per pixel shaders

Is Blitz3d capable of per pixel shaders? Quest 3D has it and I head Dark Basic Pro is making it. I saw a water demo (or the screen shot for it) in quest 3d and was kinda blown away. However, I was not impressed with the frame rate (same for their monster mayhem demo).

I would love for Blitz to have that ability for realistic water and nature / texture effects. I know Blitz 3d is already capable of major texture effects, multiple textures, etc - but this looks so darn good!!!!

To add to the above, it is stated right on the home page of Dark Basic Professional that it does pixel / vertex shaders.

Again, is Blitz 3D (the best) able to do this? I want it!!!

Nope no shaders, as its only DX7 support.

I have Darkbasic also..while i havent messed with the Shaders , I cant even get the basic perpixel Raster effects to work half the time.(Dot3,EvmBM ect)


what kinda system are you running?
Becasue Quest runs pretty fast on my system.
The Monster mayhem demo runs about 148 fps.

I have quest3D 2.0 and its not to bad,,not sure its ready for game Primetime yet tho.



Zmatrix

Athlon Xp 1600+ 256meg + Radeon8500 pro 128meg

Athalon XP Pro 2700+ 1GB DDR RAM, Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti 4200

It (Quest) runs kinda slow and there are no viruses on my system - brand new video drivers (updated).

I am interested in doing realtime storm and water fx (realistic) - can that be done in Blitz on a large scale (like driving a speedboat in a ocean during a hurricane - and it looks totally real - I saw the sea water demo, the water demo (night time) and rob's cube mapping - they all looked amazing - but can it be done large scale?

Zmatrix,

How easy is Quest to use, I have the demo currently but not explored it too much yet. I am having difficulty with the tutorials, they name everything explicitly, yet those named behviours are not to be found anywhere :{

Some of the demos are rather nice though - but again can you get down to controlling everything like in B3d? I think not so far.

Ipete2.

downloaded it yesterday - so I have no flipping idea.

It looks nice, but I think much of it is hype on the ease of use. I think Blitz will still be the best choice.

I don't know how fast the 4200 is, but pixel shaders are probably costly to use, and/or can be more costly the more complex/poorly written they are.

Also, it's probable that Darkbasic Pro isn't near as fast as Blitz. DarkBasic sure wasn't. I highly doubt that the guys that wrote DB Pro became pros at designing 3d engines overnight. I suspect that DBPro's 3D engine is similar to Dark Basic's, with new additions and some slightly different syntax.

That really depends on the system and the display mode you use. I find DBP faster, others find Blitz faster (remember that the 3D engine has been completely rewritten since release).

Pixel / Vertex shaders are complicated to add full support for, because they require very low level 3D data access (to the world / transform matrices for example). With next gen shaders (HLSL / DX9) it gets even worse. Plus you need to cater for cards that don't support a given version of shader.

Blitz would need a whole host of low-level commands besides the shader ones.

I would think it unlikely that shaders will get added to B3D, although they probably will be in BMAX.

It isn't a matter of picking up a shader and plonking it into the code either - if you wanted to write your own you need a good understanding of assembly (and C for HLSL shaders)

To be honest, the cube mapped water is probably your best option - Unreal II uses it!

@MusicMan

Quest3d Is Just a very differnt way of doing things.
Its easy to add effects to a scene, But I so far do not think it would be easy to make a complex game in.
Its fast, has path/keyframe/animation support built in a Virtual editor.(and thats very nice)
But you will have to merge all your surfaces to get blitz3d speed out of it, It doesnt do this for you like loading a high surface mesh into blitz.

I agree, Blitz3d is still the best choice for games.
If you want to make a multimedia presentation or a screensaver then quest3d is great.

Im not saying a game cant be made in quest, Just not by me as of yet. ;)

Zmatrix