Legacy LD5

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.

Hooray! Dino's getting unlazy on us! It must be a sign of a syzygy!

I'm psyched as usual, Dino! Keep us posted on format-information and stuff.

I tried using 3Ds Max on a friend's computer the other day, because I'm going to need it soon for class. God, I hate it. The modeling workflow is really great, but the UI is so "huh? what's a keyboard?"-like that it drives me nuts. Not to mention the way the trackball works when changing angle in the viewport! I don't want to use the stupid little cube in the corner! It takes too long! AHHRG.
I'm finishing up a model right now (in Blender) for my personal portfolio and was just amazed at how much easier it was when I got home and switched back to Blender.

Anyway, said model might have a role to play in Faibanx3D, which is cool. And yay for hating your job! (Sortof :/)

In other news the GIMP is still better than Photoshop.

*swats Yaki* Shush, thees ees goood.

It's like Faibanx, but 3D.

So you could say its Faibanx 3d or something. :3 Just to be clear.

Will it be like Runescape 3D or Second life 3D?

Of course, now that I've turned Mac, I need to make sure I pick a game engine/development environment I can develop for both Mac and PC. But yeah, if work ever stops demanding my attention and people learn to suffer and wait, I can start up on it again. I'm trying to get back into being creative by starting with music (since it's easy), and then once the ball gets rolling, diversify into 3D and programming again.

Wow...I can't believe I made the title of this post "development will resume". 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.

Ah you will get there Dino ^^...