Infectious Diseases

Tuberculosis is one of the infectious diseases that causes an important number of deaths in the world, along with AIDS and malaria. This situation is seen to get worse by the emergence of M. tuberculosis strains with major capacity of dissemination, multi-drug resistance (MDR), or extreme-drug resistance (XDR).  In Spain tuberculosis continues to be an important problem for the Public Health. Despite the fact that it showed a tendency of decrease between 1999 and 2004, but number of tuberculosis cases has been observed to increase since 2005. At present according to the estimation of the World Health Organization,the incidence in Spain has been reported to be 27 cases per 100 000 population. 

Our autonomous region of Aragon has an incidence close to the national average.

The team, created in 1992, has been a pioneer in the genetics of micobacteria in Spain and with an important international projection. Since its creation the team has been working in collaboration with other research groups, national and European and Latino American.

The interest of our group is reflected through the relevance of the research projects into which we participate. The group is currently participating in the FP6 Integrated Project “TB VAC” (2004-2009) for the construction rationale of new vaccine candidates against tuberculosis. Since 1998 the group has been coordinating and realizing the genetic study of multi-drug resistant M. tuberculosis in a systematic form; and it has impelled, in collaboration with the Health Institute Carlos III, the creation of a network of laboratories of the National System of Health for the study of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in Spain. Since 2001, in collaboration with the Department of Health and Consumption of the Government of Aragon, the group has been involved in the characterization of the molecular assembly of M. tuberculosis isolated in Aragon.

What do you expect in your lifetime?

Progress in the global fight against TB cannot wait.

The World TB Day Campaign 2012 will allow people all over the world to make an individual call to stop TB in their lifetimes.

In their lifetimes, today's children should expect to see a world where no one gets sick with TB.

In their lifetimes, women and men should expect to see a world where no one dies from TB.

People of different ages and living in different countries could have these hopes for stopping TB in their lifetimes:

• Zero deaths from TB
• Faster treatment
• A quick, cheap, low-tech test
• An effective vaccine
• A world free of TB.

Please add your voice to the campaign.

Coming soon! A new interactive site, www.mystoptb.org, where you can make your own poster and add a message about what you expect to change about TB in your lifetime.

Gamestudio/A8

The engine is the core of the development system - it determines the rendering of 3D objects or virtual worlds. Gamestudio's A8 engine was developed in 2010 and is one of the fastest and most robust engines available. Its Adaptive Binary Tree scene manager switches seamlessly from indoor to outdoor sceneries and supports up to 200,000 objects per scene. The light manager generates an unlimited number of static and dynamic shadow-throwing light sources. Programmers can add new engine functions with the included Source Development Kit. The simple and straigthforward C-style API allows painless access to the engine from external development systems under C++, C#, or Delphi.

The A8 engine is designed to support a wide range of hardware and software. Gamestudio applications run fast and stable even on old PCs, without requiring the end user to update the 3D hardware or DirectX version. Still, Gamestudio is regularly updated in order to support the newest 3D features. Free engine updates are released about every six weeks.

Rendering engine

	Adaptive Binary Tree (ABT) scene manager, up to 200,000 entities per scene
	Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) / Potential Visibility Set (PVS) / Render Portals (Pro Edition)
	Indoor and outdoor support, seamless LOD terrain renderer
	Light manager for unlimited point and spot light sources
	Static and dynamic shadow mapping, decal, stencil, and PSSM shadows
	Fog areas, Camera portals, reflections and mirrors
	Geometric LOD, detail textures, texture compression
	Softskin models with multiple shaders; bones, vertex, and morph animation
	Animated sprites and decals
	Material properties for static and dynamic objects
	Multiple cameras and render views, multiple monitors, widescreen support

3D Rad v7 Installation Notes

If you have 3D Rad version 6.x installed on your system and you want to continue using it along with the new version 7, please make sure you specify a different installation folder for version 7, when installing this update.

If you also want to port all your own projects to the new v7 installation, manually copy the entire 3DRad_res folder from your v6.x installation to the v7 installation folder, by overwriting all files with the same name there. After the copy, please install the latest v7 again to the same folder, to ensure that all 3D Rad system files you may have overwritten by copying data from the previous version, are updated to the latest release.

Finally note that you may have to manually create a desktop icon for either the v6 or the v7 installations.

