bad news and good news

Well, where should I begin?

Lets start with the bad news. I have canceled the current developement of minib3d extended. So the extended Version will
not continue.

Now the good news:
I have found a very good coder to my side and we are currently working on a completely new Version of minib3d. You may ask why? Well the integration of new features is more like hacking things into minib3d and I simply have lost my orientation so we have decided to develope a completely new minib3d based on simons work.

What will you have from this new Version?
1. It is interface based. That means OpenGL and DX9 drivers.
Also it is easily to integrate OGL3.0 or DX10 later.
2. It is much easier to keep track of the various state switches which makes it easier to develope new extensions.
3. Hopefully we will find the one or other bug and are abel to solve it so both our and simons version will be more stable.

What we currently have:
The Interface is almost ready, the OpenGL part is ready to 99% and we're currently fixing bugs. The new Version is 100% compatible to previous Versions so no need to change any code.

In general the good news is: We're announcing 'miniB3D extended 2'

thx for reading (any comment or suggestion is welcome ;))
klepto2 and Rone

Sounds cool!
Will the new version still be supporting low end hardware or will it be "next-gen" GFX cards only?

thanks man,

Sounds awesome!

To prevent that the miniB3Dext2 will slack behind miniB3D 's development in future, you could perhaps use a patching system, so that all changes from miniB3D to miniB3Dext2 could be patched by anyone when a new miniB3D comes out.

I would be willing to help write such patching system, once you get the first miniB3Dext2 out.

If you ask me, you could just forget about the DX9/10/11 part, OpenGL replaces DX completely and is even much better. Even XBOX360 and PS3 can run OpenGL, since they can run both Ubuntu (although Microsoft doesn't like it, yet. Sony supports it fully, at least their official forum is full of linux installation questions, and they haven't made a new firmware which blocks it, as Microsoft has done).

Patching if the engine is totally different?

Could be a bit hard I would say ...

And OGL does not replace DX, at least as long as Intel holds the major market share.
And OGL will always lack behind at least 1 generation ... till OGL 3 comes out, which has DX10 feature level, DX11 will already be out (2009).

The only way to get OGL on DX level is using CG ... CG 2.0 offers DX10 features for GF8 series cards.

@ Peter Scheutz

i have had the pleasure to trie a compiled demo (exe) on my machine (see sig.) and it was gooooooooooooooooooooooooood. :)

http://www.blitzforum.de/upload/file.php?id=2582
http://www.blitzforum.de/upload/file.php?id=2583
http://www.blitzforum.de/upload/file.php?id=2585 ~350fps (+phys)

Wow, nice work!

I'm shivering with antici.... .... .. pation ;)

@Abrexxes: Cool.

I'm not worried about performance, only if it'll run or not.

My targets include office machines with builtin GFX cards, capable of OpenGL 1.1/1.2 but without shaders.

Great news!

A feature request: hardware skinning.
because cpu based animation is so slow.

Pete

Hardware skinning is on the todo list, but at first we need a stable version before we start to integrate optimisations.
Btw: have you tried the latest version? Bone animation speed has inreased a lot.

Sounds cool klepto :) good luck!

klepto2: i desided to get the blitz3d version of my driving game out the door first, because its almost finished. then I will move it over to max. so im in no hurry.

The reason i would like hardware skinning is that with my long term project which is like a update of Syndicate, I find with the number of animated meshes it slows down to much with cpu driven animation. But i agree with getting a stable version up before working on such things, good luck with it

when do you expect stable version to be ready? rough estimation is fine.

cheers
Roman

sound cool!!

This is really great news. Would I be right in assuming that this version will have the new material / shader system you mentioned before in my thread about shaders?

...Is there any remote chance of adding blitz3D's quake 3 BSP support? ;-)
Keep up the good work!

nice!! good luck and thanks for the effort!

Question: is "miniB3Dext2" cross platform ready or is it a "Windows only" thing?

It´s cross platform. because you can use opengl or dx9.

any news? :)

Hi,

a first beta will yust takes a while.
The OpenGl part works fine, but the d3d9 part yust makes some trouble...
Actually we are integrating the extensions and some cool new features into the new version.

Is it a matter of days/weeks/ or months? We can do some beta test for you.

cheers
Roman

My guess is that it will be out before Max3D :)

Lol :)