CloudWright Beta and impending launch

The main beta period is now coming to an end. But rather than leaving you high and dry, we’re putting out a new version sometime today that won’t expire until the 31st of December. Between now and then, we hope to have version 1.0 of the CloudWright cubemap tool available for purchase. And in the meantime we’ll continue to welcome all feedback either from beta testers or paying customers.

Lyon Game Connection

We’ll be at Lyon Game Connection and GDC on the 3rd to 6th of December showing CloudWright and the clouds SDK. Contact us to set up a meeting.

We’re BACK!

On Friday we went over our bandwidth limit due to a spike in hits. What should have been an outage of a few hours while we upgraded the bandwidth turned into a two-day black hole thanks to technical issues with our hosting solution. We’re back, and on the hunt for a better way of hosting a website – if only Amazon S3/EC2 weren’t so complicated it would fit the bill ideally.

Forums

To access the Simul forums, click here.

Thank you Ogre

We got a front-page link from ogre3d.org. OGRE is the open-source rendering engine we use for the CloudWright realtime tool. I’ve used OGRE for many months now since switching from another open source renderer. I’ve found it stable and powerful, and easy to write for.

CloudWright Beta Release

The CloudWright Beta has now commenced.

I’m delighted to announce the opening of full beta testing for the CloudWright cubemap tool. Want to join the beta? Sign up at http://simul.co.uk/cloudwright/cloudwright-mailing.

A free cubemap

While we’re waiting for the beta to get out the door (not much longer now I swear), here’s a hi-res cubemap to keep you going:

MorningSkyCube.dds

It’s 1024 x 1024 on each face, and it looks like this:

Send us some shots of what you use it for!

The CloudWright Beta

CloudWright is entering Beta testing soon. Join the mailing list or mail enquiries@simul.co.uk to get involved: I’ll limit the numbers if necessary, but otherwise anyone who’s interested can sign up.

CloudWright Image Gallery

I’ve added an image gallery for CloudWright, go take a look. Each new iteration seems to produce vastly better output, we’ll need to get it out there soon!

God Rays

More CloudWright : it’s just about ready to be released, though in what form is to be decided. These shots show “god-rays” – light from the sun poking through gaps in the clouds. I’ve implemented save/load and you can also export to a cubemap view ATI’s cubemap tool. The clouds shown render at interactive rates on two year-old

hardware which helps a lot with adjusting for the perfect look – you just can’t do this kind of interactivity if you have to wait two minutes for a render.