Which 3d engine for BlitzMax looks most promising?

During some texture work i somehow was wondering which might be the best 3d solution for BlitzMax in a year or so.

o Will Max3D get into a useful shape in a reasonable time?
o Is Leadwerks about to win the race because the developer is fulltime behind it?
o Will Flow beeing updated often enough and with enough steam?
o Will people interested in 3d simply leave BlitzMax?
o Any other option?

What do you think? Sadly you can't make polls here...

I'm liking Leadwerks a lot, but it's not one for those who want backwards compatibility with 6 and 7 year old cards.

I don't think Max3D is a good choice *at the moment* <cue flaming>

I don't see why people interested in 3D should leave Max. There are plenty of 3D options out there that seem every bit as easy to use as B3D was.

o Max3D will remain cutie and experiment puppet for some time
o I think Leadwerks will take over once 8800GT turn to be low end and whole thing become multiplatform
o Flow looks really handy thing and getting my vote at the moment as well as Xors3D, both very very nice
o I do believe BMAX will remain nice to work with, in fusion with one of good 3D extensions
o for other option..hmm..I cant see much space..Unity3D on PC...

I think in terms of promise, Max3D has the most to offer because it's open source. It may not be the most feature-complete right now, perhaps even the farthest from it, but that leaves a lot of room for designing it and branching it as you see fit. The more complex it gets, the harder it will become for others to do that, and you may find that now is the best time to be involved, even if only in discussing where it goes.

Perhaps ironically, I'm not at all involved in it.

I think if when BlitzMax was released it had a full 3D engine, there would have been much less desire to create another engine for it, and because of Max3D's absence I think this created an atmosphere of `lets make a 3D engine ourselves`, so I think there's always going to be several solutions to choose from now and Max3D will have to compete with them.

Sure but then we wouldn't have seen BlitzMax until ....? No, Mark for sure did the right thing here, the only fault in my opinion was the whole GUI stuff.

I know that some have changed their tools already and others will follow. Some of them will return because they just don't feel well with any other tool or simply when a working and convincing 3d solution is available for BlitzMax and quite some people just don't like learning something new.

What i liked in Leadwerks is that he invested some time into tutorials, although the BlitzMax videos are behind the C/C++ ones.

What i'm not sure about is if Mark is making a game just for a change or if there is a purpose behind like working himself more out of the Blitzthing. I hope it's the first and not the second.

I would also check Irrlicht and TrueVision3D.

o Will Max3D get into a useful shape in a reasonable time?
I think it will be very difficult for there to be a single Max3D entity any time soon.
o Is Leadwerks about to win the race because the developer is fulltime behind it?
Only for higher-spec machines.
o Will Flow beeing updated often enough and with enough steam?
Can't answer this but it looks (not used it) promising.
o Will people interested in 3d simply leave BlitzMax?
They've either gone, using a 3D module or still with B3D.
o Any other option?
I think this depends on what your requirements are.

I use BlitzMax usually for some smaller projects, and C for larger projects.
Leadwerks, Max3D, Flow3D work with BlitzMax and C, Max3D just needs a little startup code for C (but Mark might move the remaining BlitzMax code to C also), and Flow3D can be used via Ogre3D in C.

I use Leadwerks for serious large game projects, Ogre3D for old machine projects, and for Max3D I still have to see what it's area of strengh will be.
At least it's very interesting to experiment with for now, until it gets enough features to make a game with it.

Another interesting engine would be a DirectX11 only engine for Windows 7, but I haven't seen any yet.

Im going with Xors3D, I am a registered LW2 user but Its reliance on powerful modern hardware is limiting my prospective audience too much... possibly something for the future when the average user catches up to its hardware requirements. It simply does not work on any of my 2 laptops (Go 6200), which is a small thing but important for me.

Xors3D flies, even on my lowest speced computer(Amd 3200, Go 6200, 1 meg), has shadows, physics, shaders, particles systems etc... plus the full Blitz3D command set converted to DX9, which is such a great bonus for me personally, being an old Blitz3D fan who waited for years, in vain, for BRL to accomplish this. Works with B3D, BMax, C/C++ and GLBasic(thanks to heiko)...

It also uses PhysX as its Physics lib, which is a revelation when coupled with the NV PhysX driver, which powerfully accelerates the physics using spare GPU hardware if available.

Downside, well... its officially incomplete, they are adding new features, although it feels pretty complete to me. All the features I mentioned already are mature and work great. Oh, and the documentation needs work.

Again, the decision may depend on your time-scale and game type. If you see your game being released a year to two years down the line, the LW should prove a good investment. If you want to tap the largest current market share, then I would go for Xors3D at the cost of possibly missing out on LW advanced rendering features.

