TrueVision3D Module Updated

I'm finally satisfied that the TV3D developers have released a version which has less bugs than the last version, so I've taken the time to update the module to work with it.

EDIT: Anyone who gets the source should have received it by now. I emailed it out a little while ago. Send me an email if you don't get it.

You'll need to download the SDK from the TV3D site as always, and you'll probably need the November DX9 release.

Amon is kindly hosting the TV3D downloads now. So you have him to thank for not having to ask me for it in email any more. Please note that I'm not taking donations any more. Out of respect for those who did donate, the source code version will remain for them only. There is very little work required to update the module and Amon's hosting the files, so there's no cause to donate to me. If you feel an uncontrollable urge to give your money to someone then either email Amon and ask him if you can donate to him for hosting the files or give it the charity of your choosing.

http://www.kamikazekrow.com/tv3d/Module/Lite.zip

I'll upload the updated samples again soon. I can only find the old ones that Amon sent me at the moment, and I know I have the updated ones around here somewhere.

Do you mean the update released in November? After reading forum posts it seemed so buggy that I never even downloaded it.

I would really love to use TrueVision but I am too scared about bugs and developer inactivity.

The latest release works fine here. Downloaded today and tested with the new wrapper. The version before didn`t work for me. No i can develope my editor further. Horray!

Well, the second release in November. They actually released a second one shortly after the first, buggy one, which fixed all the new bugs. They just forgot to tell anyone or mention what had been fixed or any of that important stuff.

I've been using it for about a couple of weeks to confirm that it's truly bug-free, and I can confirm that it's as good it's ever been. Honestly, I'm pretty loud and obnoxious on the bug-fixing issues, because I'm doing this professionally, so it really hurts me when they ignore bugs for nine months. However, TV3D is so far ahead of everything else that I feel you really don't have much choice if you want all the eye candy, without compromising on speed or ease of use. It's compatible with pretty much anything with a 3D card in it, it has all the Blitz3D-style fixed function stuff. It will do all the shader stuff on ATI and Nvidia hardware, and seems to do most of it on Intel hardware too, which is impressive. It's very fast. It doesn't require a bleeding edge videocard even for the top eye-candy.

Of all the bugs I've reported and complained about, I only have one which hasn't been fixed, and it's a slight visual bug, not a crash or anything. So I suppose that's better than most engines. And I'm always being told that I'm pushing TV3D to the edge, so I guess most people wouldn't have come across these bugs anyway. There's not much to be scared about that. The wrapper is free, the engine is free for non-commercial use, so it's not like you have to lose any money if you find it doesn't suit you.

I think I probably best summed TV3D up when someone asked me about an animation bug which has since been fixed. I said simply that TV3D is the worst 3D engine out there, apart from all the others.

EDIT: Thanks for letting me know, Sigi. Glad everything's working well.

Got the email with the latest version. Gonna test it in a bit. Thanks! :)

No worries on me hosting the download and certainly no donations are needed or will be accepted.

Donations are not needed but if you feel the need to donate then please (as Gabriel says) pick a charity of your choice and make the donation to them.

Once I've tested the latest wrapper I'll edit my post and add to it if things don't work. :)

I have to check the forums again, I guess. I didn't realize that there had been a new release. Last time I checked things with TV3D I got the feeling that it was going down. Hopefully my feeling was unfounded.

I really, really want to use TV. It's so easy to use, there are so many cool features (for example, I think often neglected stuff like 2D is extremely good in TV, perhaps even better than Max2D), it's so fast and very compatible. What's not to love? :)

The down side is that I find it very tempting to go dot net with TV. Mainly because the debugging power of Visual Studio is on totally other realm if compared to BlitzMax. Blitz is a bit easier to deploy and doesn't require separate libraries for stuff like sounds and networking. With TV I'd lose Mac and Linux, but I just might be able to live with it.

Updated the download. Two small bugs in the wrapper fixed. Also it seems I left out some important files from the archive. Hopefully all fixed now. Any problems, please let me know.

There were no files missing from the Pro version. I haven't resent the Pro version as I don't like to keep sending out attachments over and over every time I make a change. If anyone wants the fixed version though, I have it packed up and waiting to send.

hi gabriel,thanks for the hard working!
i wonder what's the difference between the lite and the pro?
also,how can i get the pro?(without watermark?)
do i need to buy a license?
thanks

BTW:i have a personal server in asia and the speed is not bad,
with 160G space if you want to host something(even a full website),just call me
:P

The only difference with the Pro version is that you get the source code, and can therefore make changes yourself, if you wanted to. It was available to anyone who donated to me, but I'm not taking donations any more. I'm not aware of anyone using the source, I think they just donated to show their appreciation, so I'm assuming that there's no great desired to get the source from anyone.

