Well, its been awhile since we posted a Dev Diary update, so here is another teaser for everyone.
Progress towards Open Beta is moving right along, with us cleaning up various bugs along with finalizing the tools, plugins, and the new website. That's right, we're launching a whole new website along with Open Beta, with much more content and more features to help you utilize TV3D more effectively by finding the information you need quickly.
Included in the new website:
- New gallery, allowing uploads of images and videos!
- New resource downloads, with full file mirroring (to 7 global servers) and automatic torrent mirrors!
- Full knowledge base for article posts, with user submission and gallery integration.
- Forum updates including code syntax highlighting and auto image resizing using DHTML to maintain the page size.
- Upgraded color schemes, to help seperate the site into two sections, marketing information vs community pages.
- Better organization of information!
- Better search function, which searches downloads, forum posts, knowledge base articles, wiki, documentation, and optionally Google.
...and much more!
If you have suggestions for the new website, feel free to email or pm me. We're always looking at ways to increase the users productivity.
Here is a quick rundown of things that have been added/fixed in the latest releases:
- Animation blending
- Velocity-based motion blur
- Custom texture fonts
- New Newton Physics integration fixes
- Ragdoll Support
- Physics joints support, with limits and breakability
- .Net Wrapper fixes
- Realtime Mesh Geometry Editing/Creation
- Multithreading Fixes to eliminate deadlocks and race conditions internally
- Collision System improvements for speed and consistency
- More shader updates, including fixes for older cards
- TVShader updates allowing easier external shader support
- Major fix for normalmap generation that eliminates seams with invalid UV's, making things MUCH easier on your artists
ModelView has also undergone a major upgrade in the past month. You can now place and drag lights around using the mouse, implement various built-in effects, and load/apply shaders and parameters. All of this is then saved off into the TVA (TVM) file when the model is exported, making it much easier for your artists to integrate advanced effects without programming.
As a final teaser, I have included a link to the latest video of ModelView in action, showing off some of the newer features.
http://www.truevision3d.com/arli/mv_shaders.aviEnjoy!
