Sell us 3D.

Basicly it's time for us to go 3D, so in the spirit of extra dimensionality, we're looking to purchase a solution costing no more than 6000 USD, which is well suited to work from within BlitzMAX.

So give us your elevator pitch along with 5 "bullet points" outlining which elements of your solution you think is most important.

For what type of game/application?

And which platforms?

Third person Action/Adventure type game.

Whichever your solution works on. At this stage we're not particular picky.

hahahaha


/troll

Hmmmm... so do you already HAVE one picked out or do you want people to hype whatever they have? And it has to work with BMAX, right? To me it's bit funny that you don't have even the platform locked... bit hard to start with "anything goes" attitude, too many options.

To me Blitz3D is almost perfect, but I'd need/want shaders and some extra stuff like shadows. As it is I don't have what I need and the alternative languages are all buggy somehow, either too expensive or... well, buggy. So I'm slogging along with my B3D until something better comes along.

..actually there is very nice stencil shadow libs for B3D, with selfsmooth and other features..supporting animated B3D as well as MD2..whats great..

Blitz3D Rocks !!! :)

I think Flameduck meant that it doesn't matter on what platform the 3D development environment runs on..
As long as the engine has an interface to BlitzMax, they can develop on windows/mac/linux.

I'm pretty sure they want to use some sort of engine which can be compiled on "any" platform, so that they can easily port it when it's done.






[edit] for 6000 USD, I'm wondering if Mark is precompiling an early development version of Max3D?!?! ;) hehe [/edit]

The later.

Not nessecarilly.

Because it doesn't matter what platform it's for. We don't need to be locked down to a specific platform at this stage. Our investors do not include anyone who has a reason for locking us down on a single platform. When you have money invested into a project, you don't have the luxury of platform religion, unless that platform is one you own.

So until one of our investors expresses a desire to develop for a specific platform, we couldn't care less.

For you maybe. People who have large ammounts of money riding on this, like options as it means that even if the project tanks, the technology can still be recycled into other projects.

Well that would be nice, but is not a requirement. If someone payed us large amounts of money for a Linux exlusive, that's what we would do.

The 6000 USD was a ballpark figure. We're open to negotiations. After all 6000 USD is only about 1.5 months salary for a developer. Anything we can't do ourselves in that time span is an elligible candidate.

At the moment we are currently considering 4 commercial engines and evaluating MiniB3D, but there is still plenty time for anyone to get in the game. Deadline is Jan. 22nd.

I'm not sure it's a game that anyone would want to be involved in, honestly. You're developing a game and haven't even decided on the platform to ship on yet? I can't imagine what the design doc looks like at this point.

I'm not sure it makes any difference..
Designing a game doesn't make it platform specific.

Locking it to a certain platform, even before choosing an engine and writing a single line of code, isn't very smart if you ask me..

That's exactly how most games are developed. Not saying it can't work, but you generally know what platform you're shooting for before designing the feature set.

Anyway, sorry to de-rail.

You'd be surprised.

We haved a time-to-market of about 2.5 years. A lot of things can change in that time. It doesn't seem useful to lock into any particular platform at this time. Particularly when it isn't nessecary.

Or necessary even!

Did you know Wii Dev-kits are 1200 GBP?

And with how much awesome fun i've had using the Wiimote on my PC, I'd pay that easily. It's the "Ninty Seal of Quality" that'll cost ya...

For some reason I always get that one wrong.

No I didn't. The project is still very much in it's early days tho'. I still have a couple of contacts at Nintendo (I think) so I'll ask around.

Cygnus: http://www.wiili.org/forum/download-windows-driver-here-t294.html

BoomBoom, I'm already using it on my pc. I was saying that i'm having fun, and would like to develop for the wii :)

:) wouldn't we all...:)

We bought Nebula 2.0 commercial version Source Code last year for nearly 4000 EUR (with maya toolkit and sourcecode of the toolkit).

Don't buy this one, the open source version is almost as good, and although the engine structure is really good, there are persistent bugs that get never fixed and that due to the complexity of the engine you could take months to find.

Reality Engine from artificial studio was (back then) second on our list (it was 8000 US$), but no developer on our project was willing to give C# a try, so Nebula went first.

I still have the license for Nebula but I hardly ever look at using it again...

what about truevision3d or the engine that jedive was making,
coldsteel engine

One collar, two sleeves. (In that order)

That's not all you get wrong. If you ever use the word 'where' in place of the word 'were' again I will hunt you down.... and kick your ass. :)

@FlameDuck
So what did you choose?