LW = http://www.leadwerks.com
Xors3d = http://www.rubux.net

Actually DX9 restricts a much larger current market share than SM 3.0 does.
I read that in 2008 9.7 million Macs were sold, and the growth is 37.7% for Mac vs 15.2% for PC.
That's for sure more customers than customers who don't have a SM 3.0 capable graphics card (even the MacBook Pro has one).
And in addition DX9 also doesn't work for Linux gamers on the PC.

Actually DX 9.0c supports SM3.

Xors3D is not reliant on SM3 to function(Unlike LW), it can use SM3 or older shader models if your clients hardware can't handle SM3.

Anyway, my decision was to go with Xors3D, I still see myself using LW in the future, so I dont resent that purchase in any way.

Actually there does not exist a single gfx card in the current Apple computer lineup which does not support SM3. Only the iPod and iPhone don't. The problem is more the driver quality/speed of the Intel powered ones in the Mini and the 2400XT in the cheapest iMac configuration.

Still the marketshare below SM3 is very large.

-> http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats/pages/web-all-gfxseries.html

That's a bit irrelevant, since my point was that DX9 does not support Mac or Linux, which are more computers than computers which don't have SM3 (which LE2 needs). If you want an engine which works on basically all computers today, use Ogre3D (=Flow3D on BlitzMax).

Lumooja,

What are some of the biggest reasons why one should use Ogre3D instead of Irrlicht?

@Errors: I haven't used Irrlicht for a while, but it might be just as good as Ogre3D, or even better.

What is the pricing of Xors3d?

nah its not as good as ogre ;P. The dec release only just introduced VBO's so you can store a mesh on the GPU. Which Ogre has had since almost day one.

Irrlicht seems nice initially because they made their demo examples easy to follow where Ogre has a standard demo framework which is overdone in the oo department making it difficult to follow.

We looked at Irrlicht extensively before comiting to Ogre and found it lacking in a lot of areas including team focus. Untill the middle of last year there were about a dozen formats you had to mix and match in your art pipeline in order to get specific features eg. material or animation needs. Each format that animated had its own bone implementation (has been consolidated finally) and for the longest time b3d was the only one that had 2 uv's but no anim. The one advantage I see for blitz users is it does load .b3d files directly. To get your b3d's into ogre you need b3dtoogre static meshes only, or unwrap 3d which does materials and skeletons too.

Not saying irrlicht couldn't have improved since I last looked, but they don't seem to have a strict design plan and tend to throw things in the engine higgldy piggldy just so that they can say its in. Where Ogre has a much more professional, focused, and disciplined design team.

No final price yet, $75 for early adopters though.

$75 isn't, too bad, but out of my price range.

Really? could you point me to that page, or another way to buy it? it wouldn't hurt to support them as they're doing an outstanding job, and it actually looks quite solid already from what I have seen.

Here is the link regarding the pricing...

http://www.rubux.net/index.php?option=com_fireboard&amp;Itemid=30&amp;func=view&amp;id=710&amp;catid=12#719

They want to add a few things (Asynchronous background asset loading:- load textures and models in a separate thread to allow for asset streaming, I believe) before the initial release. The Paypal link is not up yet, but is due very soon.

here ya go :)
www.rubux.net

@Ian: oooh thanks, I read that post months ago, didn't think there were other info. Anyway, you can't actually buy it from there. I presume I should have to contact Squid directly, but I wouldn't go that far since I have already saw the demos+source and at the moment it would get some dust before I use it. From your post I just thought that they already opened an early adopter version to the public.

@Naughty Alien: I'm not so dumb, but thanks. :)

..hehehe..ahh..im sorryy..I was not pointing or thinking that about ya...Just wanted to be handy/funny...

I second the importance of Apple development, but I heartfully disagree for simple statistic reasons: ATI started supporting SM3 only later, and we can safely say that most PC's from 2004 and below don't support SM3, and also not every 3.0 capable card is powerful enough to use these features extensively (such as notebook chipsets). Now, almost any PC supports DX9. Want to sum up all the Macs and SM3 PC's and compare the numbers with all the PC's sold since year 2001?

Also, at the moment OpenGL's future is unclear and as it stands now all the technical advancement comes directly from DirectX development. Of course something has to happen as the need for a cross-platform API if very important, but in the gaming market OpenGL is hardly leading in the next few years unless there are some surprises yet to be seen. Surely they'll follow closely enough Direct3D though.

And of course SM3 cards are rapidly replacing older models so this will became less and less of an issue.




Don't worry, I was joking :)

Delving more into the subject, my point is that at the moment if you want to publish a SM3 only game you have to justify it by pushing up the technical aspect, and even if you have the budget and experience it isn't necessarily a winning idea. It heavily depends on your objectives and experience, but it's worth a shot only if you know exactly what you are embarking on. Let's take for example Xors and Leadwerks engine.