Note that neither 3D Rad nor 3D Rad compiled projects require the PhysX system software installed. However, in order to run PhysX in hardware, they may still require that your video card driver is the latest or the one recommended by NVidia. For more information, please see the NVidia website.

Getting started with 3D Rad

This five-minute tutorial will show you why 3D Rad is the ideal 3d development software for CG artists and non-coders!

Complete documentation showing you how to make a 3d game with 3D Rad is also available!

A page I strongly recommend, if you are new to 3D Rad, is the 3d game editor overview. 

 Modeling for 3D Rad

The official tutorial about importing, rendering and enabling physics for your own 3d models. Feel the power of 3D Rad as you learn how to make a 3d game! 

Physics in a box

You can enable collision detection and realistic physics for your 3d models by simply importing them to your 3D Rad project (no coding!). These 'bodies' can then be combined visually with working joints, wheels, springs, forces and even airfoils, to create any sort of system (cars, aircraft, ragdolls, machines). 

Quality rendering

To make setting up eye-catching scenes easier, 3D Rad comes with unified shaders designed to integrate smoothly, pre-made natural environment elements, a snap-together road system and many useful resources provided by the community. 

Artificial Intelligence

Adding CPU controlled cars to your project is as easy as 'plugging' a special object to your virtual cars! Simple character A.I. can be achieved by visually combining objects. For more complex artificial intelligence behaviors you have powerful script functions allowing you, for instance, to scan an area for obstacles, test meshes for visibility and so on. 

Network, Multiplayer

3D Rad includes sample projects demonstrating how to render, in real-time, on a remotely connected PC, a simulation processed on the local machine, how to exchange textual strings between connected computers and how to download artwork from a remote server to update the 3d world, run-time.  

Adding 3D Sound Effects

Adding a 3d sound source for an object in your project is very easy.

Custom made sound effects (.wav, .ogg files) can be used with the SoundSource object as described in the documentation.

In this movie I apply a car engine sound effect to the default buggy car.

The first thing I do is placing the 3d cursor where I want the sound source, by right-clicking the car engine.

My SoundSource object settings should simulate gear-shifting audio pretty well for the default car, but you may have to do some tweaking if you change car's top speed, acceleration, etc.

 

Quake's Texture Mapping

The floating point pipeling code for the texture mapping inner loop described in the articles exploits the fact that the P5 architecture allows for scheduling integer and floating operations in parallel, and effectively reduces computation to 4 cycles/pixel in best case.
The article series does not mention Quake, and the details of the implementation id's rasterizer is acutally using might differ. In his CGDC talk, Michael Abrash stated that screen gradients for texture coordinates and 1/z are used to calculate perspective correct texture coordinates every 8 or 16 pixels, and linear interpolation is used between those points. He characterized the loop to be 100% floating-point down to the 8 or 16 pixel subdivisions, and mentions overlapping FDIV. In summary, their inner loop is clearly faster in floating-point on Pentium than it would be in fixed-point.
Btw., the z-fill that is done by the Quake rasterizer while processing world BSP polygons is not done within the same loop as the perspective texture mapping, because of the ever present lack of general purpose registers on the Intel x86 architecture, as pointed out to me by Chris Hecker and confirmed by John Carmack.

Perspective Texture Mapping by Chris

This page discusses copyrighted material published elsewhere, and used with permission. It is intended as an add-on and a pointer, not as a replacement. If you want to know what you are doing, you should get the articles and read them very closely. Be sure to have a look at Chris Hecker's home page for current info.

The articles

In 1995, Chris Hecker started an article series on "Perspective Texture Mapping" in the Game Developer magazine, published by Miller Freeman. The series is finished by now. The articles in question as published in the "Under the Hood/Behind the Screen" column are:

• "Part I - Foundations", April/May 95, pp. 16-25
• "Part II - Rasterization", June/July 95, pp. 18-26
• "Part III - Endpoints and Mapping", August/September 95, pp. 17-24
• "Part IV - Approximations", December 95/January 96, pp. 19-25
• "Part V - It's About Time", April/May 96, pp. 25-33

I received the back issues for Part I-III. MFI will hopefully deliver soon the Part IV issue on scanline subdivision, and Part V issue which contains the discussion of an example of a pipelined floating point texture mapper as invented by Michael Abrash. Another issue I got lays the foundations to the floating point approach

• "Let's Get to the (Floating) Point", February/March 96, pp. 19-24

Back issues can be ordered from MFI.