The new Horde3D Beta2 release contains many bugfixes and smaller updates reported and contributed by the community. Besides these, it brings some noticeable improvements like increased shadow quality and extended occlusion culling. A further important enhancement is the expanded support for dynamic resource updates. On the COLLADA side, the compatibility was improved by supporting non-baked animation data. Finally, the previous makefile system has been replaced by CMake-based build scripts.

DMP recently announced three new courses, two getting started courses and one advanced course. The first GLSL Programming training course (getting started) will be next month October 23rd-24th, the second OpenGL ES Programming training course (getting started) will be in November, while the third OpenGL ES Programming training course (advanced) will follow,also in November. For more information on these courses, please visit the Khronos Group events page.

Mogware recently announced MogBox, a powerful processing chain with a visual flowchart-style interface for building complex data conversion scripts enabling you to more easily manage and automate your 3D data conversions. Furthermore, Mogbox is a multi threaded application that enables you to maximize multicore processors. There is a very good video high-lighting some of the features of MogBox.

Adobe announced CS4 on September 23rd with a new round of updates for their design suites. A notable addition to Photoshop and After Effects is the addition of support for OpenGL. After Effects CS4 Professional now has OpenGL high-fidelity support for blending modes, adjustment layers, track mattes, accelerated effects, anti-aliasing, 2D motion blur, lights, and shadows. In Photoshop Extended, the entire 3D engine has been migrated from a PDF-based architecture to OpenGL, and the company has seeded OpenGL support throughout the application. Standard users will also see small advantages with OpenGL which is used to quickly zoom around large images. Read more on OpenGL support in Photoshop CS4, which is due out near the end of October.

The new gDEBugger V4.3 adds in-depth analysis of the OpenGL usage by tracking redundant state changes and detailed usage statistics. This new feature includes various capabilities, such as noting unrecommended OpenGL functions (with a detailed explanation of why are they unrecommended and possible alternatives) and in-depth information about the usage of OpenGL State Change functions, including redundancy percentages and amount of redundant / effective calls. The S3 Graphics performance counters integration is also introduced in this version. This powerful integration works on all S3 Graphics hardware, giving very detailed information of the hardware utilization to allow optimizing the OpenGL usage on S3 Graphics hardware using gDEBugger. gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, lets programmers see what is happening within the graphic system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance.

Toshiba will exhibit at CEATEC JAPAN 2008, the largest consumer electronics trade show & conference in Asia from September 30 to October 3 at Makuhari Messe, Japan. They will have the presentation titled “A Software Platform for next generation media SoC based on International Standard”, to talk about the overview on current media SoC software platforms. During the speech, Toshiba will unveil a software prototyping environment based on the “OpenMax” API for the next generation media SoCs, where migration on communication, broadcasting and internet will be more progressed, According to Toshiba, by utilizing the software prototype, we can check total system behavior, specification and functionality before actual SoC available.

Free Software Foundation and Khronos Group Both Herald New License of Industry Standard Graphics Software SGI today announced it is releasing a new version of the SGI Free Software License B. Included in the relicensing is the SGI OpenGL Sample Implementation. Said Neil Trevett, President of Khronos Group “today’s announcement shows real support for developers who rely on OpenGL, the planet’s most widely deployed 2D and 3D graphics API.”

Imagination Technologies POWERVR Insider SDK, which continues to remain developers’ preferred development environment for the creation of OpenGL ES 2.0 as well as OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG applications, is demonstrating the latest version of the SDK Austin GDC from 15-17 September 2008. Developers will be able to see Imagination’s SDK and tools demonstrated on Stand 115.

The Eizo Shimbun of Japan interviewed Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group about the recent highlights including OpenGL 3.0 and OpenCL at SIGGRAPH 2008. On OpenGL, the new OpenGL API supports the future creation of profiles to enable products to support specific market needs while not burdening every implementation with unnecessary costs. Beyond 3.0, OpenGL will support multi-OS platoforms including WindowsXP. On OpenCL, “I think OpenCL will be the first API ever with the shortest TAT from the announcement to launch”, said Neil Trevett.

Khronos is please to announce that a whole page article based on an interview with Neil Trevett, Khronos President, is in the September issue of EETimes Japan Magazine, circulation 44,000 monthly. The article explains the structure of OpenGL ES 2.0 and the relationship between OpenGL 3.0 and ES 2.0, as well as news on the newly announced OpenCL and updated on the latest highlight of the Khronos group.

As a part of its continued push to create an open, standards-based platform, Forterra announced today that it has integrated support for COLLADA into its OLIVE platform. “Our defense and intelligence customers are very much pushing for COLLAD- based standards,” said Badger. “One of them has talked about having all their building designs available in an OLIVE-based virtual world as part of their approval process (which would be possible via our COLLADA support).” We see widespread acceptance of COLLADA within the virtual world industry as being somewhat analogous to adopting HTML back in the early days of the Internet

SceneCaster announced new functionality with its ability to support the Khronos(TM) Group new COLLADA(TM) 1.5.0 specification. This expanded functionality now enables SceneCaster’s 3D content to be exported to and shared with other 3D applications and authoring packages across all delivery platforms.