Josh Klint has taken this route with excellent results, merging cutting edge technology and a design which looks ahead (its design, not just the feature list, speaks for itself): in the long term is a winning strategy. The Xors engine offers instead basic support for shader model 3 features: you can't compare it with Leadwerks engine, but it has shadows, post processing, instancing, it's fast and you can cut it down to SM1.

Now, developing for a 'next-gen' engine doesn't just mean using cutting edge media assets and popping them into a scene, like you could do with Xors. The actual design phase is of a magnitude more complex (though simpler in other aspects), and you don't gain much from it if you don't know exactly where you came from. The technical documents kindly published from time to time by Josh are a very good example, and there are more like them on sites like Gamasutra.

On the contrary, Xors is an engine thought for today's use with an eye for backward compatibility: instead of a far seeing design it has a solid featureset and support for older cards - also, as a plus it's practically a replacement of the B3D command set, but that's counts something only on these boards.

While Leadwerks will gain popularity with time, Xors technologically wise has a far shorter life span (though being solid enough it will still keep a community of afficionados, as B3D did).

At the moment I can't manage the magnitude of a 'next-gen' engine - I always hated that term but it in this case fits the situation perfectly - even though I am aware of the graphical workflow involved (probably more so). I simply lack the man power. Also, I usually prefer to sacrifice technology in favour of a wider audience, and I think that the final result depends more on the use of technology then on the technology involved. Anyway, when I say that I lack than man power I don't mean that you could do the same game with simpler graphics in a shorter timespan - that's not true - but you can adapt a design to a different implementation.

The bottom line is that bad use of advanced technology just produces forgettable games. On the other hand, it's also true that an indie with a brilliant and well bounded design can produce marvels with an advanced engine.

However, I think that in this very moment it is a lot more risky to try (and be able to) push the envelope than developing with a scalable engine and by sacrificing some of the more advanced features, expecially for indies, mainly because 1) at the moment graphically wise the line between 'current gen' and 'next gen' engines is blurred and 2) a simpler engine is easily portable to OpenGL for Mac's (where you don't have to care about shader models) if the game is successfull enough.

Doesn't DX9 need the same hardware as SM3?
I mean DX9 is SM3, with the exception that SM3 runs on all platforms and DX9 only on Windows.

Not at all. It supports SM3 without requiring it, which is another matter entirely. Maybe you are confusing it with DX10 and SM4.

It will be interesting to see how many of the more half baked products will die away once Unity for windows hits the streets.

I want the linux version. Shouldnt be too much to ask considering its supposed to be written in mono anyway.

I have found development for "next-gen" stuff is easier than "last-gen" (Half-Life 2 era technology) for the following reasons:
-No lightmaps to bake.
-No special materials to worry about for different lighting models (lights just work the same on everything).
-No visibility data to compile or special geometry rules to follow.

@D4NM4N
The work would be more on the gfx engine side and ohh getting the distribution issues sorted out.

@Leadwerks
In my opinion you're misleading people if you're saying that realtime shadows are replacing baked ones because in most cases that's just not true performance and quality wise. You'll still use baked shadows for static meshes because the quality is so much higher and restrict the usage of realtime ones were it's necessary all due to quality/performance issues.

How can the quality be higher for baked shadows if it doesn't even support day/night cycles and dynamic light effects, like carriable lamps and flashlights. For me quality means also immersion, realism and dynamicality. Besides, I've seen as good or even better looking dynamic shadows than baked one's, when I compared 3DWS shadows with LE 2 shadows in the same map.

Well, i don't know how you bake your maps, if you ever did, but mine look much better than anything i could achieve with for instance Unity's realtime cascading shadow maps, and these contrary to many other shadow implementations are quite good. Immersion also comes from the framerates and visual quality and they drop significantly with the way you're suggesting doing things.

I also can imagine a certain visual style were you're primary after the dynamic aspect but that's not the majority of the games.

@Leadwerks: You are right. I have specified the reasons just a line below:

Inevitably some concepts do require more effort, and to justify a capable graphic card at the moment you need either to push the envelope or to fit in a nice niche market, such as some games distributed on Steam.

It's more about the genre then the engine, anyway, since for exploiting the features you offer people aim for genres usually not suited for a solo developer, and that's what I meant about man power.

If we talk about terrains, big levels with instancing, maybe even free roaming, physics and/or vehicles, plus AI characters we are talking about a small sized team working full time for at least six months. It's true that you don't necessarily have to put in everything, but the aim it's there and it's actually a great milestone to code an architecture which can handle projects manageable by medium sized teams. In that respect, have you tried contacting small but accomplished development game companies, or thought about volume licensing?