If anyone desperately wanted the source, they could email me and we could work something out. Probably, to be fair to those who already donated, I'd let anyone else have the source in exchange for a charitable donationation of some kind. That way, I don't take anything, but I'm still being fair to those who supported me. But, like I say, I don't expect anyone will want or need it that badly. If you found a bug you needed fixing, pestering me about it ought to be reasonably effective.

now work!!!

thanks

got it,i will send you an email!!

check your email ,Gabriel :)

And the blitz world get another dimension ^^

Very good work Gaby ( I can call you gaby ? :) )

Judging on my experiments, tv3d module is very far from what I could expect, It actually runs 2 or 3 times faster than the blitz3d engine .

Now I think I have thought my future support for 3D , and that's all thanks to you.

You don't take cash anymore ? ...mmm ... ok, so I'm just happy I won't have to pay anything for this marvelous module :D . Many many many thanks !

+ >Landscape engine is a good approach for terrain, CLOD is probably the best way to get a large world running with lots of entitys.
+ >Bones management Inside ! That makes all the difference with blitz3D or whatever engines I tryed
+ >Enable to save as TVA or TVM , very good idea !
I thought about every time I managed to code exporter for this or that...
+ >Shadow system is maybe not very accurate, but works very fine. Enough for what I want ^^
+ >large available commands for picking and collisions
+ >bonus with the newton engine for physics...

maybe some negate points :
+ >not available for linux
+ >doc is really not enough, inefficient !!!
+ >problem while rendering meshes with alpha blending... but this is probably the same of every engines...


And now, I really enjoy with blitzmax :)
Another one : Thank you Gabriel ! Great work !!!

Bobysait:
do you mean you want to support the tv3d module?

For now, as we are trying to make a wrapper for the wrapper +> to have Blitz-Like syntax, and easier access for blitz users, maybe it's not the moment for support...

But probably in few months , yes :)

that's nice!!

There used to be BlitzMax TV3D tutorials. Are they available somewhere?

I lost them when I lost my old hosting. I still have the old versions that Amon sent me a while back, but most of them needed to be updated to work with new versions of TV3D. If anyone has the fixed, updated ones available and can email them to me, I'll gladly put them up on the webspace Amon gave me. If not, I'll try to find some time this week to fix all the old ones.

I believe I have some versions burned on a backup DVD. I think they are from last fall. I'll try to find that DVD in case it's of any use.

You can get the latest versions of the tutorials, up to date and working with the latest TV3D wrapper from my sig. There is also a working particle tutorial in there which I never got around to completing.
:)

Gabriel: What are the outstanding bugs in TV3D which are still causing you problems? Is it the glow not respecting multiple viewports? Are there any others to watch out for? I read recently that the path system is basically useless.

The glow wasn't respecting even a single viewport if you used anything but the default one, but that's apparently been fixed now. I haven't seen it yet, but I hope to test it later this week.

That's the last outstanding bug for me. If there was anything else it's either been fixed or I've found a way around it, because everything else seems to be fine.

I haven't used the path system at all. I wrote my own pathfinding.

Cool. Can't wait to see what you've written.

One day I should pull my finger out and complete them tutorials. I notice there's a bunch of other ones specifically for 6.5 that could do with being converted:

http://www.bartkuipers.com/index.php?id=27

Kenshin the link on your sig is not working.

Damn, my hosting provider (electronicfiles.net) had a hard drive crash and lost my account and uploaded files. I'll set up another account and upload the tuts again in a few hours. I'd do it now, but wifey is watching net tv (i.e scamming all my bandwidth).

Thanks for letting me know about it, and I'll post back here when they're ready for downloading again.
:)

Okay, the link in my sig works again now.

I've noticed that if I don't run a program using TV3D for a while, say about 2 hours, then attempt to run one, it can take up to 10 seconds before anything appears on screen. After this, if I quit and try to run another TV3D program (not necessarily the same one) then it starts instantly. If I let the pc idle for another few hours, then run a TV3D program it takes a long time again.

