Well, thought I'd put a post here to tell everyone that Faibanx 3D has been on my mind recently again. Why? Because it seems that, magically, all of the tools necessary to create it are becoming free. Now albeit, they're free for Microsoft's own devious reasons, but does it matter?
A while back, Microsoft threw some money at The Game Creators, makers of my current flavorite 3-D "engine," DarkBASIC Professional. Now, the BASIC version of DarkBASIC Professional still costs money I believe, but they also sold a better optimized DLL library called DarkSDK, which used very similar syntax but was for C++ compilers. In order to drum up interest in their own compilers, Microsoft offers "express" editions of all their Visual Studio stuff, and so they thought it would be nice to drum up game programming interest by not only offering a C++ compiler for free, but also a games library as well. Therefore, everything needed to make a 3D game using the DarkSDK is now legitimately free.
When I heard that, I figured, "Cool...I should get off my ass and start amassing the library of models, sounds, graphics for the game and get a "Faibanx 3D Development DVD" kind of thing going that I could send to people or they could download that would have everything anyone would need to help work on the project. I was going to lean towards using Blender for the 3D work, and it's still an option, but I saw in a 3D World magazine that Microsoft did it again!
One of my favorite 3D development programs, trueSpace, got bought out by Microsoft and is now totally free. All they still sell is a raytrace rendering engine, and who cares about that?
Yep, if you go to caligari.com, you'll see that you can get the latest and greatest version of trueSpace absolutely free, along with TONS of training videos. I always liked the no-nonsense interface of trueSpace, so I recommend everyone check it out. I'm still in the process of downloading all the training videos. Again, Microsoft bought them out to pimp their Virtual Earth software and to give people free tools to develop it, but their marketing scheme is our gain, as far as I'm concerned.Anyway, since I'm starting to hate my job again and not really spend any effort at it, I think I'll be working on Faibanx 3D again in the near future. And, thanks to all these free development tools, everyone can help out with no monetary investment at all.
Keep us posted on format-information and stuff.
I think I'd need to get laid off for that to happen at this point. And it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing...my company sucks now.