Eovia Announces Carrara 5, Software for 3D Modeling, Animation, and Rendering
Create full forests, light objects like skin with subsurface scattering, deform objects with displacement texture maps, get the Fresnel effect for water reflections and more with Carrara 5, the just-announced upgrade from Eovia. Other additions include anisotropic lighting to make objects like CDs scatter light appropriately, volumetric clouds, a surface replicator to speed those forest creations, and a redesigned interface that behaves a little more straightforwardly and customizably than previous versions of Carrara. Buyers of Carrara 4 will get a free upgrade to 5 when it is released, and buyers will get immediate access to the Carrara 5 beta version.
- tilebased collision detection and response
- hills & slopes
- big maps and scrolling
- object management [beta 0.5]
- destroyable pixel landscapes
Cheetah3D 2.5 Released With Improved Javascript Integration
Cheetah3D 2.5 has been released offering improved Javascript integration. The scripts are now seamlessly embedded into the user interface. It’s now possible to write parametric spline or polygon objects with Javascript, as well as custom tools. The developer mentions though that the Javascript API is still under development. Changes since the last update:
- Seamless integration of Javascripts into the UI
- Javascripts can create parametric polygon objects with UI
- Javascripts can create parametric spline objects with UI
- Javascripts can create tools with UI
- Faster OpenGL redraw in edge mode
- added animation export to .fbx loader
- renderings with transparent background will be antialiased correctly
- fixed UV inversion bug in .obj loader
- fixed bug in file loader parameter handling
- many updated scripts
- some Javascript API documentation
- other small changes and bug fixes
Game Programming Wiki PixelateWiki
Pixelate Wiki, a collection of useful articles, made by game programmers for game programmers, and written collaboratively.
Large assortment of tutorials and interactive examples for programming tile based games. Although the example code is for Flash, the concepts are universal.
PhysicsFS is a multi-platform library that provides abstract access to various archives.
It is intended for use in video games, and the design was somewhat inspired by Quake 3’s file subsystem. The library allows easy access to the contents of ZIP files, among other packed formats, treating them as a virtual file system allowing you to address folders and individual files inside.
PhysicsFS is licensed under the zlib license.
Normal Map Generator for Mac OS X
A new free program called NMG by Marabese Nilo will let you generate tangent space normal maps which can then be used for normal mapping, a technique used in games such as Doom 3 and Unreal 3 to give objects more detail without more polygons. The program requires a video card that supports the GL_ARB_fragment_program extension, which on the Macintosh is a Radeon 9550 or better, or an nVidia 5200 or better. Previously, only high end game engines such as Unity could generate normal maps on Mac OS X, as tools such as nVidia’s Adobe Photoshop plugin were available for Windows only. This program is a welcome addition to any Mac OS X OpenGL developer’s arsenal!
iDevGames and Freeverse Software Announce the Start of the OMG Cup Contest
ZENTSUJI CITY, JAPAN—OCTOBER 18th, 2005—iDevGames, the Macintosh game developer website, announced today the first “OMG Cup,” sponsored by Freeverse Software. Open to any and all game developers, the contest seeks to identify the best original Mac games (OMG). The OMG Cup is designed to help developers successfully release their games and to help the Mac game market evolve with innovative new game concepts. All qualifying entrants will receive a free game from Freeverse Software, and the top three finalists will be awarded cash prizes. The first place winner will also receive an option to turn their winning entry into a finished product—either as a shareware or retail product.
TNT BASIC 1.3 Released as Freeware
TNT Basic uses a simple programming language to allow a novice programmer to make 2D sprite based games very easily. All editing is done through an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which supports pretty printing of code, integrated command help, a tile based map editor, sprite image editor, sound importer and music importer (most tracker formats are supported as well as MP3). TNT Basic has the following features:
- 16 bit graphics (Over 32,000 colours on screen!)
- Lightning fast sprite engine (supports anti-aliasing and translucency!)
- Hardware accelarated graphics (uses OpenGL)
- Stereo panning sound support
- Advanced music engine (supports MP3 and many tracker music formats including MOD, MAD, MIDI, SoundTracker and OctaMed)
- TCP/IP and AppleTalk game networking – play your friends over the internet!
- Build standalone games which don’t need TNT Basic to run
- Load and save hi-scores and saved games
- Automatic joystick, mouse, keyboard and speech input support
- Integrated development environment, manage everything from code to music from one application!
- Syntax colouring, your code is coloured automatically to make it easier to read
- Integrated help, just highlight a command in your code and hit cmd-? to find out more about it
- Mac OS X compatible
LAB3D/SDL is a port of Ken’s Labyrinth ( a predecessor to his Build engine which was used in Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Redneck Rampage and others) to modern operating systems, using OpenGL for graphics output and the SDL library to provide user input, sound output, threading, and some graphics support functions. Music output is through Adlib emulation or MIDI (MIDI only on Windows, Linux and other operating systems with OSS-compatible sound APIs).
Tactical War Game Crimson Fields
Crimson Fields is a tactical war game in the tradition of Battle Isle.
The outcome of the war lies in your hands. You decide which units are sent to the front lines, and when to unleash the reserves. Your mission objectives range from defending strategically vital locations to simply destroying all enemy forces in the area. Protect supply convoys or raid enemy facilities to uncover technological secrets or fill your storage bays so you can repair damaged units or build new ones in your own factories. Lead your troops to victory!
Tools are available to create custom maps and campaigns. You can also play the original Battle Isle maps if you have a copy of the game. You can pit yourself against another human player either in hot-seat mode in front of the same machine or via e-mail, or against the computer. Crimson Fields is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Loonyland Released by Red Marble Games
A forum member who is most definitely not Aarku has helped complete Loonyland, a new adventure game just released by Red Marble Games for Mac OS X. In Loonyland, players will find a series of big-headed, goggle-eyed goofy monsters, including werewolves, skeletons, trees that breathe out putrid gas, fire toads, drunken zombies, and more. Players control Loony on a quest to save Halloween Hill.
Golden T Game Engine (GTGE) is an advanced cross-platform game programming library written in Java language. GTGE library provides a complete routines for making 2D game from low level routines such as hardware accelerated 2D graphics, mouse and keyboard input, audio support, game timing, to game specific routines such as sprite, background, collision detection.
Interactive Fiction Alan Adventure Language
Create your own text adventures, like the old Infocom classics: Zork, Enchanter or Planetfall.
Alan is one of the most easy to use tools specialized for creating works of Interactive Fiction, a.k.a text adventures. It’s focus has always been on the authoring aspects.
Ren'Py - Visual Novel Interpreter
Ren’Py is a programming language and runtime, intended to ease the creation of visual-novel type games. It contains features that make it easy to display thoughts, dialogue, and menus; to display images to the user; to write game logic; and to support the saving and loading of games. It’s hoped that, through the use of executable scripts, Ren’Py will reduce the effort required to make a visual novel game.
This seems to be like SCUMM , so I’d expect you can use this to make your own Sam & Max or Leisure Suit Larry type games.
Its built on top of pygame, so your projects should be portable.
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