3DVia (Dessault Systemes) have recently made a couple of new services available for free (currently) including 3DVia Scene - a 3D chat, community, collaboration, browser based viewer (may be a bit buggy. It froze IE7 a few times when tried. Not tested with Mozilla based as of yet). And 3DVia Studio - a game and interactive development suite; Studio looks and works a little bit like Unity3D, having similar project capabilities. Both allow collaborative project development to varying degrees with Studio being geared more towards that rather than individual stand-alone applications although 'games' can be made with it. At present the applications are in public 'beta' but there does appear to be plans to make both available for licence (else you have to upload content to the 3D communities depository via a profile you need to create). Various documentation is available for Studio, including tutorials, reference and demos.

So, not even the metaverse is safe from recession as it's announced that There.com, one of the early prospectors in the virtual world space, is to shut down it's servers effective 9^th March. So if you have an account there and want to archive your material in the form of screenshots, you'd better get on it right away because once the system goes down you'll not get access to it. Although this is the end of There.com you can bet management will be popping up in other ventures in future.



This does make you wonder about the value of your purchases as a consumer, in buying in to the virtual space what is it exactly that you get? Is it just experiential? Are consumers investing simply for the the 'fun' they have rather than any physical or quantifiable product? Interesting questions, I expect your answers on my desk by the end of the week!

Collision hull meshes are one of those topics that can get modellers seriously confuzzled to the extent that it often gets overlooked or ignored as a subject. If you're one of those and need help understanding how you should be setting up and using collision hulls during the process of making 3D game objects in Blender then this tutorial is for you. It'll explain the general principles behind collisions and the different ways it can be set up as you work; it's relatively easy once you understand what's going on. Read "Game models, physics, collision hulls & meshes" and learn another core skill needed for game modding and development.

Activision has made a tentative announcement that it's putting together a competition open to independent game developers that chance to win a prize of $100k for a game concept (PDF download). The news, being carried by Develop magazine, mentions some tentative criteria "The publishing powerhouse said it will soon be asking interested developers to submit a two-page summary of their proposed game, complete with a bullet-point list of defining features, as well as a video of the game’s prototype". This doesn't appear to be targeted so much at the modding community but at 'proper' independent game developers already working on ideas that are seeking funds to finish and publish (although it's not known yet whether a publishing deal is part of the prize. This is obviously good news (although one could make a case for 'cheap' concepts), there's a need for this kind of support within the modding and indie scene as this is where the industries future talent is pooled from.

Not played the game for a while so only just found out that NCSoft pulled the plug on their fun little MMO/RPG Dungeon Runners in January so it's no longer available. As the game starts via NCSofts GUI it looks like it's being 'disabled' so you can't launch it into any sort of offline mode either - which would have been fun to have. RIP Dungeon Runners.