3Impact Vrs Others in Bmax

Question, How fast is 3Impact?
I downloaded the Demo, and on simple things it had a framerate a lot less than a comparible scene in B3D with EasyTok (Felixs' Tokamak wrapper).

I understand that the main sales pitch of 3Imapct is its simplicity, but that goes out the window if the potential Buyee is comfortable enough to use PhysX or Newton.

So to anyone who has used 3Impact and Irrlicht/Newton or MiniB3D/PhysX or etc in Bmax (Any Graphics engine with any Physics engine)
Could you give some indication as to what a speed comparison would be between them.

(That is, Im willing to putup with a longer dev time, cos Im not going to finish anything anyway)

Are you asking about the graphics, the physics or both?

Both

Im asking as a joint unit of (say) "irrlicht and Newton" or any other Graphics engine-Physics Engine pairing, how do they compare in speed to 3Impact.

As I said I found B3D and EasyTok to be faster than 3Impacts, demo and I dont want to pay for 3Impact and then find that MiniB3D and Newton would be faster.

Ok, so this limets the number of people who might know, (What with them needing to have used 3Impact), but Gman didnt know, and hes the one I would have most expected to.

Newton is a little bit faster than ODE, in my experience. ( Better too. ) Not sure how Irrlicht is for speed, but 3Impact is pretty mediocre for speed. It's decent, nothing more. I'd say performance would be better with Newton and a decent graphics engine. Which would include the B3D SDK, if that does all you need.

I only have experience with 3impact.. speed is relative I guess,.. 3impact demos are usually locked to "physics" loop which IMO runs 75 fps so thats to top fps what you get.. none of demos are very powerhungry, except mayby some shader related with slow vid card. So do you get some really low framerates or how you compare "slowness" to other solutions?

"Not sure how Irrlicht is for speed"
Irrlicht appears to be very fast. I managed to run the collisions / quake level shader demo on a 700 Mhz duron w/intel 828xx horrorcard and it ran very smooth considering how bad the pc was.

Not used 3impact as its windows only.

3Impact is under continous development, but the price ($199) can't refelect the functionality/quality and basically you can think it as an DirectX + ODE wrapper, some free 3D Engines has such functions built in so I suggest you to think twice befor buying it.

And the yearly re-subscription fee is annoying, each release may break old code, considering you can't get the source, it's not best option even it's API is really well organized or something.

3impact is a very capable engine but does have a few querks. Here is my list of stuff missing from 3impact and what I would like to see before I ever go back to it.

1) Currently only Spheres can be used to setup a .spg collision group. This would make things difficult for instance if you wanted to have stable stacked crates etc.

2) More collision bodies are needed like box collision.

3) There's no support currently for custom post process effects like bloom, blur and render to texture is not possible.

4) There is a current lack of a proper FPS camera setup. The current implementation is laggy and overly complicated

5) There rules for creating models to be used with 3impact are a little strict as you need to make sure of a few things in order for your model to properly work with 3impact and its physics. Other engines don't have these strict guidlines.

6) Only .x support for the time being as it's the only way to get your model in to the converter to output spg and pol files.

7) There is no option to remove physics and still have the cool collision commands 3impact offers. Everything needs to either be a dynamic body or for Terrains and levels a .pol file.

There are other things but I can't quite think of them.

Below are my ratings for 3impact.

Useability : 8/10
Simplicity : 8/10
Shader support : 7/10 - When they add support for bloom etc I'll bump this up.
Physics support : 9/10
Networking : 9/10
Features : 9/10

:)

There is a yearly subscription fee and an initial purchase cost of $200 and as yoko said, 3impact is being constantly improved. I personally would wait a bit untill they improve the shader support and add more collsion groups.

Other than that 3impact is a Blitz3D 2.0 physics, network, Graphics and shader driven engine that you will have fun with.

Got to say, after the 3DRAD fiasco I wouldn't have anything to do with those people again.

What 3dRad fiasco?

I've found the 3impact devs to be dedicated to the engine and always respond to any emails you send them. The forum is also very helpful.

The forum might be okay, but that'll be down to the users.
I personally remember all the bullsh*t and promises for 3DRAD6 which kept me and many other people hanging on for a long time only then to be told the towel was being thrown in and everybody should try 3impact instead. It's obvious this was the plan for a long time in a bid to get a whole new user-base and many new customers. Stinky, mealy-mouthed business practise in my book. Plus - the 3impact demo seemed to be a clunky, cumbersome affair to me, aside from the limited physics system there was no reason to even look twice at it.

You would recommend Truevision3d Gabriel?

Even I would suggestion TV3D if you want something within BM and only target Windows.
At least until Flow is testable which might become a second solution.

(miniB3D has no DX, so not a really usefull solution as it will not run on Intel Vista Systems at all, Dreamotion is too bugged)

I'm guess he means all those promises about a 3DRAD 6.0 from a few years back...in which turned out that 3drad got discontiued altogther, which recently a few months ago got picked up again by a new developer...

Irrlicht is a very capable engine especially being free, but I've used RenderWare 3.6 in the past running examples about 750 up to +1000fps of which are more complicated than Irrlichts examples, whereas Irrlicht and other free engines including 3Impact run around 150fps - 200fps at best. So I'd say the answer is, Irrlicht and 3Impact are not really capable for commercial high level games, far too slow. Perfect for anything else.

This is using a Geforce 6600gt on a p4.