Hi, I need the following features:
- robust boned mesh support with ability to animate it by moving the bones
- great shadows support. Hard edged stencil shadows are fine, but the shadow engine must work correctly, ie objects block light
This is basically what I need for my project as the emphasis is very much on lighting and shadows, I consider this more important than any other feature. Any suggestions on what to use? I would like to code in blitzmax if possible but will consider another engine. I would be using unity3d now if it didn't require a mac to develop on.
I found a few engine with reasonable shadow support, but can't find one with the bone support yet, most of them support up to mesh deformation and blending only.
A few with possible hit....
http://devnet.sylphis3d.com/http://u3d.xinto.net/And a side note, I can't bother to use OGRE myself but I remember recent update they introduced such thing in the SDK, contact Cygnus if you want to use OGRE in BMax.
If you need it now, want an easy and working solution with a future perspective then i would go for unity and spare myself devmaster and testing out this and that. But as you've written you would need to buy a Mac.
Does anyone know how far approximately Cygnus and Evaks Ogre based Engine for BlitzMax is away from beeing finished?
We scheduled to be feature complete for christmas, and have set a release date for feb 1st. Should have something for people to play with between those dates.
We can't wait to get it released either, since we really want to start making proper games again :)
Hey cool, i wish you good luck! I guess it would be nice having something to play around during the holiday time...
"Locust" is after a good one there:
, ie objects block light
One of the things I want as well - as it is such a pain to manually calculate this into my engine with calculated manual entity lighting.
I mention that as I know people must have probably worked on solutions ("halo" etc) - I'd pay for such a system. I mean surely it can be incorporated into a shadow system?
heh, worst thing about modern shaders is that you have to set up your lighting on a per material basis. Making shaders is pretty tricky, and to be fast shaders need to be optimized and often tailor made to a specific task.
theres about 14 combinations of shadows you can use in ogre, and they all have their quirks. If your not using more than the basic modulative stencil shadows then a fairly good knowledge of shaders is required. Some shadows like Additive shadows require you to have
1. Ambient or depth-only pass
2. Lighting pass with 'iterate once_per_light'. Only lighting components, any textures must solely be concerned with lighting e.g. normal maps. No diffuse maps here.
3. Diffuse pass (1 or more). This modulates with the light that's been built up.
You have to set the number of lights on a per material basis, whether lights can have attenuation etc. Luckily Ogre has some auto_paramaters to take care of much of this for you. But for artists that arent familiar with coding, shaders can be a royal pain. Most people just use a handfull of shaders that are avaliable in the public domain and are restricted to those.
A lot of the fancy effects in modern engines are post effects done globaly to the entire screen after your meshes and materials are rendered. In Ogre these are called compositors.
Anyway, Shaders are a lot more complicated than fixed function, but with the complexity you get a lot of fine control.