A couple of interesting events.
Jul 30th, 2007 by susheel
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FX composer RC1
NVIDIA released the release candidate of the FX composer not too long ago. I downloaded and gave it a “breezy” try, but I don’t see GLSL support! Maybe I missed it. Why is there no GLSL support? Nothing is mentioned on the site as well. This is what the site says about API Support, “HLSL, COLLADA FX Cg, CgFX shading languages”.
I don’t have a latest card to test all profiles, but the product seems good, though it crashed on me once on an older gen card! Some dll problem. Ran ok with 6200 and 6600 cards. I am eagerly awaiting the gold release. Comes at an opportune time too since I will be finishing up with the current project and moving on to the next. Maybe I can seriously think of including this in the pipeline for the next version of the O2 Engine.
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Silverlight
Apparently Microsoft’s answer to Adoble system’s Flash player. Or so they say. A significant development if you are a Flash game developer. I don’t see myself developing Flash games in the near future, but you never can tell.
Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.
Hmm, cross-platform, cross-browser! So are we going to see Microsoft officially support Linux and other *NIX platforms, and browsers like FireFox? Usually in Microsoft’s dictionary cross-platform means platforms including Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows 2000, NT, Vista and cross-browser means Internet Explorer 5, 6 and 7 .
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Intel® Threading Building Blocks 2.0 (TBB)
Intel released a library designed to get the most out of multi-core processors under a modified GPLv2. This could be an interesting development. Parallel processing and parallelism is another contentious issue. Especially when it comes to implementing it. Many people have said that true parallelism is only possible while programming with a Functional approach. While that remains debatable, it is aptly clear that the next gen games will have to leverage most out of multi-core processors.
I am just a little bit worried about the licensing policy. They have released it under GPLv2 with a “runtime exception“. I am no legal eagle, but it sounds like Intel intends to make make some money with the library after all. I am also not sure how things will work out with AMD processors. In any case, it is one of the “must look into” things.
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Nintendo “for” the garage developers
Surprise surprise! Nintendo announced the availability of its platforms for small and independent developers. It’s some kind of service named WiiWare which will allow developers to sell their games and players to download them off this service. WiiWare titles are supposed to be launched next year.
It looks like FX Composer 2 is released :D. You should bug people over at the new nvidia developer forum : http://developer.nvidia.com/forums/index.php?
Maybe in this thread: http://developer.nvidia.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=15
Wow it got released yesterday. Great! I currently don’t have too much time to look into it. Maybe you (Sandeep) can take it for a spin and post your comments.
Frankly I haven’t looked too deeply into the FX Composer. Besides, I am not using the tool right now. However, from what I can see, NVIDIA is pushing for Cg and CgFX and seems to have no interest in GLSL.
I have a lot of stuff to do right now so won’t be checking out FXComposer 2. I probably was using it the wrong way but fx composer never worked properly for me. Didn’t load a new material when I request it to.
Besides, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 has destroyed my VS 2005 installation. VS just crashes right now :(. Not at all in a mood to try some new software.
Have you try out RenderMonkey. http://ati.amd.com/developer/sdk/radeonSDK/html/Tools/RenderMonkey.html
It support GLSL. It is better than FX Composer. I am using it.
@JStefania
No I haven’t given RenderMonkey a try. Maybe I will. I have also heard good things about HLSL2GLSL. Thanks for your info, must look into RenderMonkey as well.
@Sandeep K
Oh god, that can be a nightmare. I remember I had a similar problem with SP1 (or was it SP2) on Win2k server a long time back. The service pack made the entire server unstable. A couple of things to try if you haven’t already tried that is,
1. Uninstall the service pack. (I am sure you tried it)
2. Reinstall it and uninstall. ;)) Works sometimes! Hey it’s MS!
3. Service packs generally set restore-points in the system. Try to set your system back to the restore point.
4. Last option, MS Support or just call them.
Hope that helps.