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

Just a short news today. The feature Table from A7 is now available. You can find it here:

http://www.3dgamestudio.com/order7.htm

What you can clearly see are the changes in the physics engine, now you can have unlimited rigid objects in the commercial version already instead of just one.
All in all the com version got pumped up quite a bit, i think thats good and will bring some new users to the community in the near future.

Personally iam extremely busy right now due to university exams in 3 weeks. I have to learn, learn and learn and it sucks. Thats the reason for the missing updates from the last couple of days. I hope you still stay with me. Greetings and have a nice Restweekend. (I wonder if this is a valid word in english?)

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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Not only we sweat these days, Utz the little sheep from the marble madness clone does too! In a tropical level of cause…. Do you find the turtle in the picture?

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.