3D Gamestudio Gamedevelopment 3DGS A6 A7 - free engine tutorials models shaders textures codes

Hey its christmas time… *jingle bells, jingle bells hummm* and a lot of users in the 3dgs forum are giving away free sourcecode, textures, sounds, and even models! So i just compiled a quick list of some things i find useful. Maybe you need one of those things. Thanks to the generous people giving this stuff away!

Position Cursor for A6 - by adoado
Free Pathfinding Script A*Star algorithm - by EpsiloN
Font Installing Dll(install & deinstall fonts) - by PadMalcom
Free Quality Lava Texture Pack - by Dan ‘the man’ Silverman
7 Tileable Textures that blend - by molotov
Render To Texture for all A6 Editions - by ChrisB
Free Barrels and Crates Texture Pack - by DEXSOFT

If i forgot your quality submission, just let me know in the comments so i can add them here.

Ventilator has developed a new tool, with its help its now possible to use a second uv set for your 3dgs .mdl models. The background was to use realistic shadows on terrain. Imagine you made a nice level scene in blender and want to calculate the shadow there. Instead of backing it onto the model, wich is hard and ugly work, you just use 2 models now in conjunction with the plugin! One model holds the normal texture data and the other the shadow data.

The plugin combines both and the result could look something like that. Without nasty workarounds of cause:

It is really extremely useful, especially for terrain shadows wich were hard to produce in A6 till now…

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George, doesnt seem to rest during the weekend like the rest of us. No! He just released the latest AUM! This time you will for shure find useful things and code for gamedevelopment with 3DGS. For example a workshop about particles and how to set up a particle generator or spawn particles out of models. Then he updated his AI Pathfinding code and made it faster/better. Now tha paths not only look better but the algorithm behind them calculates much faster. In addition you can now place 300 nodes instead of only 100.

You also find an interview with the coder Andreas Hermanspann from Antaris a 3D Shooter he works on with A6 on his own. The usual frequently asked questions from the forums get answered too, so you can grab some hints from a pro. Have fun with it in your garden on a sunny sundayafternoon.

Hey there, i just decided to compile a linklist for gamedev that helps the beginner, intermediate or even pro users to find helpful ressources for independent game development. I will always try to keep this list up to date and eliminate old/outdated links. Please dont worry, that i can not include all links, i want to keep it as clean and helpful as possible without too much confusing content.
It is not meant for the 3DGS A6/A7 user exclusively, but for everyone who wants to dive into game development and gather knowledge/tools. I also list freeware/cheap tools first, because those are meant for the indies. Note that all tools, links are tested and recommended by me and not just copied from somewhere. They are meant as a basic toolset or starting point, so you cant go wrong if you learn to use and master the things listed here!

You can find this link always under the “Freebies” Section and the sidebar, be shure to bookmark it and let me know if i missed/missspelled something, as this list will constantly grow. Thanks!

Remember: Not the tools make a great game, but the one(s) behind them!

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Heelx wrote a nice free wrapper DLL for the FMOD audio engine. You can get it here! You may ask yourself, “Why do i need this plugin?”. The answer is quite simple. It does enhance sound playback, not only is it faster than standard hardware sound acceleration but also it has great features such as internet streaming, audio cd playback, spectral analysis and so on.

The only thing you need to know is that this wrapper allows you to use FMOD wich is free for freeware products, costs 100$ for shareware authors and 6000$ if you plan on using it in a commercial project. Word of Warcraft for example uses it. So grab this for your next freeware project or big commercial MMORPG!
Here is a quote from Heelx about his plugin:

FMOD is a cross-platform audio engine, which makes it easy for you to use current audio technologies in your software. No other audio engine offers such a rich and up-to-date platform support. FMOD isn’t only available for the Windows 32 bit system, but also for 11 other systems, among them e.g. Windows 64bit (AMD64), Linux, Macintosh and all game consoles available on the market. FMOD is being and was used by over one hundred commercial games, for example in “World of Warcraft” or “Flat Out”. With the Lite-C FMOD wrapper plugin DLL for A7 / Lite-C, all of those features will be enabled for you – no matter which edition of the A7 engine you own or if you „just“ use the free Lite-C distribution.

Damocles wrote a fast treescript for A6. Its using bones animation, therefore it can be used from the com version above.

It generates a variation of a tree and then places some leave sprites wich always face the camera.

The effect is a nice alternative to static trees only consisting of models, it also runs very fast.

If you know speedtree already, you can guess how the whole thing looks in action or you take a quick look at this screenshot.

You can download the free script with a compiled example here.

http://www.wasteland.at/tree_generator.zip

Damocles said its not complete yet but he does not want to put more work into this. So if you need some C-Script practice go ahead! Things like LOD, different sprites or wind effects would make the script even better - have fun with it!