Roman Ormandy from Caligari has sent out this email to the registered users of trueSpace. Microsoft (who bought up Caligari recently and made trueSpace available for free) has been cutting back their projects and trueSpace is feeling the knife. Roman has posted some tips about the imminent doom and is urging people to get all their goods while the goods-getting is... good. <_<

If you haven't taken advantage of getting trueSpace 7.6 and a ton of great video tutorials and other resources, you ought to step to it right away. It's not clear exactly what will happen or when, but it looks like things could shut down on various levels. I'd guess Roman wouldn't be putting this info out if he didn't think something big was in the pipe, but I'm spectaculating here.

I'd be sorry to see trueSpace die off mostly since I have a long history with it, but considering Microsoft almost let SoftImage die a while back, I'd say they have a < stellar record with this sort of thing.

Anyway, on with the announcement:
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Dear Caligari customer,

You may have heard that Microsoft Corporation, reacting to difficult business conditions, has been evaluating many of the products it produces and making the difficult decision to reduce investment in certain areas.

It is with regret that I have to tell you that trueSpace is one of the products affected. As a consequence, you will see reduction or elimination of services offered for trueSpace. For example, there will be no phone or email support offered for trueSpace by Microsoft, and our web site may also be affected. While the dates are not absolutely fixed, some services and contacts may come to an end as early as Friday May 22^nd 2009, while others will continue as long as possible with no firm cutoff date available yet.

While we are working to minimize negative impact for the community, here are some things you may want to plan for in near future:

1. For those who have purchased and paid for Caligari products, download a copy of all purchased software from the repeat downloads area.
   Please log in with your username and password at:
   http://cart1.caligari.com/ebuy2/enterdownloads.asp
   If you have forgotten either your user name or password, please visit:
   http://cart1.caligari.com/forms/memberform.asp

   Ensure you keep the copies and information in a safe place, as they may not be available for download again. Be sure you also have a copy of all required serial numbers, as there will be no support staff to assist you after a certain date.

2. For those who have downloaded trueSpace7.6 since it became free, if you do not already have a copy of the installer kept on your hard drive or on CD / DVD, you may wish to download the trueSpace7.6 installer and keep a copy in a safe place.
   Please log in with your username and password at:
   http://cart1.caligari.com/web/Truespacemainreg.aspx
   If you have forgotten either your user name or password, please visit:
   http://cart1.caligari.com/forms/tsmemberform.asp

3. Download a copy of any training that you wish to keep from our main website.

4. Download any useful plug-ins you wish to keep from the forums.

5. Download any useful information, training, tips etc from the forums that you wish to keep.

6. Contact any Caligari staff or forum users who you wish to keep in touch with, and arrange to have an alternative email address to contact them.

   As a community you may decide to set up a new forum or meeting place. Please use the existing forums to announce the location of that new meeting space, and we will also strive to put that information onto our main website. I personally plan to visit any such meeting place to keep in touch with you and hear about your new plans.

All of us here in the Caligari team would like to thank everyone in our community for your long-standing support of trueSpace and Caligari. Our community – that is, all of you – were truly one of our best assets, and you have created incredible work, and we hope you will continue on to do even more amazing things.

I personally want to thank all of the Caligari staff for their amazing contribution to development of trueSpace and building of this community. During 25 years of trueSpace history the product made a difference in lives of many people and the world is a better place for it.

Roman Ormandy,
Caligari Founder

I have been sitting here tinkering with the GameDevSchool.com site, and I got an email in my box: Caligari has made their newest version of their great 3D modeling/animation/simulation/content creation suite, trueSpace 7.6, available for download... for free! Wow! I've used trueSpace since way back around version 2, but I'm not doing as much 3D work as I used to -- well, almost none, tbh. At any rate, I've already downloaded this sucker! It's a really fun program to use, I always thought, so I'm stoked to play with it again! I've picked it up several times through upgrades, but since I don't work with it much, I stopped back around version 6 or so.

trueSpace is a very powerful set of tools. You can sign up and snag trueSpace 7.6 right now, along with some training videos, for no charge. Nice. Those training videos are an awesome resource for learning trueSpace, and were previously sold for something like $79 each.

This is a seriously great opportunity, I'd say. The program really is fantastic. For more information about the new version, as well as insight into reasons for releasing the application free of charge, you can read up on the announcement blog of the company's founder.

Cool stuff. :-)

Cryptic (the folks behind City of Heroes and City of Villains) have released a pretty sweet tool for animation junkies.. the Cryptic AR (Cryptic Animation Rig) for 3D Studio Max 8 or higher. Their stated goal for doing this is to provide "the animation community with the ability to use professional quality animation tools free of charge. The rig's flexibility and ease of use allows users of all experience levels to create professional video game animations."

