Blitzmax or C# 3D engines

Hiya,

I need/want to try playing around with a robust 3D engine for C# or Blitzmax. Any advice? must have great terrain, picking and the usual stuff...

Look no further than Using C# with TV3D 6.5.

The ogre based Neoaxis engine is coming along leaps and bounds at the moment. Really impressed with what has been done with it in a short time.

http://www.neoaxisgroup.com/history.htm

The Dark Basic 3d Engine is now available for c# net.
Having said that, I've never gotten the C++ version to work

The neoaxis engine looks good but it doesnt appear to be available to download, which isnt much help.

Grab the demo. :)

did you look at the license thread? theyre talking about 1000's for licensing.

I would recommend TV3D - unlike all the other engines out there, it actually makes sense, has a decent art pipeline, friendly developers etc. I'd recommend C# and TV3D.

I would recommend TV3D only if you care to use version 6.2. I've purchased it almost 2 years ago and have been told (very soon) since then for their 6.5 release - which natively supports C#.

If you are serious to develop a game and need something that you will deliver in few months, do not pick TV3D. If you are considering dabbling in, get $150, buy TV3D license, use their closed beta DLLs and be happy.

It is such a great engine in terms of design and power, just lacks the "business" end of it to bring it to market.

Have a look into the "Leadwerks" engine too. Very nice.

www.leadwerks.com

IPete2.

heh, TV3D 6.5 was suppose to be released "soon" since 2003. Everyone reccomends it because its the only viable engine that supports C# and actually works. Needless to say, I didn't like it too much.

For Ogre stuff tHere's also mogre which is managed ogre and lets you use various languages, thats pretty cool.
OgreDotNet, but most prefer mogre
Ogre4J uses Java
PyOgre a python variant.

Lots of commercial games are being done with ogre now, about 4 released in the last couple of months, and a handful more are quite far along.

The newest version thats out at the end of the month has some cool features for multiple processors, like threaded streaming media through your scene manager. More shadow types, instancing on the GPU that reduces the number of batches that have to be processed (so surfaces count isn't such a big deal. Ton's of other stuff.

I basically need an engine which is as simple as Blitz3D but has a lot better in terms of terrain design, being able to paint texures on it which are tiled, a major design flaw in existing terrains.

That, and the language Blitz3D uses are the reasons I don't use Blitz3D. Only Blitzmax will do if I may be honest. Its a lovely language let down by complete lack of good 3D engine.

MiniB3D is fun but not realistic.

If you can wait until mid april the devs of 3Impact will be releasing an all new version of their Engine. It will have full blown shader support, you can wright your own shaders and it's DX9. DX10 will not be a problem to upgrade to as they have completely rewriten it from the ground up.

3Impact is still one of my favourite 3D Engines. :) The best part also is that gman has wrapper for it so you can use it with BlitzMax.

ok, Ive finally gotton DarkSDK (now GDK), to work, and its OK. I dont know if there is a Demo of the C# (net) version.

Amon, 3Impact still dont have support for lightmaps??

Yes it does have support for lightmaps. Everything I've lightmapped in Gile[s] and exported in to the 3impact engine looks fine. :)

hey, but i thought 3Impact doing lightmapping by use of second mesh (identical like one with textures) what means double poly count?? Or they already add lightmap texture feature like B3D?

That was fixed ages ago dude. :) People started complaining about Multi-Texturing and the devs caved in and added it. I think it was added to version 4.2.

:)

oh..I cant find any info on web site...what format is used then for geometry export (if you using Giles for such a purpose) ?

Export from Gile[s] in to .X format and then use the 3impact converter to convert the .x file to the native 3impact format. Or Just use .X. :)

It wasn't in 4.2 that it wwas added but in 4.1. Link below

http://www.3impact.com/3Impact_Engine/forum/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=118

..but X format can support only 1 UV map set?? Or Im wrong? I mean when you export X from Giles, you will have 2 meshes, one with textures and another one with lightmap only?? So?

I don't know the intricasies of it all Naughty. What I do know is that you can have alightmapped sene in 3impact.

You seem more technically knowledged than me anyway so you're more than likely right with what you say. :)

I don't know what the terrain is like in either, because I never use terrain, but I agree with Amon's choices. TrueVision is my favourite by a mile, but 3Impact is a really nice choice too. I think the 3Impact demos have some terrain stuff too, and GMan's 3Impact wrapper is just great. What I particularly liked was how easy it was for me to add in additional features not already part of 3Impact, like TFormVector and those sort of things.

For C#, I would recommend an engine based on Ogre, such as Axiom. I'm currently working with Ogre (assembling my own game engine), and it is very fast, powerful, and feature rich.

I could list Ogre's outstanding features, but then my post would be several pages long ;)

Here's a little screen shot of one of my Ogre projects:

(Click image for video)

And yes, each tree seen above is a full 3D mesh (although some advanced optimization techniques are used to get that 152 FPS, of course :) )

What's the art pipeline like for Axion/Ogre ? On the website it only mentions the proprietary Ogre mesh format.
The 3Impact engine seems really nice given that it incorporated physics and networking - it has a very extensive list of features/commands as well.
True Vision engine also looks good but will 6.5 ever be actually released ??
There's also now the realistic option, on Windows platforms, of just using straight managed DirectX with c#.

Sorry for the delay in my response, it seems I missed this post.


Axiom/Ogre only supports it's built in .mesh format. There are, of course, advantages/disadvantages to this:


+ There are excellent exporters available for almost every major commercial/freeware modeler

+ Ogre's .mesh format is extremely optimized and loads VERY fast - no parsing is required like .x and other mesh formats

+ There's no need to worry about if a specific feature in your exporter matches with Ogre's importer features (otherwise it can really be a pain debugging why your models don't show up right in engine A, but do in engine B)

+ Ogre meshes do not contain embedded material properties - this means that you don't have to keep re-editing your meshes in your modeler and re-exporting to get them to look right in your game - simply modify the material script and the changes take effect immediately.

+ Also because material properties aren't embedded in the mesh, you can use any of Ogre's rich set of material features, whether or not your modeler supports it or not (I used to be annoyed at how my modeler didn't support masked textures for trees, but not any more - simply add one line of text to the material script, and voila! )


- If you are using a obscure modeler, an Ogre mesh exporter may not be available.

- Many commercially/freely available model packs may have to be converted to Ogre's mesh format