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

This semester we had the task, to read a lot about a certain topic, wich we could chose during the english class. Our group had chosen “Serious Games”. Those are games for a target audience out of primary or secondary school, to deliver valuable knowledge in a fun way.

I think this area is a big chance for independent developers. Because development costs are lower compared to normal games. The games itself are not so long, usually for one class so 45minutes maximum. In addition they dont have to meet AAA standards. Most of those games are sponsored by companies or the government. Of cause you have to know a lot about learning behaviours and technologies. So if you are interested in this topic, i can recommend you to read my abstract (by the way let me know if you find errors, my english is not so good and i havent handed it in yet. Thanks!).

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Some of you might already know it, Blizzard has announced Starcraft 2 officially in Seol. So that was the secret game they where working on so hard. Not that everyone and their mother guessed it.
This is great news for lots of fans, i can remember how i went in a big shopping center in germany some years ago, to get my copy of the original Starcraft. A big shiny protoss was printed on the front cover. I finished the game as fast as i could for shure, and even got on my sisters nerves, to play some multiplayer games with me. It also came with the first RTS ingame editor i ever used, to make custom maps for a game.

Here in the YouTube Gameplay Video Number 4, you can see the used graphics engine. Starcraft has a big entertaining value in Korea. There are even television stations showing starcraft games(and soon Starcraft II probably). The best players are treatet like stars, you can only compare this to football or basketball here. Blizzard therefore said, that they use old but good looking graphics in the game, to make it run on older hardware and reach a broader audience of cause. They learned this lesson from WoW. That this does not look any old at all can be seen in the video. Read the rest of this entry »

Again i can tell you about an announcement about a new version. This time its the public beta from 3DGS A6 from conitec, with the versionnumer 6.60. There are a lot of improvements that can be read in the release notes. You can download this beta here at the conitec server, you of cause need a valid full version of A6 and not a pirated warez version to download. I didnt have time yet to test it, because tomorrow i have to talk about “Serious Games” in my university. I will tell you about this later, because i think its an interesting topic - especially for indie game developers! Its not about general game development, “Serious Games” are games, meant to educate people out of secondary school. Developing games in this area is not so flooded with traditional game developers, so its a good opportunity for indies in my mind, but ill discuss this later a bit more.

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.

The latest Version of the free 3D modelling tool Blender has been released in version 2.44! The program is the biggest one available for free with the richest feature set. It even comes with .mdl export for 3DGS via plugin. You can grab it here!

The Release Notes consist of many new things in different areas such as:

-Subsurface Scattering (You can render surfaces wich dont reflext but consume light and scatter it such as skin, soap or milk.)
-Physics Engine
-New Phyton Scripts
-New Sculpt and Multires Functionality
-Many new smaller bugfixes and features
-Improvements in character animation

If you want to see what you can do with blender besides making 3d models for games, have a look at this short but sweet animation film.

I just discovered a very useful interview over at destructoid. You can read how Moonpod answers questions about independend game development. Moonpod is a team consisting of only 2 people from the uk. Their famous titles Starscape und Mister Robot are award winning not only in the indie gaming scene.

They discuss the future of the game industry, marketing pain and development times. The interview is rather long but you can learn a lot, if you are interested what the life of an indie is all about.

Have fun with it!