Metaverse One

 With their initial announcement of stepping into the game development arena made back in March, Autodesk finally launched their Stingray game engine this past week. Autodesk is going after small to mid-sized studios that don't have large programming teams so ease of use and simplicity to create content is a must if Stingray wants to compete against game engines like Unreal 4 and Unity 5. Built around the Bitsquid engine it bought last year, it has equipped the engine with node-based scripting tools to make coding a drag-and-drop affair. One advantage to Stingray is that Autodesk product users (Maya, 3DS Max, MayaT) will benefit from extra integration over these other engines. Autodesk will also be offering Stingray's C++ source code (for a fee) to companies that want deeper customization. "Live Link" is a Stingray feature for multi-platform testing. With Live Link, you can tweak a model inside Maya LT and see the changes in Stingray on a given platform...

Here is a great tool for all you programmers that work with or are interested in getting started with the web3d open standard X3D. X3D-Edit is an Extensible 3D (X3D) graphics authoring tool for simple error-free editing, authoring, and validation of X3D scenes. X3D-Edit is written in XML and Java using the Netbeans platform and so is portable across major desktop and laptop operating systems (Windows MacOSX Linux Solaris). X3D-Edit requires Java (version 5 or 6) and features include: - Collada .dae model validation, code completion, and conversion to .x3d (XML) encoding -direct editing of X3D scenes using the XML (.x3d) encoding, -embedded visualization of scenes using the Xj3D viewer, -XML validation against X3D DTDs and Schemas, -drag-and-drop palette for X3D nodes, -popup panels for node editing, -extensive help resources. A huge download, but way better than authoring in the standard text editor. ...