Turbo Squid is a digital marketplace where people buy, sell, and share their 3D models and textures. Wherever there's people who need help in the 3D game and art industry, and are willing to pay for it, Turbo Squid's there to start a trading community for their own profit. Even the newer XNA service is supported on their site. They haven't changed their setup much in the past few years, although they've just launched a brand new site for an entirely different agenda:

"Turbo Squid . . . has officially launched GameFlood, the premier destination for playing and creating add-on videogame content, including mods and maps. The new GameFlood portal and platform will dramatically improve the experience for players of add-on content, while also serving to bridge the gap between 3D modelers, add-on developers, and game publishers. GameFlood provides a secure hosting environment for playing and sharing mods and maps designed for the world's most popular PC games, including first-person shooters, real-time strategy, and role-playing games."

GameFlood already has add-on content libraries for several series such as Half-Life, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, FEAR, Oblivion, Grand Theft Auto, Doom, Warhammer 40,000, Neverwinter Nights, Age of Empires and many more. You can check it all out here on GameFlood.

These new screenshots come from GameFront, and preview what looks to be a great example of how to utilize the PS3 as it was intended to be used. Not making PS2 mech games that look like a more boring Lost Planet, but instead creating vivid and engaging graphics and gameplay. Lair could easily get old quick, but any game that offers this level on dragon intensity, is a game you can always come back to. The level of detail looks impressive - you can tell Factor5 is at least putting their best effort into this game, whereas the Armored Core game shows signs of cutting corners on 3D modeling and texturing. Lair is supposed to come out on May 7th, so let's hope for some new videos to go along with these new screenshots.

Many of you know about Kkreiger - the world's smallest FPS game (it was only a 96kb file), but this is something different. How different from Will Wright's procedural Spore engine it is, i'm not sure - and I doubt Wright will let many people at all know those details, but the makers of the Xbox Live game Roboblitz have a new way of producing game textures that they think will revolutionize gaming. Long story short, down to earth explanation, is that procedural textures are basic textures for 3D images, that take very little time and power to load into the 3D world. The problem is that current gaming involves a mathematic algorithm that makes it hard to use procedural textures. Instead we get company made textures that are just amazingly awesome as their disc sizes are shamefully large.

Well Sebastian DeGuy has used his wits to write up different algorithms that easily allow procedural textures to be used for in game 3D texturing jobs. He explains how Roboblitz was originally about 527MB in size, but after using this new texturing code that took up 3MB of space, they were able to trash the original 480MB of textures. Pretty damn impressive. Hopefully that means we won't have to wait for more John Carmack genius, or a PS4 that can handle every bump, parallax, and normal map you can throw at it.

It will be interesting to see if this changes how games are made in the next few years. With a little luck, we could be seeing 3D games on our cell phones with textures this impressive. You can even take a 3D 360 degree tour of one of their environments here.