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One long time user wrote to me privately and said that he feels like a passenger on a bus from Boston to New York which just stopped in Connecticut, with the driver suddenly announcing that the new destination will be Philadelphia. I think he expressed the sentiments of many of you. I wrote back to him saying that while at this stop we are indeed changing the bus for a new shiny one, the destination is still New York, the passengers are the same, and I am still firmly in the driver's seat. It might have been a difficult transition to change buses, but it is now done and behind us, and while this new bus may not have cushioned seats on it yet , it has some great stuff under the hood! In the end, the true value of a new platform can only be proven by the benefits and features it delivers to its users. While some found that the new “revolutionary” features in trueSpace7 were not what they “really” wanted, I am here to tell you that I am convinced that everyone will love trueSpace7.5. How do I know? The reason is simple; unlike trueSpace7.0, most of trueSpace7.5 features were requested, specified and in fact co-designed by Beta testers - who are users like you - in collaboration with our developers. The developers now have to prove that their new platform will make it possible to implement this feature set in a fast and reliable way. So here is a first look at what 7.5 will bring:
1. Simplified UI Some say that the trueSpace7 interface is needlessly complicated. The reason for this is that when we created the new architecture, we decided that not only did we have to provide backward compatibility for truespace6 users, but we also had to create a live bi-directional bridge so users could move back and forth between old and new parts of trueSpace in real time. While the bridge is not perfect, it works well, and I am still convinced we made the right decision at the time and that many users benefit from this ability today. However, as many more old tools get converted to the new architecture for 7.5 (there were over 400 in trueSpace6!) the need for the bridge and the "two types" of interface will be less, and we can eliminate many of the old legacy tools. Furthermore, with 7.5 we will complete those elements of the new UI which were not quite finished for TS7 such as configurable toolbars and libraries. This is the #1 priority for us; we take ease of use seriously and you will find 7.5 UI will be easier to use and more polished in looks. 2. Character Animation Historically, the animation tools in trueSpace were never on par with its great UI, power modeling, surfacing and rendering. All of that will change with 7.5. We are designing a brand new, state of the art character animation subsystem, which will take advantage of the new architecture as well as the latest advances in animation research. First, our new IK will be style based, using empirical databases of motion styles to make manipulation of characters much more natural, while at the same time giving full access to every single key-frame-able parameter a demanding animator will undoubtedly need and consider as his birthright. Second, you will be able to freely and seamlessly blend traditional keyframed clips with new procedural and physics based clips. Physics can help greatly in creating certain types of realistic animations such as jumps, falls or crashes and 7.5 skeletons will be very much physics based. 3. Modeling tools We are working feverishly to convert existing tried and true tools from the Model to the Player side and introduce some cool new ones. Expect a complete polygon modeling suite of tools in the Player, all of which will work with our next generation SDS editing as well. Additionally, you will get a new Material Editor, UV Editor, Draw panel with curves etc in the Player. Among the new tools will be a redesigned PolyDraw, which can draw on SDS surfaces as well, advanced snapping and constraints (think Sketchup), shrink wrap, and unwrap. True displacement tools will allow you to literally paint new geometry on the existing surface using image brushes. 4. Rendering Yes, you will get Hair and Fur shaders :) V-Ray will be moved to the Player side so that the bridge will no longer get in the way there. Other new V-Ray features will include good animation support, such as high quality motion blur, incremental updates for irradiance/photon maps, GI light maps, multi-pass rendering, depth of field, post processing, chromatic refraction, anisotropic reflections, true displacement mapping and more. There will be improvements in Lightworks too. 5. Collaboration Collaboration is not just a fad as some currently proclaim and I am convinced that one day everyone will use it, just like 3D acceleration or 3D widgets today (both of which first appeared in trueSpace, ahead of the so-called “big boys”), and we have no intention of relinquishing the credit for bringing it to market ahead of everyone else. There are great improvements in store for 7.5, with one of the most prominent being private user shared spaces. Think of it as MySpace.Com in 3D.
I hope you find this interesting reading! I will be continuing this Captain's Blog on our forums, with updates every few weeks. You can find that thread here, so be sure to bookmark it and check back for the latest behind-the-scenes information!
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