Dear friends,

The new magazine is here

Have a great day.
George

Great news! Thank you George.

thanks!

Thank you, guys!

Thanks George!

Thanks for this new aum ^^

You are welcome

Awesome. Keep em coming!

Hi George,
please don't take this personal but in the course over the last months I got disappointed even more each issue and this one was really annnoying. I can tell you why and I do it in the form of constructive suggestions:

• It would be cool if you could put all questions in "Questions from the forums" at top, so that one could read them, click on it and jump right there instead of getting tired, scrolling through the page
• It would be nicer if you could go sometimes more in-depth with new beta features. E.g. take "Netport I/O modules support": I guess no one knows how to use this, how much it costs and there is even no source code shown. You could even give a preview for some even more "hotter" beta features or give some hints from the development team.
• It would be nice if you could put for each "hot at the forum entry" a link, so that user can jump from AUM to the forum thread. Plus, I almost always feel that this section is not up to date and that you almost always cover only contributions. What about interesting forum threads? What about threads which include very interesting posts about coding? Even from threads with awful titles like "Unity is a dic*" you can get interesting info which are useful for lost of users, like the talk about programming with components.
• Especially in this issue, I feel that the "Featured contribution" is not featured very well. Sure, Hummels demo and shader is awesome, no doubt, but you could even go into more detail, about the inner workings and why it is so special. One thing which is special for this shader is the fact, that the model needs NO uv-map for the texture is is applied - why not talking about this technique with soem explanations and links to further resource like white papers or other sites? Plus, you could tell users what features it has: edge glow, normal and parallax mapping, etc? You say in the last line: "Well, I can see this shader being used for the walls in one of your cave levels; I'm sure that you will be able to come up with several other interesting ideas." Why don't you make or take a rough cave (or rock) model, show how and where to get a good texture (CGTextures anyone?), show how to make a normal/depth map (there are so much tools available!) and how this shaders gets transformed into a cool cave shader. Again, link is missing, too. Maybe people get more information from the thread Hummel showed this.
• It feels akward that you post only one (1) entry in "Other contributions". Must it be contributions for Acknex Unlimited? I would say that you would better merge "Other contributions" and "Hot at the forum".
• Interviews: I don't want to talk about the project because I really like it and how well it is perceived, no doubt. But I want express that I felt VERY disappointed, that you feature a project that feels like it is a hundred years old. Seriously. This has been shown at the forum a long time ago and it feels not right that a monthly magazine features it so late. If there are indeed more than one project(s) per month that are of such a high quality that it can be considered as featured project of the month with an interview, why not do so and take those two?
• And at last, there should be a link in the introduction for the download of the archive for each AUM.

I'm sorry, if I have disappointed you. These are some of the most striking things which are wrong in my eyes, there are even more little things. But I don't want to blame your work, because I know it -is- actually a lot of work to pull this out each month.

Best regards,
-Christian

I would like it if George also covered new features in 3dgs. We now have an updated networking system, why not explain/show how to use it?