They've also put up a Cryptic AR community forum for new & experienced animators to discuss their craft, as well as getting tips about using the Cryptic AR.

I'm not much of an animator, but I'll have to give this puppy a run and see how it flies. Good Stuff, Cryptic! This is pretty cool.

Torque Constructor has been discussed here before, so maybe you remember it from my fingertips. The GG community is all buzzy about the release, since it marks the first official tool targeting the Torque art pipeline squarely in the chest. Previously (as mentioned in my earlier post) you had to use other tools to develop Torque interiors, so this is a pretty Big Deal to have a tool specifically designed for Torque development.

In a nutshell, in case you're not going to follow the link above, here's what you'll find in Torque Constructor:

Torque Constructor is a Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) WYSIWYG brush editor that supports export of buildings and structures to numerous industry-standard CSG model (.map) formats, or seamlessly exports directly into Torque Game Engine (TGE) or Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA).

Torque Constructor features the ability to modify and expand any of the basic scriptable functions with TorqueScript, from plugins, tools, and widgets to customization of the GUI.

Get a nice list of features by checking out the big announcement post at GG.com: Torque Constructor Now Available .

I'm not much of a modeller, so I'm not one to state how wonderful stuff like this is, but on their site, they make a pretty stout claim: "The easiest 3D modeling tool for creative professionals that utilizes cutting-edge freeform surface technology." Well... okay. That sounds nice, eh?

I can't vouch for that statement, since I am not available ATM to try it out, but the good thing is, you can! Go snag CB Model Pro during their beta program for free. Yay! Please drop me a note if you try it out and tell me how you like it. I've seen some good reports about it so far.

This is a great opportunity for all you starving artist/students out there to get in on a little 3D landscape lovin'! Daz is giving away copies of Bryce 5.0 until Sept. 6th, 2006 by way of Download.com! Suhweet. I haven't used this killer app since roughly version 3 or so, but I've definitely enjoyed the program since the early days when Kai Krause was making those killer Kai's Power Tools goodies. Great stuff, that.

So, go snag a copy (Win or Mac) fast, so you don't miss out. You're welcome (for the heads-up, I mean.)

I need to get back to other work, but I wanted to post a quick follow-up about the whole 3D architecture/building content creation tool "problem" I'm having. I noted that Garage Games' Torque Constructor was getting nearer to reality -- as it's gone into beta -- which pushed me ever so slightly further into researching other tools available to create interiors for 3D games (notably for Torque since I'm playing with that these days.)

I've used the aforementioned QuArK most recently, but I honestly didn't get too far into it. At the time I was furthest into this stuff, I was lacking a project to keep me focussed. Right now, I'm in "research mode" so I will be trying to find as many tools as I can... in this case, for creating "levels" and/or buildings and interiors for levels. I won't go into the distinction of terms right now, sorry. :P

So... I'm wanting to point out another tool that I hadn't pointed out in my post: Cartography Shop appears to do much (all?) of what is needed for creating architecture for 3D game levels. It's pretty inexpensive, but I'm not personally going to commit until I find out more about Constructor's pricing/availability.

It also appears (from posts by Garage Games employees) that these guys aren't working directly with GG on specific Torque integration or whatever. That doesn't make it less of a worthy product (I haven't tried it yet, but there is a demo,) but it does affect my decisions if I end up going with Torque for future development. In fact, just to give you more to read if you're looking in the same direction, I'm seeing the Torque Pipeline for Cartography Shop as a possible resource for using CS for TGE. Again, this isn't an endorsement, nor have I found all the options in this space... this is just where my research landed so far. Fun, isn't it? Please add comments about other options if you know of them... please? :)

If you're doing non-TGE stuff, or if you need a something besides the other free tools now, you might find this sucker to be what you need/want. Heck, you might find this program to be excellent... in which case, you should be posting comments here so the rest of us know how it is!! :)

Here's a blurb from the Torque Pipeline page that sums up basically why I'm on this journey to discover alternatives:

If you tried to use QuArK and found it to be difficult to setup much less use for mapping on a daily basis, the Cartography Shop + Torque Pipeline combo is what you need. Yes QuArK is free and we can't beat that price, but is your time really free? Can you afford to battle the tools while you try to build that next complex building for you game? Torque Pipeline fully supports all the major capabilities of the DIF format in a simple to use package that won't frustrate you or hamper your creativity.