Flow3d is out

Hey there,

Just to let you all know, that Flow3d is out, see http://www.flow3d.org/

Congrats on the team for that :)

Mmm, squeezed out before Unity Windows.

Cool, These things always come along when im tring not to be destracted from the game im working on!

Shame it isn't for Blitz3D.

The only thing Blitz3D has that BlitzMax doesn't is a DX7 3D engine (and even then the B3DSDK is virtually identical.) I'm struggling to imagine why you would need a DX7 3D engine to go with Flow, but hey, they're your needs.

I love Blitz3D.

Looks good, however the random screenshots on the website do not seem to have images attached to them at the moment.

lol, we haven't even announced it outside of our website yet. The demo version is only about 10mb, takes 20 seconds to setup and install.

The demo never expires, just limits your runtime to 4-6 minutes. So you can do quite a lot with it for free. The editor has been updated too and is fun to play with.

There are a few more examples in this version including a tutorial game demo that shows most of the basic functions needed to make a simple 3rd person shooting game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VE1VnW-WMU&fmt=18

300 lines of code. Includes 2 NPC robots, simple AI, collisions, physics, camera picks, linepicks, particles, shooting, collision response, score keeping, score printing, WASD controls, mouse look, simple control of animation tracks etc.

So basically all you need to get an idea of how to use it.

LOL, just watched the old video posted above and noticed something behind the robot that shouldn't be there. Um! we removed that in the actual demo..

Is this cross platform?

According to a brief glance at the website, yes.

The FlowEd doesn't run on my system. It even doesn't start if I click at the executable. Are there any log files? Might be due to OpenGL issues?

My system: Dual Core, GFX 7300LE, 2 GB Ram, Windows XP

edit: But I have to admit that I really like what I see! Good work and good decision to choose Ogre+Newton! :) I think about to purchase this.

Me too. I was looking at Leadworks, but it was a little expensive for something I just wanted to tinker with. This looks like a decent fit for me. Now I just need some time to actually play with it.

I already have Leadworks and it looks good, BUT it has really high requirements and is rather slow at non-high-end-systems. I know that Ogre is a quite good and efficient 3D engine.

Hey Xaron, I did have the same issue, the executable wasn't running, however i fixed it, by rebuilding the modules in BlitzMax, try doing that

Kind Regards

Thanks nrasool, will try that! :)

Hi It'a currently windows only, but Lina has already made some progress with the Mac version. I'll post on here as soon as there is a mac or linux version publicly available.

We tested flow with the current installers from the BRL site. Both retail and demo versions.

It all looks very impressive. Just one question, what are the minimum specs. for the end user? I had a look on the site, but I couldn't find the info. Thanks.

I guess it's not compatible with the SVN version of Blitzmax?
I can't build the module because of the following error:



Regards,

Andre

Modules are generally not compatible between major versions of BlitzMax. Are the people who are experiencing problems using either an older version of BMax or the SVN version with new Garbage Collector? If so, then needing to recompile the module would make sense.

I'm using the latest SVN version and I can't either test the examples or recompile the module. :/

Can we even get the latest SVN version. I saw that the site was hacked and theres a sticky saying SVN was down for the foreseeable future. Were all using the base 1.3 and Maxgui versions with flow here. We will definitely update flow when there is a new Bmax release.

Lina said

I doubt it, looking at Marks post, released updates are'nt going to be minor ones we got through SVN, but along the lines of past BlitzBasic updates, possibly from the account page.

Thats how I read it anyway.

Dabz

Nope, don't think you can get it until Mark releases it as a "big update" now. It shouldn't be a problem though. Anyone who has the SVN version ought to be able to recompile modules because I believe that's a necessary step in having that version. I guess if someone had reinstalled since and just copied their BlitzMax folder around it might not be so, but I can't see anyone doing that.

EDIT: Ok, I see Byo listed the problem above. I think TDataStream was removed recently? Think I saw a thread on it. I can't find it now though. May have gone missing in the server hack? I remember Mark said whatever he was removing had been superceded by Reflection, if that's any help.

EDIT#2: Ok, it was TDataType, which may or may not be related.

