A huge +2 Millions poly spaceship in C4 engine

Since I'm still waiting max3d (more than 3 years now) I was shopping for a 3D engine and I've played a bit with C4 engine demo.
The quality of this engine is very good. Here is a scene I've put together in 5 hours with no programming, no other 3d engine was able to load this mesh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0a26e4x7-o

A picture :

Nice :)

Engines don't render 2 million polygons, graphics cards do. To someone who understands how 3D engines work, this isn't impressive - it just means the engine can use 32-bit mesh indexes, which any modern engine should be able to (Ogre can, and it's free).

What would be impressive if it used occlusion and LOD, with pixel shaders applying realistic shading effects like AO and parallax or bump mapping.

AO shading and Paralax or even bumb mapping are doing bad result on a ship of this size. It generates messy shadows, and the bump mapping or parallax fx are only seen when you are very close to a wall. When from the distance it adds blinking pixels, so I simplified the shaders. I've just a normal map with specular a little ambient in a shader. I can render a picture with a parallax shader if you wish.
Also Ogre could not load this ship (collada format) while C4 did. Ogre just crashed so did NeoAxis which is made with Ogre.
No converter would convert the mesh in a Blitz3d compatible format.
C4 takes 3 seconds to load the ship as shown in this video... Even 3ds max takes more than 20s...

..while i like this ship, Im not that impressed since i use to pull off 4 million polys in B3D with no problems (respecting separated meshes cant be more than 50K each)..it had also just one big texture applied to it, but thing worked well..

Nikko: What I mean is even though it can render your ship model, it's not practical, is it? Just because an engine can tell your video card to render 2 million polygons doesn't mean it's a good engine - just that your impractically high res model works with it.

For example if I was to render 2 million polygons to the screen, and I got 100 FPS, it would prove nothing about the engine - just that my video card can render X polygons at X fps with whatever effects are used.

On the other hand, if your engine renders those 2 million polygons at an unusually high frame rate due to LOD optimizations, occlusion, etc., then that would be a sign that the engine is helping out. Simply drawing 2 million raw triangles to the screen really isn't a good idea in most cases, and usually doesn't prove anything about the engine.

For example, the engine I'm working on (built on top of Ogre) can currently render various planets consisting of 800 million to 12 billion polygons. These planets run at 500-700 FPS at 1280x1024 8xAA on my PC, due to various optimizations the engine makes, obviously.

Anyway, the point is, the fact that C4 can load a 2 million polygon model means nothing of value really. What's more important is what occlusion/LOD optimizations C4 uses and how they'll suit your game, what kinds of effects it can do, etc.

That said, I do agree C4 is an extremely good engine, although I don't know enough about it to tell whether or not it will work well for a space type game (my impression is that it was designed for FPS-style games, but I could be wrong).

C4 is too slow for low-to-mid spec computers, I tried it last month and I trun back to Irrlicht.

It's possible to use under 1000 poly for a cool looking spaceship btw, I can save 1,999,000 poly for other things :P

The most important thing about C4 is that I get it done.
Having a state of the art 3d engine is cool, like Unigine for example.
But the 3d engine you will use to do your next game is the one that is
- stable
- quick to understand
- powerful
That's why a lot of people still stick with Blitz3D.

Some features in C4 that are quite amazing for the price.
- the editor, once you get use of it, it is an incredible time saving
- the pipeline, it loads Collada and does it well period
- you get the full source code of everything
- free updates forever
- very stable and bug free
- works on PC/MAC and Playstation 3 (XBOX in development)

The actual demos of the engine really sucks, it took me a while to really love it.

Also something else, C4 is a game engine not a renderer like Irrlicht, that means :
- 3d sound support with fx (like reverb...)
- multiplayer built in, robust
- physic engine, even for water (boyancy?)
- voice over IP for real time in game chat
- clothes/flags animation support
- video in game support
- a powerful gui editor
- a powerful virtual terminal editor
- path finding, and cinematic
- powerful portal system
- pre configured weapons, and particle for games like weather consdition (rain, wind), explosions, grenades, flares, starfields etc...

and a lot of things done automatically, texture compression, bump map, normal maps, specular maps etc regenerated on the fly and automatically, choose for each objects the way to calculate the shadows (shadow maps are caculated on the fly)

ah I forgot, multizone fog spaces : http://www.terathon.com/wiki/index.php?title=Fog_Spaces

It get to be known more... the v 1.5 will be released this month and will bring everything fancy about shaders and post processing, plus a powerful terrain with the tools to play with them... hot!

..Elemental 2 engine..free, open source, full next gen features, editors provided as well as source code for it and engine, and running on everything..Windows, PSP, Xbox360, PS2, PS3, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS...and fully LUA scriptable with provided LUA editor/debugger..few games done with it already....C4 I dont think so that you can get for 200 bucks for PS3..read license..

@Naughty Alien:

I checked Elemental 2, I only find Windows distribution and SVN trunk for Win32, how do I find other platform builds, Thanks.

Of course you'll pay for having the Playstation conversion, but if you do so, you'll have a contract with Sony or a Publisher and that will not be a problem.

about Elemental 2 engine.

You can't compare Apples and Oranges. Read what I said before, having the features is not enough, it must work.

A game will be used by thousands (millions?) of people. You do not want to create something that is not working everywhere.

Blitz3d was a great solution, very solid and very stable. That's why so many people have made great games and published them.

Now Max3d is another story. It will takes more than 3 years to be at C4 level of stability and support. Where will be C4 in 3 years? Well I hope my game will be already released and selling!

>>A game will be used by thousands (millions?) of people. You do not want to create something that is not working everywhere.<<

Few game titles released already with Elemental 2 ...check their web site

I'm not sure I understand this Elemental 2 engine. The website is confusing.
Is it the engine that was used to make Age Of Empire III?

That's what I said..

Age of Empires 3 builds on the Age of Mythology engine.

Good ol' bumb mapping... works every time ;)