The frustum is an area of 3d space defined by the camera lens setting and clipping ranges, basically it is the visible area.
Culling is any method used to remove faces from the rendering process with a view to increse speed.
This system checks the bounding box area of each object in the scene against the frustum area and only passes objects with overlaping volumes to be rendered.
Frustum culling is automatic meaning that the user does not need to do anything to enable it, they may be totally unaware of its existance and still benefit.
This gives us more freedom for the polygon counts of our game objects and the ability to use considerably more armature deformed meshs at the same time as those that are not visible are not calculated.
Transparent face orders can now be sorted to avoid distant faces being rendered in front of close faces.
Object sorting is based on the location of the object center and is automatic requiring no setup from the user.
The individual faces constituting an object can also be sorted, the order of the transparent faces is determined by the distance from the camera of the farthest vertex making the face
Polygon sorting is expensive and needs to be enabled by the user, this is done by setting Ztransp on the material button's mirror transp panel.
Ortho (Orthographic) is set on the Editing button's camera panel and gives a non-perspective type camera, useful for isometric maps, flat look platform games and other applications that do not need perspective.
Specular (lamp reflection) highlights are now applied after the textures are drawn on the object, this means they appear brighter and are not interrupted by the contrast of the texture being used.
These modes are set on the lamp button's lamp panel
Quad lamps allow the user to modify the energy falloff profile of the given lamp, the profile is controled with the Dist, Quad1 (QLin) and Quad2 (QQuad) settings in the lamp button's lamp panel using the following equation.
Energy = Dist/(Dist + (QLin * a) + (QQuad * a^2))
Where 'a' is the distance from the lamp to the surface being evaluated.
For a lamp with no energy falloff due to distance set Quad1 = 0.0, Quad2 = 0.0
For the fastest falloff set Quad1 = 1.0, Quad2 = 1.0
Negative lamps subtract energy in there range giving dark areas. Negative works in combination with other lamp mode settings.
Only specular highlights are shown meaning that the object looks shiny, but the textures are not visible.
Combined with other lamps No Diffuse lamps will add more specular reflections but will not effect the existing diffused shading.
Only difuse shading is displayed meaning that textures are illuminated to there pure colour but don't show any shininess.
No Spec lamps tend to give a soft looking light because there is no shiny 'hot spot' visible.
Download demo of real time lighting features. (250k zip)
Exporting of standalone executable files has returned with a selection of new options for the runtime file. these are found in the render button's Format panel in the Game frame settings.
Sets the file to start in a fullscreen mode, any resolution can be set, but for fullscreen it is advisable to stick to the common screen dimentions (640*480, 800*600, 1024*768 etc).
Sets the Horizontal and Vertical pixel size of the game.
Sets the Bit depth of the color palette for the file, lower color depths free up resources and run faster
8bit = 256color
16bit = 64kcol
24bit = 16Mcol
32bit = 16M+8bit alpha
Note that this is the count of colours in the palette not the color base, i.e. a 32 bit depth is not required for alpha textures.
Sets the target (Maximum) graphical frame rate for the file.
Stereo is used for displaying the environment via a dual display system such as a pair of polarised projectors or 3d goggles.
Gives access to the camera's lens and clipping values, Projection and model view matrices and testing of coordinates/spheres/boxes against the frustum, Useful for disabling processor hungry scripts or effects when an object is not in the visible area.
Gives access to the lamp energy, colour, falloff profile, and spot lamp settings and allows the user to dynamically set the active layers, this gives the user the ability to 'swap' around the 8 lamp/layer maximum by using the 8 closest or brightest.
Allows the user to interrogate the scene for name/current camera/scene states as well as allowing simple, direct access to objects in the scene by name. this makes it easy to centralise the control scripts and create more integrated AI, scene control and/or physics.