This happens with all the tutorials, even the 1st one which does nothing other than open a 3D window. While it's going through this 'pause' it seems as though the program has hung. After it finally starts going, fps is okay (>3000) and everything seems fine. Strange???

Anyone else noticed this? Got any ideas why it happens? Are there any workarounds?

Doesn't happen for me. Are you on that Windows 7 64 Bit OS in your sig?

Yeah. I was thinking about that too. I might try it on missus laptop tomorrow. That's running XP 32. It's no huge drama, just a bit strange.

Thanks for the update.

Where would be a trustworthy source of d3dx9_36.dll? I notice I have a several copies knocking around each of a different size, which is... suspicious. (Top marks to Gabriel, BTW -- the samples that come with TV3D don't run at all on my machine but the BMax wrapper works fine.)

Cheers for the tutorials kenshin, I wouldn't have time to check out the module without them.

The DirectX RunTime Web Installer will spot which files are missing and download just those.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&displaylang=en

The 'pause' doesn't happen on XP, so it must be a Win7 x64 Beta only 'feature'. I can't recall it ever happening on Vista x64. Hopefully it's only a Beta thing as I've tried fullscreen, windowed and also pointing TV3D at a BMax window, but regardless it still happens.

Not too concerned at the moment, but I'll be interested to see what happens in the full version of Win7 when it's released. Who knows? Maybe then there will be Win7 specific drivers for the gfx card which fix the problem.

Thankfully nothing else BMax or TV3D related seems to be affected by it.

Looks like it was a problem with the TV3D developer license system and me not updating drivers.

I just noticed that I had to regenerate a new license every time I rebooted otherwise I'd get exceptions/crashes similar to ones you'd get from a corrupt/incorrect license file. Fixed this by removing some unnecessary hardware (IDE Raid controller, 2 DVD drives) which were not being picked up in Device Manager (don't ask) and also updating drivers for my network controller. Now my license survives a reboot and the 'pause' is gone.

That's good news. They do seem to have had some issues with the developer licenses. I just hope the end user licenses are solid.

I spoke too soon. I just had that 'pause' again, but the license is still okay which is good.

I think they're dev license checks are too strict. I can understand a MAC address check, but anything else is overkill imho.

Oh well, here's hoping the pause automagically disappears in the Win7 final release.

What are the main reasons why you use TV in BlitzMax? I have thought about this before and I am once against thinking about this.

For me the biggest reasons are that I get audio, network and some other libraries for free with BlitzMax. With .Net I would have to buy them separately. Another bonus is that my application won't require dot net runtime (or does TV itself require it?).

On the other hand with BlitzMax I am dependant on updations of the wrapper, I can't be sure that all TV functions work (do they?) and I can't use TV "plugins" (like the one that lets you play SWF apps in textures). I also can't use any of the goodies that Visual Studio gives, like that handy debugger, intellisense or any dot net components or dialogs.

Are there some other reasons why you use TV in BlitzMax? I just want to be sure I am not missing something.

for me:
easy and fast,is what i want.
that's up to what you want!

I can code faster and more reliably in BlitzMax than I can in C++. I marginally prefer Blide to Visual Studio. I'm more comfortable with TList and TMap than I am with std::vector and std::map.


No it doesn't. TV is written in unmanaged C++.


Every function has been wrapped, and there are currently no reported bugs waiting to be fixed. I'm not prepared to say there aren't any bugs in there, because that's an absolute, and I can't possibly be 100% certain. All I know is that I fix bugs when they're reported or when I find them myself (I work with TV on a daily basis) and at the time of writing, I've fixed everything that's been found.


Blide most definitely has intellisense, both for BlitzMax itself and the TV3D wrapper specifically. You may need BlidePlus to get intellisense in third party closed source modules though, but BlidePlus is an exceptionally good product. It's well worth it.

I'm not thinking about going C++, but C# and VB.Net are options. Development with BMax is still going to be faster, tho.

I guess there is no way to get things like EvoGUI or EEGui to work in Max?

I have to get BlidePlus and try it out. Does it improve debugging in any way?

if somebody don't know,tv3d65 had a new version out!!!

http://www.truevision3d.com/forums/news_and_announcements/new_release-t18866.0.html

Thanks, I did spot it. I'm slightly concerned by the mention of using the DX10 compiler for shaders. I want to make sure that doesn't require having DX10 installed, and hence mean it only works on Vista. I can't imagine they would do something like that, but I want to be sure before I update the wrapper and people want to lynch me for breaking their work on everything but Vista.