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March 31, 2007
3D Ripper DX
This little tool captures various data from a game frame and dumps it out for all to see:
- capture all geometry, textures and shaders, rendered during single frame;
- import captured geometry into 3D Studio Max or Maya;
- see what exactly has been drawn by each individual draw call;
- see renderstate, textures, vertex streams, index stream, vertex declaration, vertex and pixel shaders (including HLSL source code if available) of each individual draw call.
What do people think of this?
Posted by JayK at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2007
AISeek
AISeek is developing a hardware solution to AI through their Intia Processor.
From the website:
To address today’s AI challenges, and to enable the creation of entirely new game worlds, AIseek developed the Intia processor. The Intia processor is the world’s first AI acceleration chip. The Intia processor is accompanied by a software development kit (SDK) for game developers. Using the SDK, studios can empower their AI modules and games with accelerated AI. The Intia processor’s accelerated AI functionality includes movement, sensory simulation and terrain analysis.
Posted by RaquelBujans at 10:17 AM | Comments (0)
Collada anyone?
Gamasutra has a 6 page article on Collada. Thoughts?
Posted by RaquelBujans at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
Call for whitepaper topics!
Aaron Walker and Raquel are kicking off a whitepaper. Let's help out!
Posted by RaquelBujans at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)
GPUTech releases RTSquare Personal Edition for 3DSMAX for free
3DSMAX: RTSquare allows the MAX renderer to offload certain calculations (i.e. GI, motion blur, area lights) to your GPU, significantly decreasing render time.
They are also releasing RTSquare 1.3 Pro, which works with Maya, Lightwave and XSI, as well as a standalone version and the SDK.
RTSquare Personal Edition for MAX
Posted by RaquelBujans at 09:29 AM | Comments (0)
MooTools Polygon Cruncher
Another solid addition to poly reduction tools for MAX and Lightwave. Polygon Cruncher will not only hold proper shape and volume, but will also preserve symmetry, vertex metadata (uvs, colors, etc) and user defined borders. Optimization is viewable through an OpenGL viewer.
Posted by RaquelBujans at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)
Avid Softimage XSI v.6 Released
Personally, I feel that XSI is ahead of the curve when compared to Maya and 3DSMax, so news of a new version is always exciting to me. XSI 6 adds the following to it’s already impressive featureset:
- Mental Ray 3.5.6 integrated
- Full .NET support
- C# support
- Python support (it’s already had Java and Perl)
- Expanded custom rendering support
- MOTOR – allows motion data to be ported between dissimilar rigs while preserving important details of the animation
- Elastic Reality integrated
- Crosswalk – Making it easier to move between 3D apps
Posted by RaquelBujans at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
Ambiera irrKlang
Ambiera, makers of the open source Irrlicht Engine are releasing audio engine irrKlang. As with Irrlicht, usage of irrKlang is completely free.
From the website:
· Buffered and streamed audio playback, in 2D and 3D.
· High level resource management and autodetection: The engine can do everything for you. Just tell it to play a sound file, and it will load, cache and/or stream sound data for you automaticly, depending on what is best for performance and memory usage. But if you want to specify how the engine should handle this, you can do this as well.
· Extendable: Possibility to write own file format readers/decoders to extend the engine with it.
· Plugin System: Simply copy external created plugins to the place where irrKlang is being used and extend its functionality with it
· Multi/Singlethreaded modes: The engine can run both multithreaded or singlethreaded in the same thread as your application, to make it possible to debug your application easier for example.
· Low level audio output manipulation: Possibility to alter any aspect of a playing sound like panning, volume and 3d position.
· Fast 3D audio on low end hardware: Because some low end audio hardware is not able to play 3D sounds without significant performance loss or some don't support 3d audio buffers at all, irrKlang has a high performance 3d sound buffer emulator built-in, causing a sound experience nearly as it was a real 3d sound buffer.
· Multiple rolloff models: irrKlang supports linear as well as logarithmic rolloff.
· Advanced file reading support: irrKlang can read directly from compressed zip files, pak files, memory, and everywhere the Irrlicht Engine can. File reading function callback can be overwritten by the user, of course.
Posted by RaquelBujans at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)
March 27, 2007
GDC Wrap Up
A big thank you to everyone who made it to our first group meeting and any of the tools roundtables. We had a great turnout this year, and thats very encouraging. Some updates:
Right now we're doing member introductions, so if there's anyone you met during GDC that you'd like to find again, now's the perfect time to go looking. They may have introduced themselves to the group already.
Check out the forums and email list for a recap of what we discussed. Notes from the roundtable have been transcribed to the IGDA wiki, and notes from the SIG meeting will be posted soon.
Additionally, coming soon there will be a new list of useful tools for tools developers posted on our SIG wiki. If there's anything you'd like to see added, don't be shy! Anyone with an IGDA account can edit.
Posted by RaquelBujans at 06:28 PM | Comments (0)