software technology framework
We need your help - we want to know how compatible our demo is. I’d like to hear from anyone who can’t get the demo to work, particularly if you have an ATI card. It should work with any shader model 3 card or above. Contact us at support@simul.co.uk.
We’re licensing our atmospherics system Simul Sky individually, as well as in a bundle with Clouds. Sky is a pretty nifty bit of software - you set the time, date, part of the world you’re in, and it first calculates where the sun is in the sky, and second, calculates the physically-correct sky colours. Where Sky really excels is at twilight, sunrise and sunset. Most scattering algorithms turn the whole sky yellow when the sun is low in the sky or below the horizon. Simul Sky gets it right. What’s also really cool about it is the number of calculations it takes to get a complete skydome - much fewer than you’d expect! So you can have the whole sky change in real time with minimum fuss.
To celebrate the release of the rather great version 1.4, CloudWright is only $59 until the end of June!
There’s a 3-minute movie of the clouds in motion on the clouds sdk page. As well as the youTube version, you can download the movie in 240p or 480p.
We’ve made a downloadable demo of realtime clouds in HDR: head to the clouds sdk page.
Our first major press coverage - the April 2008 issue of Develop magazine has half a page on CloudWright and the Clouds SDK. More information and subscriptions from www.developmag.com.
CloudWright 1.4 is a major milestone. We’ve made the windows interface much more configurable, we’ve merged the Free Edition with the main program.
But the big difference is we’ve integrated the realtime cloud rendering from the Simul Clouds SDK into CloudWright. This means that when you’re in “Realtime” mode, you can move the camera freely through the sky at a fast framerate. Then you can generate a cubemap from any point in the sky.
We’re replacing the Free Edition with 1.4 from now, and asking for feedback. When it’s good and stable, registered users should upgrade.
You can download it here.
Apologies for my slack blogging these past few weeks - we’ve been gearing up to get the SDK ready for developers. Which in preview form, it now is. Interested devs should send us a mail about getting an evaluation version. Stop by the SDK page for further information and some video/images.
Recent versions of CloudWright Free Edition had out-of-date cloud xml files that didn’t load properly. This and more is now fixed in version 1.3. There’s also an update to the full version, here. Apologies to anyone who’s had problems with either one.
We’ve added a new feature, Quicklight, which does a faster calculation for secondary scattering. There’s also some new options for adjusting the cloud generation.
Meantime, development of the Simul Clouds SDK for realtime weather is proceeding apace. Much more on this soon!
Now that the demo is available, the promotional launch price for CloudWright is coming to an end. The regular price of US$80.00 will kick in on the 1st of February - that’s four days from now. So now would be a great time to buy!