Stage Studio in Next Alpha Release December 9th, 2008 The first alpha pass of Stage Studio is ready for the next alpha release.  Stage Studio allows the user to create actor instances, place and orient them, as well as change instance properties.  When the stage is exported a single convenient package is created that can then be loaded directly into the runtime.  It can be inspected in various ways using the XVP API.  Shader Builder In Next Alpha Release November 5th, 2008 The next alpha release will include the Shader Builder tool.  What is the Shader Builder?  Imagine this.  You have hundreds, perhaps thousands of shader combinations.  At one end of the spectrum, engineers can meticulously maintain each shader permutation by hand, replicating changes across similar shaders.  Turn around time can be slow for designers/artists not to mention the process tends to be very error prone.  Even if engineers can devote all their time to maintaining thousands of permutations, how do you efficiently include only those permutations used by the application?  Simply including all the byte code from all permutations quickly grows out of control.  Imagine a shader with 14 features.  2^14 permutations are possible.  Thats somewhere around 16K versions of the same shader!  The plus side of this method is that every combination of every shader is available to the shader author. At the other end of the spectrum you have a complete visual front end tool (say a node/graph editor similar to Mental Mill) that lets artists build whatever their heart desires.  Typically the shaders output by these types of tools are not very efficient and usually don't take advantage of target platform specifics.  The plus side of this extreme is that the artists don't need to involve an engineer in the iteration loop and prototype time can dramatically decrease. The Shader Builder in XVP takes the best of both extremes and ditches the shader code bloat, provides unlimited shader permutations for the artist with just a few clicks and produces efficient code for the target platform.  Look for it in the next alpha release. Posted Some Test Movies October 13th, 2008 Posted some pre-alpha movies of us playing around with meshes, shaders and postfx in Actor Studio.  Nothing is set in stone at this point but these movies show a little UI interaction.  One shows us loading a mesh, applying simple shaders and viewing it all through a camera that has depth of field applied.  The other movie creates a quick distortion mesh and camera. Better, more serious movies showing various parts of XVP Designer will be coming in the months ahead... Click on the images below. Posted Pre-Alpha Images of Actor Studio June 1st, 2008 Posted new pre-alpha images in the Actor Studio gallery.  They show various components of the UI and workflow.  A lot of the functionality is still under heavy modification at the moment. Testers Needed May 19th, 2008 We're looking for a few testers to help us with pre alpha versions of XVP.  Click here to learn more.  Website Additions May 13th, 2008 With development underway, we thought we'd spend some time updating portions of our website.  There's still a lot missing but bit by bit we're fleshing it out.  We've added contact info, a bit of info about who we are, and more product information.  Soon to come will be our development roadmap for XVP as well as pre-alpha binaries free for the world to download. Initial XVP Feature List and Architecture Overview Posted October 2nd, 2007 A feature list for XVP had been uploaded along with an overview of the engine's architecture.  We'll be fleshing this out in the months ahead.  It's incomplete at the moment and some of the info is out-dated, but it serves as a decent placeholder for now. Development Pics of XVP Designer Posted September 31st, 2007 Posted some screen grabs of XVP Designer.  Designer is in the pre-alpha stages of development and I stress the words "pre-alpha".  A lot of the design has been solidified but there is still massive amounts of feature development going on.  XVP Website Goes Live September 30th, 2007 XVP Website goes live.  Not much content on the site yet, but that'll be changing soon.