NeoTextureEdit 0.6.4 Released

I just released a new version (0.6.4) of NeoTextureEdit (my open source graph-based procedural texture editor). The major additions in this version are

Spectral Control Widget

you can now control the individual frequency bands of the perlin noise pattern via a simple widget. This allows you more control than the standard persistance parameter that gives you only an exponential falloff:

Directional Blur

the addition of an anisotropy parameter and an angle to the blur filter allows you to perform directional effects:

Modulus and Math1 Filter

The modulus filter was contributed by a user (Talin) and allows you to create an u-coordinate dependent color shift. The Math1 filter perform simple single-input math operations (like exponentiation for gamma correction, or single channel multiplication/add):

Node Folding

this feature was requested by a user and should help reduce the visual clutter in larger texture graphs:

You can download the latest version of NeoTextureEdit at Sourceforge or visit the Homepage for more information about the features.

Gem Square - Procedural Gems

I just released my new free game Gem Square for Android on the Android Market. It is a very simple 'match 3' game with square gems. One of my goals when deciding to develop this game was to start a simple project where I could use my open source texture edtior NeoTextureEdit.
I hoped that using the editor on a real (but small) project helps me to identify parts that can be improved. The result after finishing gem square: it worked :-)

So here is a screenshot of the final NeoTextureEdit project with the gems from the game as procedural images:

It might look a bit confusing, but for such a small project it worked really well. The most important feature that was missing when I started the project was a way to automatically (i.e. via a shell script) export images from the texture project. This is now part of NeoTextureEdit and works really well by adding filename prefixes to individual nodes to mark them for export. More features that came to my mind during the project and that are now on my todo list are automatic graph layout and merging of redundant nodes.
At the end of the project I have to say that using procedural representations for game graphics when possible is really a time saver. The images are resolution independent and you can make small changes to all images with a single click and they get exported automatically. This hugely improves the workflow and shortens iteration time.