Find out what 3D engine Halo is using. It looks pretty good imo.

Just use minib3d (kleptos version).

What's significant about kleptos version over the one from the minib3d thread?

VBOs and shader support :-)

Leadwerks most likely. Unity3D seemed a bit too much like "Pictionary Programming". Max3D doesn't seem like it's happening any time too. MiniB3D has too much that's broken, and no immediate way to fix it (unless you're Simon).

Also Leadwerks Engine got a very well response from the investors.

At this point the only thing that remains to be clarified is whether Leadwerks costs more than wrapping Cipher.

Really? With all due respect, isn't that still bit WIP for serious dev purposes?



If you mean 6000 USD that would be a quite heavy price tag IMO, at least around here - surely not many could afford to pay such sums for a 3D engine.

Quite possibly. But we have a time-to-market of 2 years, and are confident that it will mature in that time.

Well 6000 USD is about 2 man months worth of salary. Which basicly means that unless one man can wrap Cipher in less than 2 months, Leadwerks wins. It's a cost benefit thing.

It seems a bit risky to base 2½ years of development on $6000, a few weeks of testing, and an unfinished engine. But I hope you make the right choice.

TBH the Quake 3 engine is $5000, if thats not a tried and tested engine I wouldnt know what is.

If you want to elaborate on your 'too much is broken' comment in the MiniB3D forum, please be my guest.

May i ask what "Pictionary Programming" is? I've never heard that before.

Yeah, what's broken with minib3d?
I guess if you "support" simon a little bit (:-P) he'll have the time to push minib3d even further (like some physics support...).

Flame, what do you plan to actually develop in 3d?

Almost the entire Blitz3d command set AND the OOP features of BlitzMax. The word 'mini' seems out of place.
MiniB3D is a tremendous bit of work and a real reason for me now to purchase BlitzMax. There doesn't seem to be much broken with it at all judging from what has been posted - quite the contrary in fact.

I've just looked up the feature sets of the engines, sneaked a bit through the forums and honestly i don't understand your decision but i wish you good luck!

Just what Ricky said.

I can only say one thing. Buy the Lawmaker engine!
www.darkroomstudios.com

The 6000 USD was a ball park figure. It does not represent available funds, nor does it represent an absolute limit of what we're willing to pay. As for it being an unfinished engine, that's fine too. It already does everything we're gonna need for this phase of development, so there's really nothing to fuss about there either.

It's not about being tried and tested. It's about flexibility, useability and productivity (effectiveness and efficiency). Quake 3 lost to Cipher, well before this thread was even posted.

Pictionary is a game where a person draws something, and everyone else has to guess what it is. Pictionary Programming is where you draw something, and the computer has to guess what you wanted it to do. It is (with the exception of Microsofts Visual languages) almost entirely in the domain of 5th generation languages.

I'm not at liberty to say. Signed an NDA you see. I'm afraid third person action/adventure is going to have to do for now. Hopefully later I'll be able to say more.

I never said it wasn't, and meant no disrespect to Simon.

Well you're entitled to your opinion.

Sorry. Too late. It's either Cipher or Leadwerks.

Has anybody used the "Lawmaker engine"?

www.darkroomstudios.com

Ah okay but now i don't get it from the content. What has this in common with programming languages like C#,Javascript or Phyton?

FlameDuck: Cipher cant be licensed anymore.

CodeGit: Yes i use LawMaker. Its great!

Got a link or something to substantiate that claim? That's not what their website says: http://www.cipherengine.com/

no? http://www.cipherengine.com/reg/buy.php

What about TV3D?

Very fast, very capable and shader driven (if you want it to be).

I can't help myself but it seems to me that whoever did that "research" actually didn't do quite a lot beside of a superficial observation.

Lol, seems like FlameDuck didn't investigate that good. Otherwise he would have seen that the registration site was taken down.

By the way: Cipher is old stuff, not as old as Torque maybe. But nevertheless old. And it won't be developed further. Cipher would be a very bad choice. Leadwerks has not even been released yet. I wouldn't count on both of them.

Maybe you should take a look at Luxinia http://www.luxinia.de

Well actually I already had a license, so I didn't think I would have needed to register it again. But yeah, I haven't been following it very closely lately (been busy with uni for the last few years). Guess it's leadwerks then.

What about Truevision 3d 6.5? You may aswell go for something that is tried and tested and which has been in development for years than go for anything else.