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=83141

That explains a lot. Thanks.
I'll install the official Blitzmax 1.30 to a different folder and wait for the bigger update.

It's a pity that Mark was forced to do that (remove the SVN feature) because of hackers but if that can make this place safer I'm all go.

Thanks Gabriel, I'll pass that info on.

Looks great. How hard would it be to convert our existing minib3d projects? I'm guessing the commands aren't B3D like?

Flow trys to be 1:1 with ogre where possible and then has a higher level set of fg (flowgraphics) helper functions to make things easier. That way you can pretty much use ogre native examples of which there are many and use shortcuts as you get familiar with the helper functions.

We have the basic docs compiled with makedocs briefly explaining all the functions. You can check them out online at:


Flow helper functions and Ogre rendering and .OSM scene commands
http://www.flow3d.org/FlowDocs/FlowDocs.htm

Newton Physics commands
http://www.flow3d.org/FlowDocs/OgreNewtDocs.htm

Hey congrats on finally getting this out there. It's been years but better late than never. Hopefully the remaining Blitz addicts will put it to good use.

Thanks Jeremy, it did take a long time, some of that was because of other ongoing projects, and also because as a team we all had to work around real life schedules.

It's great that it's out and were really excited about finally having the solution we want to use in our future 3d projects. Now we just need other people to give it a try and provide feedback and ideas on how to improve it and grow a community around it. Really look forward to seeing what other people produce with it.

The Mac and Linux versions aren't too far away. I know some people are anxious to see those platforms catered for.

FlowED got some significant improvements including basic physics editing, entity renaming, and a interim right click single undo. Making it much more powerful scene/level editor and heirarchy rigging tool for gameplay objects.

The main feature for the next release of FlowED is going to be animation playback of tracks both global scene animation, and local entity track animation.

This week flow got .scene (dotScene) loading to compliment the .OSM scene loading, to make it compatible with a lot more exporters. You could always produce .OSM scene files in the editor by loading .mesh files and constructing your scene in FlowED. The extra .scene format allows you to create your levels from scratch natively inside a lot more tools than just 3dsmax and load them straight into both flow and flowED.

Oddball wrote:

hmm, we havent really tested it on ancient systems. Works fine on almost all hardware we have thrown at it in either D3D or GL, most of the time both. That includes the notorious Intel GMA 9xx cards.

The oldest machine we have run flow on so far is a 500mhz machine with an old 16MB ATI card. It ran flowEd and displayed correctly so long as you aren't using shaders.

FlowED has some media included from our maze monkeys game that uses HLSL and is DX9 shader model 2/3 only. In GL it will appear white with no textures. Will have someone convert those to CG soon so it works in both GL and D3D.

The examples in Flow3D itself are mostly fixed function and should work on almost any hardware. Only the soft shadows example uses shaders.


PS. Thanks for pointing out our missing minimum specs. I will add some recommended specs to the site since I'm not sure what our actual minimum specs are.

AdrianT wrote:Sounds good. Can you have auto fallback in Flow apps. if shaders aren't present? i.e. Is there any in built contingent for this, or is it a roll your own situation?

There are a whole bunch of options for fallback techniques built in. An ogre material is made up of material, technique, pass

Here's the page in the manual that explains some of the fallback options in Ogre. There are too many options to summarize briefly. There are a lot of options, you can even isolate a problem material and create a specific material that isolates a particular Hardware vendor or GPU and give it it's own compatible material if needed.

These days there are so many shader2 cards that its hard to have automatic fallbacks. A GMA950 does pixel shaders but the vertex calculations are done in hardware making them slow and often buggy, you can't rely on a simple fallback to ignore that the card is capable of PS2.0 so you may have to force it to fallback to a material of your choosing by writing a custom fallback for that particular card or family of cards.

Here's the page of the manual that explains some of the fallback technique options available in ogre and therefore flow.

http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/manual_15.html#SEC31

Chapter 3 gives you a full rundown of Ogre's material script features.

http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/manual/manual_toc.html#SEC_Contents

Excellent stuff. This is looking like the best all-round solution for 3D in Blitz Max.

