Hello,
i have a more general question: What are absolute "musthave-tools" for game developers (in addition to 3dgs, of course ). I thought:

- Blender
- Gimp
- Fraps
- ArtRage
- Dogwaffle
- Photo Filtre

What tools would you recommend?

Hmm, I keep it rather simple

- 2D Art: Photoshop/Gimp
- 3D Art: Blender/Wings/Others

And that's all, apart from an Engine (3DGS) that I use, sometimes also IceX2 for terrain creation. If you know how to handle e.g. Photoshop and Blender, you're able to create almost everything that you need. And naturally the forums here, that's the best "tool" for game creation.

For me with GameStudio

- Blender
- GIMP
- Code::Blocks / Visual Studio(Or another C/C++ IDE)
- SMEE
- Sphere
- DEX Soft

But for GameDev in general:
- Modelling, e.g. Blender
- IDE, e.g. Code::Blocks
- Compiler, e.g. MinGW/gcc
- Intarwab, e.g. Google
- Image handling, e.g.GIMP
- Engine, e.g. GameStudio / AGE
- Audio handling, e.g. Reason

You all forgot to mention a slice of paper and a pencil

- OpenOffice or MS Office for document solutions
- A PDF creator for distributing documents (OO has a build in converter)
- A code-editor other than SED for various reasons. I own Visual Studio but I kept on my personal favorite: ConTEXT. I stay on VS for DLL and C++ programming.
- Tortoise SVN if you rely on Revision Control (SVN is the successor of CVS; but it depends on personal needs - artists would choose AlienBrain or such)
- A 2D graphics program of your choice (arguing which program is better is senseless when a user is able to make stunning graphics with a program which is dismissed by others )
- DDS converters: NVidia Texture Tool and ATI Compressonator
- Wings3D
- Milkshape 3D
- one prominent commercial modeling package or blender. If you are a student, you get stunning discount prices, e.g. on Cinema4D R10
- Tattoo for skinning. This is the only freeware tool the features paint-on-UV-map-by-painting-on-the-model. DeepPaint3D and BodyPaint are commercial solutions which are far better and feature rich.
- LithUnwrap for skinning. I prefer the skinning feature of WIngs3D over LithUnwrap, but it has also its strengths.
- Audacity
- VirtualDub and any other video software of your choice. In combination with FRAPS for taking ingame videos. Or Taksi, which is a bit slower, though - but free.
- FolderShare - a p2p client which makes it easy to share folders between teammembers (if you dont have a FTP or a SVN server)
- Harry's FontGenerator
- if you are into OOP or are used to plan your software before you program it , try FUJABA as UML modeling suite (free)
- for JAVA apps (tools, etc.), use Eclipse
- HelpNDoc for documentations and manuals
- DDS and TGA thumbnails previews for the Windows Explorer shell

there are a lot of other tools, but I guess most in my list are not listed above

[EDIT] and COFFEE!

Hiya.

-Corel Painter / Adobe Photoshop
-[graphics tablet; Intuous]
-UltimateUnwrap3D
-Softimage|XSI
-Hexagon 2.1
-regular ol' paper and pens/pencils, of course!

...and a few "nice to haves"...

--Bodypaint3D
--some type of terrain tool like "PnP Terrain Creator", "TED" (http://www.d-grafix.com/?page=ted), etc.

have a look at my mega gamedev linklist wich is meant as a "must have" starting point for indipendent game developers. feel free to comment if you think its missing something. iam still working on it.

I was thinking about

- Blender ( I finally realise it was a good engine)/ 3dgs
- Lightwave / xsi
- Photoshop /gimp
- reason /audition
- combustion/ after effects ( not necessary but usefull for a good presentation using avi )

cheers

Here's my list. Note that some of this I haven't had a chance to use yet but I would consider them necessary for their particular specialty. My list is designed mostly around quality cheap or freeware applications:

Modeling and/or animation: Blender, Milkshape, Wings3D, Ultimate Unwrap3D, and fragMotion
(Wings3D should take a more prominent place in a 3DGS developer's toolbox given it features FBX import/export and new beta versions of 3DGS feature this as well. The fact that our FBX allows up to 4 bones per vertex is great. fragMotion will soon feature FBX, too)

2D: Paint.NET (with DDS plugin), Inkscape (for vector graphics and PDF creation), Wood Workshop
{These two free programs continue to amaze and grow in power with each successive update. They also use a traditional Windows UI, so none of that esoteric GIMP nonsense. However, GIMP is a nice program, as well and should also be considered. Wood Workshop is a freeware texture creator esp made for wood textures, although it can be used to make just about anything if you use your imagination)

Audio and video: Kristal Audio Engine, Audacity, Exact Audio Copy, burnatonce, dbPowerAmp (with OGG encoder), Virtualdub, and appropriate video encoders

Misc: Pencil/pen, paper, lots of caffeine, and a good selection of music with headphones, FontGenerator, Easy Particles 3, CRED tool, SMEE, Dan's Arch-E 3DGS arch/stairs generator, Inno Setup with ISTool, OpenOffice or Atlantis Nova word processor, Adobe Reader, and of course 3DGS