Testing Crystal Space

I have been quite busy lately testing other technologies than Ogre engine. Specially, I have spent some days (and plan to spend  much more) playing with Crystal Space. Often acused of being complicated and lack of documentation, CS seems to be the lesser brother in the game engine family. Another scary detail is the total absence of widely known or commercial titles in its project list. Besides Planeshift (a totally free to play 3D, fantasy based MMORPG), no other Crystal Space based project enjoys the attention of media.
I haven't gone too far with CS, just some sample program copied from docs and some work with the Blender exporter, but after playing with the last one, I discovered the great potential of this engine and CEL. Using the exporter you can quickly test your scene and see how it will look in your game, and even edit some entity features, quests, etc.
I really recommend that you take some time to check this engine if you plan to get involved in 3D games, unless you have some serious cash to pay for a commercial product.

German OpenGL tutorials

Good news for german people: the series of OpenGL tutorials for Windows have been updated to version 3.3!
Original source: Opengl.org.

Panda3D 1.7?

According to Linux Game Tome, version 1.7 of Panda3D was released. Even when the official site confirms that 1.7 is the current version, I dont see any announce. Anyway, enjoy!

Free 3D assets and tutorials

3D-Source is a new site hosting 3D assets and tutorials, all of them free. The author just asks you to registers, and donate some money if you want to support his effort to provide quality assets for free. The models are available in several formats and they also include normal and specular maps. Also, the poly count isnt that high, despite the good look of the models.
the only complaint I have so far is that I havent been able to import them in Blender, even when tried with dae and obj versions.

OpenGL samples pack updated

Copy and paste from opengl.org:

The OpenGL Samples Pack have been updated providing new OpenGL 4.0 samples and more OpenGL 3.3 samples for a total of 57 as simple as possible samples. The project builds with Visual Studio 2008 and 2010.

SCons 2.0

SCons - a software construction tool, has released version 2.0. SCons is an easier alternative to autotools build system and it is the one I use under Linux. You can download it here.

OpenGameArt.org interface is great!

I havent checked OpenGameArt.org site in a long time, and today I was quite pleased to see the new interface (new for me). They really have improved the browsing with filters to match specific licenses and game genres. Also, it looks much better now!But not only the interface has changed, I have to admit that I found a lot of quite useful stuff, at least in the 2d art section: buttons, bars, icons...
By the way, if you find the site useful, they need donations.

Migration to Ogre 1.7 completed

After a week of work, we have completed migrating the project to Ogre 1.7 and CEGUI 0.7.  Most problems with Ogre were because of not being yet in Gentoo portage, not to API changes. But CEGUI does have a lot of API and build changes, which caused a lot of headaches to me and the rest of the team.
I would say that Im satisfied, but considering the lot of troubles just to get a better terrain system I think that I should have waited a couple of months more.