Hi Everyone,

We're very excited to annouce the first release of Blade3D Beta 2.

This build includes over 15 major new features and more than 50 improvements and bug fixes.  These include single click deployment to Xbox 360 and Windows (for XNA Creators Club members), Sott Shadow support, drag and drop Material Palette, character controller and greatly improved performance.   Please check the release notes to see all the awesome changes.

Enjoy!

Blade3D Team

New Features

New Xbox 360 compatible runtime
Direct deployment to Windows/Xbox 360 targets
New Shadow system with PCF/VSSM
New Drag/Drop material palette
New character controller with supp ...

Hello,

I just want to give you a heads up that we are just building the final build of Blade3D Beta 2 and expect it to be released sometime in the next couple of hours.

Yes, you heard it right Beta 2 - which means it has Xbox 360 deployment!

Also in this build is a very easy to Windows Forms compatibility layer that lets you embed Blade3D scenes into any .Net application.

-chris

Hi everyone,

First I'd like to apologize on behalf of the whole team for not being active on the forums for the last few weeks.  As you probably gathered we had a stand at  Gamefest this year and were very busy getting things organized for the show.

Gamefest was a wonderful success for us and everyone we talked to loved what we are doing.

Our booth was in an excellent location right next to the main Microsoft stand.  We showed Blade3D to attendees including the press and many major game studios.  Everyone who we showed the product to was very impressed and excited at how much Blade3D has to offer.

Thanks to all of you who dropped by our booth to say hello and check out Blade3D.
 
More good news...

Since our last public drop there has been an amazing amount of new functiona ...

Hello Everyone,

The Blade3D team is very happy to announce build 2212. 
Here is the list of additions, improvements and bug fixes that you will find in this build.
The most important thing to note is that apart from a few minor work items still to be done, this build contains the necessary changes to allow us to deploy the Blade3D runtime on the Xbox 360.  We will be finalizing the deployment features in upcoming builds.

Enjoy!

Team Blade3D
 

Hi Everyone,

We're happy to announce the "Father's Day" release of Blade3D.  This build includes a brand new lighting system, some nice additions to the IDE and major performance tuning for BSP maps and the material system.

The new lighting system now supports 5 light types. Point light for light in all directions, directional light for light In a particular direction, and spot lights for light in a specific direction with a cone. The final two lights types are projected texture lights. Projected texture light projects a texture onto the scene in a specific direction, while projected cube texture light projects a texture in all directions, using a cube map.

To use the new lights all you have to do is add them to your scene, if a scene item is within range (each light has a range property), it will be lit by the light, when using a Lighting material.

It has come to our attention that some people are having problems running Blade3D.  If you are having these problems please could you try instaling the DirectX End User Runtime here.

Do not be fooled into thinking you already have DX9.0c since Microsoft frequently updates the DirectX runtime making your installed version obsolete.  Also please make sure you install from the link I have provided since there is also another DirectX runtime setup that is floating around on the Microsoft site that does not work correctly on Windows Vista.

We are investigating how best to deal with the problem since adding this 48MB setup to our own setup is somewhat overkill.  I should also point out that other people who are interested in redistributing the XNA framework are having& ...

Good Afternoon,

We have made some fixes in response to problems we found while working on the Wiki content and community feedback.  Most of the changes are fairly minor and are not be breaking changes.

Enjoy!
Blade3D Team