Info:
For those who haven?t managed to stop by and check out our new Software & Tools forums yet, I felt it might be a good idea to post a brief note to let you all know that the alpha version of our Carbon Game Development Toolkit is available now for all Game Developer Package members!

Since the launch of the pre-release version of Carbon back in September, development has continued at a steady and fairly rapid pace on the road toward ?Beta?. With lots of great feedback already submitted ? both on the forums and elsewhere ? we?re starting to get a sense for what you guys want and need, and that is proving extremely helpful as we begin the process of moulding Carbon into something that we hope will be truly useful to all of our users moving forward.

The most recent version of the toolkit (v0.8.7 at the time of writing) ? including all source code projects, scripts and shaders for the engine component, and a fully featured world designer (Carbon Forge) ? are currently hosted on our public source repository (SVN) allowing for fast an efficient updates whenever a new revision is made available for download. Projects are available for Microsoft? Visual Studio 2008, 2010 and 2012 with full support for Express editions.

If you are a Game Developer Package member, you can get access to the pre-release Alpha version by visiting the ?Software & Tools? section of your training area where, after subscribing to the development project (just a couple of clicks), you?ll be given access to all of the links and information you?ll need to grab yourself a copy and get started straight away.

We?ll be continuing our efforts to improve Carbon and its associated tools and documentation a great deal over the coming weeks and months; so whether you?re just interested in the development process, or want to get your hands dirty with the engine source, it might be worth you checking it out!