Reality Factory

For those of you with any interest, Caligari Truespace has been shut down by Microsoft. Should you wish to download Truespace for free you can go to the Caligari.com web site.

There is a downloads page with the last relevant releases of Truespace, trueplay and the SDK.

A new community of Truespace artists is being formed at http://www.tscommunity.co.cc. There you will find experienced users intent on continuing to use the product. In addition, progammers who author plugins will be on this site, and others, to announce their products.

The versions being released are Truespace 7.6, Truespace 7.61 (last beta), and Truespace 7.61 Workspace only (see forums for an explanation). Any prior version or prior plugin offered by Caligari is not available. Some older plugins are still available directly from the developer or archive sites where the plugin has been released as freeware.

The Caligari forums are no longer open to new users and support is not being provided. For help with TS or the downloads I suggest the tscommunity forum.

This is a sad day. It always seems that M$ never fails to ruin good things. If caligari didn't let themselves fall victim to greed and take a seat on the M$ money train I bet they would still be in business today. TrueSpace is one of my favorite programs and now it's completely gone from the market. At least they released it for free. I am tired of Microsoft and I guess will soon become an all Linux fan if I can ever get CS3 to run in Wine. Goodbye Caligari, I will miss you. You have been there since I started my journey in game development six years ago.

I wouldn't blame Microsoft because I'm surprised trueSpace lasted as long as it did. It never had a large market share because they didn't have the features like other major modeling applications. They just did a lot of user interface changes and added one or two new features then called it a new version. They focused more on architecture instead of character animation so they really didn't have a big following by game developers. It was only their last version that added skeletons with inverse kinetics, 3DS MAX and most other modeling applications had that feature for more than 5 to 10 years. Also trueSpace's pricing didn't really work. It was too expensive for the average person that wanted to just play around with modeling, those people would use Blender, Milkshape, or a free earlier version of trueSpace. But it didn't have the features as the others packages in it's price range. Their last version seems comparable to the other modeling packages but I think it was a little too late to save it. They should have released the latest version under a different name then maybe people would have taken a look.

I wouldn't really say that trueSpace was all that bad. It is a little lacking in the animation areas and since version 4 it has had IK with bones. It is a lot cheaper than other software out there(Maya, 3DS Max, XSI Softimage all $1000+) and it focused on modeling as an art not a series of button and option box clicks like 3DS Max. I hate 3DS max because of its awkward interface. There is blender, but that has an even worse interface in my opinion. The part that gets me is that M$ bought Caligari to compete with Google Sketch up as they made trueSpace objects a standard for M$ Virtual Earth. Now they are killing it? That's a strange marketing plan. Sure it was not as top of the line as other modelers but I mean for the price range it wasn't all that bad. And for making game assets who needs the ability to have access to all those fancy shaders that won't be able to run in real time? I found the modeling tools to be quite sound although there are some glitches in the program but I have had 3DS mAx 2009 do some pretty strange things too. Oh well, either way, I'll be using trueSpace 7.6 for at least the next five years because its what I have found to be the best software for me.