Which 3d Engine?

Hi everyone,

I am considering a game idea that will involve millions of individual objects in a 3d space, all of which will be very simple, probably cubes.

I want to program this in blitzmax. Graphically it will be very simple. So I am wondering which 3d engine would you recommend? As I have very little idea about any of them.

Would it actually be easier / more efficient for me to make my own pseudo 3d engine in 2d, replacing cubes with sprites?

Ta!

The critical point in your project is millions of objects. Even if they could be displayed easily, updating them all regulary will put even high-end computers down on their knees.
So i would suggest rethinking your goals.

Cheers for the reply BladeRunner. These objects won't actually need updating often. Maybe it's best I just use an array.

Should I maybe consider not using blitzmax?

That isn't necessarily so. One of the modern, shader-driven engines would allow you to use hardware instancing, so all the transformation would be done on the GPU, and you will still be throwing large chunks of polygons in one go, instead of a few at a time as you normally would with cubes.

TV3D has "minimeshes" which is essentially a fancy name for any small mesh you want the GPU to automatically group as instances for such fast handling.

Besides, he didn't actually say that many of his millions of cubes would be dynamic. He may have intended for a static environment to be built out of cubes.

Cheers Gabriel, I will give it a look :)