OK, Roll Call! Who's Working On A 'Max 3D Game...

... using one of the wrappers to an existing 3D engine, or their own 3D engine?

just out of curiosity i'm wondering who is braving the waters and moving ahead with a project in the interim period between while waiting for the release of 'Max3D...

please state the name of the project (if it has one), type of game (genre), and the engine and wrapper you are using...

thx

--Mike

Me!!!

I have tests going in SOW and gg.Irrlicht (with IrrB3d, which is really an amazing piece of work) at the same time and I'm going to see which one I like best.

Irrlicht seems to be filled with all sorts of weird simplifying things that annoy me (like CreateCameraSceneNodeFPS which automatically makes an FPS style camera... presumably handy for debugging but seems to be a waste of space for the most part) and Ogre's extensive use of strings seems odd.

Other than that, they're both great!

Oh, and the test scenes are currently just grey cylinders which I occasionally mess up then revert and close.
Once I'm a bit more decided on an engine, I'll have some more pleasant stuff with specular maps and the like.
Newton, which is the physics engine that I'm now definietly using, was wrapped for BlitzMax and has examples under both engines. (Yay!).


Worklog / Basic Concept is here:
http://www.blitzbasic.com/logs/userlog.php?user=7206&log=666

I urge you to not waste your time reading that. I would rather not be strangled to death as a result of lost time.

Were working on a couple of projects using SOW. And so far it's a lot of fun to work with. One project is an App and the other a game.

The Gui functions in SOW is really nice and easy to use. And the Ogre mesh, materials etc are really good to play with, particularly if you use 3dsmax. Not sure about with other tools.

Yes, I'm working on a game with TrueVision3D ( my own wrapper, of course ) and - by inference - Newton for physics. No name or genre yet ( well it has a name and a genre, obviously, but it's such a large project that I'm carefully planning what information I release and when, the time has not yet arrived for the first info to be released. )

I don't see any reason to wait, to be honest. Maybe Max3D will be great, and maybe it won't. Best case scenario, I don't see it being any better than the best engines currently available, bearing in mind how many years of work those existing engines have had on them, so I've nothing to gain by waiting and I can't see the purpose of losing all those months waiting.

coolness... good to see a few 'Max based projects underway...

be nice to post a few small screenies (not to make this another graphics forum, just a real small 300 or 400x400 idea of your wip if you have any...

... or a link to your worklog or site.

--Mike

here's a little something for a SOW demo, Really simple rooms with stencil aditive lighting. With this shadow mode the light areas are calculated rather than the dark stencils, so shadows can overlap nicely without getting darker.

So in the example above, when the doors open light spills through the gap realisticly.

This is for a little FPS demo, that will show door triggers, swinging and sliding doors and elevators. The screenshot shows the scene rendered in 3DS max with an ogre viewport.



Heh, those axes that show where the lights are are rediculously large :(

woah... now that's cool indeed...

--Mike

Here's a quick rough gui skin, since SOW got pixel perfect skinnable buttons now. Not really 3D but still.

No name yet.

Combination turn-based and realtime rpg. Exclusively indoor non-random dungeon. More focus on statistics and realism than the current crop of action rpg's (Oblivion excepted).

Gone through several re-incarnations including PureBasic, ColdSteel, and now part way through transfering to Gabriel's TV3D wrapper.

I'm just testing out the OGL features, trying to hack it together to make some sort of engine.. :p
I have had a few tests.. successfully loading a .3ds file.. hehe
and currently just reading through the RedBook..

Hi all,

What is SOW?

Thanks in advance
:)

A a SOW is a female pig.
There are 3 demensions? WHAT!?

heh, its Simple Ogre Wrapper. Chris C's Free Answer to Aurora. It come quite far in the last month.

http://chris-camacho.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_details&gid=25&Itemid=26

http://chris-camacho.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=5&id=18&Itemid=28

I'm not working with Max3D in mind as such but I think there will be some important ways that my game - a blobby-objects based game (untitled) - could be enhanced in several ways once Max3D functionality comes along. I'm not using any other 3D stuff at the moment, though. I think shaders will be interesting. I'm mainly `keeping in mind` that Max3D is coming along sometime soon and `leaving space for it` in my design.

Thanks a lot.
:)

Not max but i had a little bit of time playing around with some Zitronenbälle by the end of this week (loop from Mr. Bowie)... http://spielwiese.marune.de/_uni/lurulu/index.html :O)

It's pretty posible that Max3D is OpenGL only, hardly to believe there'll be DX port of it, otherwise the Max2D library itself will need to follow up to DX9 too.

However all Max3D info were kept secret that's just a guess, I'll still buy it and use...

Yup, no hard choice made for an 3D engine though. We're busy making tools and content now.

I won't code a 3D game without BMX 3D!
As I hate to rely on third party stuff.

But BlitzMax is 3rd-party to the platforms that it runs on.
At least, I don't think Mark Sibly is an employee of Microsoft or Apple...
;)

i'm also gonna wait for the 3D module... i see no advantage to going the 'max/wrapper/other engine route, when i can usually just code em with c++...

i'll stick with B3D and suck up the shader stuff for now...

--Mike

Im glad youve done this "Looking at BMax thing" over the past week, its been informative. Now you can just sit and wait like the rest of us ;)

Heh, have you browser your Mod folder recently? BMax uses a LOT of third party stuff. You'd struggle to write a game with it without using some third party stuff IMO.


I'm pretty sure it's not at all possible that it's OpenGL only, because I'm pretty certain Mark said it wouldn't be :)

yeah... it was fun... nice to get everyones take on things...

as far as waiting... i don't have the luxury... the wife is suing me for divorce, the money is running out, and i'll be out on the streets soon, with my computers hooked up to the open panel in the light poles for power...

... and the bad thing is, where i live, there aint no light poles.

--Mike

Yah I'd say it wouldn't be likely for Max3D to be GL only. Although Max was GL-only originally, it's clearly got lots of DX support so would be silly to have it run on GL only when they're trying to please the crowd. I don't think it'd be that hard to convert Max2D to DX9.

Especially if they want to please professionals it must have DX. OpenGL is no acceptable solution on windows where half the users have Intel that does not work with OpenGL. *their driver got worse on OpenGL on windows with each iteration in 06

.. 'cept that the real pros use OGL.. ;)

One thing I noticed with SOW and Aurora, both used the Ogre3D engine. Rendering is consistently over 70% faster in DX9 than OpenGL. And this was even worse on older cards like my GF3 where DX9 was still playablem and GL simply was not.

Except that they don't. 9/10 ( probably more ) of all professional games are using DirectX. OpenGL on Windows is for John Carmack and people who can't figure out D3D ;)

Nah, OGL is more of a cross platform thing. They both have their own strengths.
DX is easier to deal with a lot of the time, but it's not going to surpass OGL unless they change the way that it works.

I'm playing with developing a DS Curling game (...weird, I know) using OGL. (Obviously, the DS does not do DirectX).

OGL is actually just an open standard of graphics functions and what they should do so that platforms remain similar to develop for.
Direct3D, on the other hand, is more specifically a graphics engine in the same way that that a modern OS has a built-in API to do graphical user interfaces.

In fact, here is a comparison:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Direct3D_and_OpenGL