At the moment I work fulltime with my brother and if we were to start a game with such premises I would concentrate the gameplay in small places, probably with limited exteriors and AI, surely not a FPS. In that respect even a simpler engine could cope with my request with the added bonus of a wider audience. Things will change in the future though, since your engine will became less and less elitist.

No it isn't. Not even close. DX9 supports all shader models from 1.0 to 3.0 inclusive, and it also has full support for the fixed function pipeline, which is to say, no shaders at all. It's massively broader than just Shader Model 3.0, particularly bearing in mind that most Intel boards which claim to be SM3.0 don't even have full SM2.0 compliance.

I think it depends if it integrates as well on Windows as it does on the Mac. One of the few things which I liked about Unity which is missing in Shiva and S2, is the ability to setup a connection between your 3d modelling app and Unity, and have live updates of your content in the game engine. One of the most annoying things with content creation is constantly flicking back and forth between game and modeller. If Unity is able to link up with 3dsMax, Maya and a couple of others in the same way on Windows, that would be a big plus as far as I'm concerned.

I must admit that I didn't initially find much negative to say about Unity, although I'm very critical about 3D engines, especially when I found my favorite.
The first bad impression I got was it's programming language. It looked a bit too Ogre3D'ish to me, making it slow and hard to write games with that OOP syntax. Here the Blitz3D syntax still rules over all game engines. It seems to have somekind of FPS maker GUI interface too, which is not a bad idea for newbies, but I hope it's not mandatory to use it, as I am more comfortable with command line tools and coding (the base requirement for automation).

Some of the screenshots looked amazing, just like raytraced. I assume they were in-game screenshots.

The final impression was given to me by the Avert Fate demo. I tried it earlier once, and was wondering why it doesn't have shadows everywhere. Does it have problems with them?

I tried now Avert Fate again, and it seemed to be quite laggy for such a simple scene. Also when enemies spawned it paused for long time.

My conclusion is: Unity is made very polished, even their website is very polished, but they seem to spend too much time and money on things which are not relevant to the final game, but very relevant to the making of the game, thus the actual game suffers from performance and quality. I think this is a common syndrome of overGUIed FPS makers, like we have seen with FPS maker X10 also: it's easy to make cost and time efficiently games, but impossible to make real games which are performing well.

Just out of curiosity: Have you ever written a game on your own, maybe even a 3d one? I mean something finished or are the things you always say more meant in a theoretical way?

I'm using Unity since 2005 and i still haven't used every possibility inside. Unity is far beyond what you reduce it to. Really, you should try to start making yourself familiar with something first, at least to a certain degree, before you criticise it.

@Gabriel
UT always advertised this as a big advantage but honestly i never saw it as such a big thing. Other things were/are much more important to me in Unity but without a doubt it's nice to have it this way, maybe i just got used to it too much.

@taumel: Well, I can only get my impression from what I see and experience, if Unity has some hidden features like a command: MakeGameSuperFastWithShadowsEverywhere();, I don't know about it. And I think they should mention that command on their frontpage also.

I've published some 3D games, nothing spectacular, just some simple cube based games. My next published game will have some cool animated human models also. I got the models already.

You might want to take my advice, it could help trying to make you appear more seriously.

If your advise helps raising quality (=features) and FPS in games, I'm all ears.

@Lumooja
Can you show me anything done with Leadwerks engine with same magnitude and playability such as Avert Fate, plus on Windows, MAc or Web browser with same frame rate? So far everything I ever tried with Leadwerks is a dead cow slow on 8800GT and never hit more than 20 fps.

Leadwerks demo scenes ran well for me, and I never ran into any problems performance,quality, or bug problems with the sandbox (which, I love the similarities to the entity object-style system that half-lifes valve hammer uses, except with realtime implimentation of it).

Unfortunately I have a table full of plates with things to do, otherwise I would probobly make more use of it in a project.


While I despise TV3D due to the arrogance and incompetence of the main developer, and regret purchasing a commercial license for it in the past, I would still suggest TV3D for small projects. It's simplicity can't go ignored as much as I am biased against it. Just don't expect anything more positive to grow out of it in the future ....not at the rate they do things anyways.


Xors3d seems interesting though, i'de like to give it a play sometime.

@Lumooja
Obviously you also can continue playing the role of a fanboy without a clue.

@Naughty Alien
I never liked Avert Fate because i dislike it's style and i think you could do a much better demonstration but there are better examples online, most of the documentation is available online, although i don't understand why they don't offer the iPhones coding options as well and i'm missing more and uptodate video tutorials.

They should offer more of the better content beeing made with Unity on their website but if you're really interested getting an idea of it, it's also not a big deal finding it.

yeah the avert fate wasn't very good. too much of a halo rip, and the shadows were disappointing. Was hoping for something a bit more dynamic. I guess you can forgive the halo part since I know a lot of mac users have a thing for it because of it's roots in mac history.

Minib3d :D