July 24, 2007
FX Composer 2.0 RC1
This one's been awhile in coming, but it seems to have finally made it out with some interesting features, one of which is Mental Mill, graph node editor for shaders.
Posted by JayK at 06:46 AM | Comments (0)
June 27, 2007
Omegame releases Omegame Menus Master
Omegame announced Menus Master v2.5, the most complete, flexible and user-friendly solution to create game user interface (UI) for any c++ platform.
Menus Master provides all the functionalities artists need to create any kind of sophisticated game user interfaces: 2D and 3D front-ends, in-game UIs and heads-up displays.
• No programming assistance needed:
- With Menus Master, artists can create up to 80% of your game UI and HUD, without any programming assistance.
- Programming assistance is only needed when the UI is integrated into the game, and if complex interactions between the game UI and the game must be established (i.e. to manage dynamic databases).
• No Creativity Constraints:
- Menus Master Studio supports any kind of resources needed to create AAA game UI: Texts, bitmaps, 3D objects, animations, videos, sounds and music.
- All parameters of these objects (position, size, motion, colours, alpha, etc.) can be easily modified and animated within Menus Master Studios.
- 2D and 3D are treated the same in Menus Master; Menus Master offers powerful tools to manage 3D and 2D.
- 3D meshes can be imported from any third party software with their own animations. Animations can also be created within Menus Master.
• Easy Localization:
- All texts created in Menus Master can have several language fields, one for each language, and these fields can be Unicode (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, etc.)
- UI project language can be changed at any time to check if the page layout conforms to wishes.
- All texts are saved in a *.CSV file. The linguistic team can work separately on this file (translate, correct, add languages …) at any time.
- When using Unicode fonts, Menus Master generates a bitmap file with only the characters used in the UI.
• Fully open and scalable:
- Menus Master has an open I/O architecture; all interactions between Menus Master and the platform are made through drivers.
- Menus Master is consequently totally compatible with any existing market’s platforms, present and next generation, as soon as technical specifications are known.
- Any standard or exotic peripherals (camera, microphone, magic wand ...) can also quickly be supported by Menus Master thanks to its drivers-based architecture.
- This open architecture also allows to use any homemade technology or third-party middleware with Menus Master.
- Omegame is establishing partnerships with middleware companies to make their solution work with Menus Master.
• Real time preview in real conditions (WYSIWYG):
- Menus Master allows a real time preview of the game UI, at any time.
- On a multi platforms project, any resources can be assigned to a specific platform. Users can quickly switch between the different versions to appraise them according to the platform constraints.
- Moreover, the drivers-based architecture of Menus Master also allows to use any homemade technology or 3rd party middleware within Menus Master Studio.
- You can consequently use in Menus Master Studio your own cutting -edge 3D engine, or the latest third-party sound middleware you need, etc ...
- So what you see on your screen is exactly what you will get in your game.
• Teamwork:
- Menus Master allows several artists to work on different parts of a UI at the same time.
- Any asset manager can also be integrated into Menus Master.
• Parallel authoring:
- Menus Master allows to create, from one UI, several others UIs for different platforms.
- Each UI can have its own dedicated resources and parameters (A next-gen version of the UI can have higher resolution textures and a higher display resolution for instance)
- Menus Master Data Generator is batchable with the game production pipeline. UI made with Menus Master Studio can consequently be smoothly integrated into the game.
• Programmer friendly:
- Menus Master Development Kit uses C++ namespace called ''MmDk'', in order to avoid any naming conflicts with the existing game's components.
- Menus Master avoids fragmentation memory problems; data in the memory is used where it is allocated; no additional memory allocation is needed. UI Data is released with one sole memory release.
- All external resource files keep their in-game format; they don’t have to be modified to be used by Menus Master.
- They are loaded according to the game engine’s protocols, allowing custom loading technologies (dynamic, streaming, etc.).
- Several UI data can be stored together in memory; they can be used at will, possibly at the same time.
