Alright, here's the new Nebula3 SDK: http://www.radonlabs.de/internal/n3sdk_nov2007.exe

Some notable new features:

  • first version of the Application Layer plus a small sample app
  • now also works on ATI cards which support shader model 3.0 (X-above-1000)
  • a new global light source type
  • resources now loaded from zip archive
  • many bugfixes

There are a quite few known issues in this release:

  • some (new) VSM-related visual artefacts in the shadow system (light leaking and shadow grain near some shadow casters), this must be fixed by tuning some VSM parameters which I didn't quite have the time to do right
  • new Application Layer sample app has clumsy controls and camera
  • shadows are not rendered when shadow caster is not visible which leads to shadow pop-up in the App Layer sample application
  • re-building assets requires the Nebula2 Toolkit For Maya
  • some new Doxygen docs pages are messy
  • ODE, OPCODE and GIMPACT not credited yet in the docs

So this release is a bit rough, I hope the next one will be more polished. But I really wanted to push it out the door instead of spending even more time to fix stuff.

Here are a few screenshots:
This is the testviewer.exe with one global light (cannot cast shadows yet, I'm planning to implement Parallel-Split Shadow Maps for global light sources), plus 2 spot lights which cast VSM shadows.

The next one is a screenshot of the new testgame.exe sample application, with a player-controllable avatar and some physics boxes to play around with:


Enjoy!
-Floh.