BCS IT Industry Awards: Simul wins!

The BCS IT Industry Awards were announced in London on Thursday the 4th of December, Simul picked up the Project Excellence Award in the Research and Development category. More updates soon!

Sample output from CloudWright 1.6

One of the best features in CloudWright 1.6 is the realtime previews of raytraced clouds. This means that what you see on screen is much closer to the rendered cubemap. Like this:

As a sample of the output from 1.6, here’s a 2048×2048 map in hdr and ldr formats, click here to download it.

CloudWright 1.6 beta

CloudWright 1.6 is now available as beta software. Like previous versions, it’s free to download and try. The big new feature is you can now see raytraced clouds in real time. There’s lots of other good stuff, so take a look.

As 1.6 is beta, it needs some testing. We’d especially like to hear from anyone using Nvidia Quadro cards, and anyone using ATI cards.

Eutechnyx chooses the Simul Weather SDK for Ride to Hell

Volumetric clouds that move and animate in real time

Simul Software Ltd has announced that Eutechnyx, a leading independent studio based in Gateshead, England, has chosen the Simul Weather SDK to generate realtime weather effects for the forthcoming multi-platform title Ride to Hell, the first game of it’s kind produced and published with the new and innovative business model by Deep Silver and co-developed with Eutechnyx.

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CloudWright Plug-Ins

We have been planning for a long time to put CloudWright plug-ins into the major 3D graphics packages, and the first of these will be the plug-in for XSI. When it’s launched, CloudWright will be available in two versions – the standard edition, which is standalone, and is on sale now; and the premium edition, which will include both the standalone version and the plug-ins. The standard edition will be £24.95, while the premium version will cost a little more.

However, anyone who has already bought CloudWright before we launch the premium version will get a free upgrade. Furthermore, we will be offering registered users the chance to test the XSI plug-in as soon as we reach beta.

I can’t yet say when launch will be, but hopefully we’ll be in beta-testing within the next few weeks: stay tuned!

CloudWright – now only £24.95

Great news everyone! CloudWright moves today to a new, cheaper permanent price of £24.95. We’re now using prices in pounds, not dollars – the exchange rates were giving our accountant a headache!

Lightning before Dawn

Simul Weather: BCS IT Industry Awards Finalist

Simul Software Ltd is delighted to announce that the Simul Weather SDK has been selected as a finalist for the British Computer Society‘s IT Industry Awards in the Research and Development category.

The BCS IT Industry Awards, supported by Intellect and NCC, are the leading hallmark of success amongst IT practitioners. These awards form a central element to the BCS’ Professionalism in IT initiative. The awards recognize, promote and acclaim excellence, professionalism, and innovation and the outstanding achievements of the nominees.

David Clarke, BCS chief executive says: “In the current economic situation it is rewarding to see that IT is continuing to lead through innovation and deliver real business benefits. These projects reflect the fact that technology is an integral and expected part of everyday life and is at the heart of literally every business.�

John Higgins, director general at Intellect says: “Information communication technology improves organisations’ competitiveness and productivity, and helps them meet the needs of their customers more effectively. These awards recognize those technology suppliers, individuals and organisations which do this best. The quality of entries is once again very high and I do not envy the judges their task of identifying the winners – it’s going to be a difficult job.�

Stormy Weather

The first video of our lightning effects is up, you can download it from the Weather SDK page, or on YouTube. Lightning is a fully 3D effect that lights up its surroundings, as it should, being hotter than the surface of the sun.

Weather SDK update

The Weather SDK now has a nifty DirectX sample. This is the first of our “no-brainer” source code samples, intended to be code you can cut-and-paste into your program to get “instant skies”. The second no-brainer is the OpenSceneGraph nodekit, more to follow. Performance is off the charts with the latest code, so this stuff is ideal for 60Hz games and time-critical simulations.

The aim with the no-brainer samples is to make putting Simul Weather in any game a matter of hours and to slash the learning curve that middleware typically entails. But we need people to test this approach, and tell us what we’re doing wrong, or right. So any developers with a few hours to spare, get in touch.

Coming soon, lightning! And because you demanded it: real-time god-rays. I’ll post screens of these effects within the next few days, they’ll be in the SDK samples next week.