I thought we'd just drop you a quick note to let you know what we're up to here at Digini.
Product News
Since releasing Beta2 following Gamefest, the team has been hard at work adding new features and improving the product for a version 1.0 release. Some of the new features include:
1. A new curve based timeline editor that allows you to animate any property on any object over time. This makes it very easy to create cameratransitions and walkthroughs as well as cool effects like time based material changes or animation triggers.
2. Support for pluggable physics engines. This allows you to use whichever physics engine makes sense for your project. This way you can choose to use a native physics library like PhysX or a managed library such as BulletX or JigLibX.
3. The ability to dynamically add behaviors to existing objects using the new component system. For example, constraints, physics, controllers or other special effects can now be added to any object in the scene. Not only this, but we've made it very simple to write your own components that can be shared with others.
4. Pre-canned particle effects such as explosion, fire, smoke and missile come as standard. There's no need to set up a particle system graph in many cases.
5. Brand new GUI system with many pre-canned controls and the ability to place GUI elements in the 3D scene.
6. More flexible component based animation system. This makes it much easier to control animation mixing and priority at the character level.
7. The ability to apply screen space effects to individual objects in the scene. For example you can have radial blur applied to one object in the scene and a different effect applied to another object.
8. New spherical and circular controllers that can be applied to any object.
9. Support for orthographic left, right, front, back, top, bottom scene editing modes.
10. Fast rendering of grass and foliage on terrains based on ecology map.
In addition to new features we've made hundreds of improvements related to performance, bug fixes and usability. We've also completely redesigned the SDK to make it even easier to add your own components to the system.
BLADE3D at GDC 2008
We're very happy to let you know that we will be exhibiting at GDC 2008 in San Francisco.
Our booth (#5131) will be located in the North Hall next to the IGF Pavilion. Please feel free to stop by and meet the team if you are attending GDC.