I agree Oddball. Using Ogre for rendering and Newton for physics was a definitely good choice.

just wonder how about the flow3d memory managerment?
is it good enough?
i am using bmax for developing a game-dev system(gui mapeditor with lua script system) since 1 year ago,but seems that
sometimes the GC of bmx is not effective enough!

I'm ready to buy it, just want to know do we need to buy each platform version seperately?

$80 is reasonable price IMHO, however, how soon will Mac and Linux version be ready?

your $80 will include all computer platforms. There's a tiny chance that with Ogre currently being officially ported to 360, we may port flow there too someday (Very unlikely). Or should we decide to sell a more expensive license with source we would obviously have a separate license there. Were really trying to keep in the spirit of the Blitz community and keep things cheap and affordable, especially when you still have to buy Bmax to use it.

The biggest reason that the Mac and Linux versions haven't been released yet is that our C++ coder moved home about 1500 miles and has been working on her PC notebook the last few weeks. Things have settled down and it looks like her desktop will be shipped shortly, at which point she will be putting Mac high on her list.

I discussed it with her this morning, one problem we have is that she's the only one in the team with OSX. I expect there will be an open beta announced once she gets her desktop machine back and is comfortable releasing it for public consumption.

It looks very nice.

I have an intel card from about 2003. It seems a bit slow, but I dont see any reason for it being slow.

The robot standing still with 5000 triangles gave me 15FPS and with no robot and 40 triangles gave me 40FPS. - This was with a CEGUI window but the Jenga example runs slowly too.(and has no window)

Im just making sure that there are no options left on by default that are slowing things down ??? Maybe there is something that my PC is trying to do in software that is supposed to be done in hardware?

BLitz3d runs very fast on the same PC.(I used the Dx9 driver for flow)

Some Intel GMA cards don't work too well, surprisingly cards like the 950 are particularly troublesome in D3D but run ok in GL. It really depends, I have the slowest video card in our team and it's a 7800GS. A couple of us have tried it on other peoples slow systems and been told if it runs on a particular card but we haven't tested that extensively. No one has complained yet.

Some people with intel GMA 9xx cards have had better luck with GL than D3D, in the last compatibility test every card tried worked in at least one of the two API's including some pretty obscure ones.

The compatibility test demo of a year ago provided the following results, Some people with the same card had different results which suggested that sometimes it just came down to driers, especially with older Intel cards. We haven't got any serious feedback since other than Ziggy's GMA 450 working and someone elses GMA 650 working fine in the beta and latest release. Also Geforce 2GTS worked in scenes without shaders.

So far it runs perfectly on the following cards.


Not so well on these:

my card is very similar to the Intel '915GM/GMS,910GML'
its a 945 I think,

Well, you should ask people to check their 'fluff' filter, on the off chance!

Dabz

P.S. Sorry Adrian, I couldnt resist! :)

I'm amazed you find blitz3D to be fast on that card to be honest Feremy. Our old racer could only handle 30fps at best, hitting 15fps at busy points- thats on the 910. (I just sold this laptop so I'm afraid I can't test!)

If your card "supports" shaders, then it'll be doing that in software. That would be a large hit. As for jenga, I can't see a reason for it to be slow other than the heavy physics? If you have missing windows etc, then I'm poised to say it's problematic/old drivers. I wish I had a card to test with!

Are your drivers up to date etc?

Also most of the examples just use a delay of 16.666 to keep things at roughly 60fps on a fairly modern system. If you remove the delay in the fg.getting started example on my 3000+ the framerate doubles from about 60 to 130

I'll buy it as soon as it gets mac OSX support.

PLS

And i'll buy it right now! Congrats to developers, i love it!!

I've tested and I must say I'm very impressed with the robot demo. I'll probably buy it when Linux and MacOS suport is done and stable.



One advice: add a note to the main site page stating that Linux and Mac versions are not done yet but will be available because otherwise it could mislead some people who are not developing on Windows machines to buy Flow3D for a current project and having to wait until the other OS versions are released. Just my opinion. :)

Yeah I added a note on the main page yesterday along with our minimum specs.

It also says that Flow is currently Windows only on the checkout form. Hopefully that and the big dirty logo on the buy now button will be enough.

Yo Adrian,

Can you email me (see my profile)?

It's coming along nicely.
Good luck. :)