- UI Data can be processed at will (compressed, encrypted, etc.).
- Menus Master Data Generator provides resource usage statistics, useful to optimize resources management.
Posted by JayK at 04:20 AM | Comments (0)
Fonix Middleware Adds Voice Recognition for the Wii
Speech technology solutions and interface provider Fonix Speech has announced that it has joined Nintendo's Tools and Middleware Program for the Wii, giving developers access to Fonix’s VoiceIn Game Edition and Fonix VoiceIn Karaoke Edition voice recognition technologies.
Posted by JayK at 04:17 AM | Comments (0)
June 06, 2007
A few good CodeProject articles
Here are a couple of CodeProject articles that are pretty relevant to tools.
Binary Search Tree in C#
Copy/Delete/Browse Files in C#
.NET Random Number Generators and Distributions
Posted by JayK at 01:44 AM | Comments (0)
May 24, 2007
Icarus Studio releases middleware toolset
Looks like Icarus is ready to release its toolset for creating MMOs. It'd be interesting to get people's takes on the service that they're providing here, from tools to all their various services.
Posted by JayK at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2007
CrypticAR
Cryptic Studios has released their custom rigging solution for bipedal characters for 3DSMax. It's a fairly full-featured solution, supports ik/fk switching, squash and stretch, custom skins and a lot of other goodies.
Posted by JayK at 03:07 AM | Comments (0)
EASTL
Paul Pedriana at EA Redwood Shores details out EA's modifications to STL, largely in regards to performance of the allocator and additions to the container.
Posted by JayK at 02:40 AM | Comments (0)
Blade Interactive announces Infinite Worlds
Blade Interactive, creators of HydroEngine unveiled Infinite Worlds, a complete game development suite, including asset management, level editor tools, QA and data managment tools. They claim to do multi-user level editing - I'd love to see this in action.
Posted by JayK at 01:35 AM | Comments (0)
May 04, 2007
FileCarver
From the site:
"FileCarver is a program for editing binary data files that follow an arbitrary format that you specify. FileCarver offers a completely new approach to binary file editing, when compared to the traditional use of a hex-editor. When using a hex-editor, you are forced to calculate the offset and the format of the data that you want to change, which, at times, can be extremely difficult. On the other hand, with FileCarver, you simply specify the format of the file prior to opening it, using an XML definition file, and you are automatically presented with a complete graphical user interface to edit the file."
Could be useful in level editors, depending on how you handle your data.
Posted by JayK at 04:29 AM | Comments (0)
May 02, 2007
Saving App Settings to XML
Jason Titcomb covers the why and how of saving application settings in XML on TheCodeProject. A lot of people seem to be doing this these days, so hopefully this will prove useful to those wanting to do the same.
Posted by JayK at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2007
.NET 3.0 New Features
CodeProject has a slightly older (Dec.2006) article breaking down the addition of Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows CardSpace in .NET 3.0.
Posted by JayK at 08:39 AM | Comments (0)
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
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)
October 18, 2006
Great listserv resource
Here are two great mailing lists that discuss topics relevant to games development, particularly tools.
sweng-gamedev mailing-list:
http://lists.midnightryder.com/listinfo.cgi/sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com
gdalgorithms mailing-list:
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gdalgorithms-list
Posted by RaquelBujans at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)
Live Move
AiLive has developed a new tool, LiveMove, to aid in the development of Wii games. The tool records data while you make gestures with the controller. It displays feedback immeadiately so you can see how easily your gesture is recognized. This should definitely help speed up the development cycle for Wii teams! Check out the AiLive page and have a look at one of the several videos listed on YouTube.
Posted by RaquelBujans at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2006
Advice on Tools Development
Here is an article from Ben Campell entitled "Swiss Army Chainsaw: A Common Sense Approach to Tool Development". He's got some good advice for any tools developer out there, ranging from the technical to the not so technical. Anything you guys would add to his article?
Posted by RaquelBujans at 05:25 PM | Comments (4)