo wall/cave systems. Later, at bogengang, I developed GPU shaders that encoded the masks for autosterscopic displays from Sharp and SeeReal. At that time I found no indication that somebody else was doing it on the Graphics card - neither at conferences nor online. Some years later, at a conference about stereoscopy in Berlin, nearly every display provider had GPU accelerated solutions. Thus, although not yet mass market, it's constantly evolving - even though if pioneers like SeeReal went out of business in the mean while. It moves forward … slowly but progressively …. Now there are not only displays, photo-handys, webcams and other stuff from big companies but it is also said that most of the US cinemas have stereoscopic-ready hardware installed. Non-CG film producers are also starting to actually produce films: in Berlin you can see Batman (or so) in 3D. A friend of mine was there and told me that he liked it a lot. 2009 won't be a breakthrough year but it's smoothly coming to the masses. It might be that the breakthough will come via the cinemas.

Something I fear that won't change that much is politics. It's nearly always the same people involved. In addition to that lobbyism, networking and media/marketing campaigns have taken too much control over political decisions. They do B but say it's A, "selling" bad solutions for the overall society as the "premium" way. And that's where I started: premium. Once in a while some guy comes up with some new words that become trendy and then it's everywhere! In this case: premium insurances, premium cars, premiums nuts … I started to use it as running gag …

Well, my very "premium" wishes for the new year to all of you!