Advice from the Gurus Needed.
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Beginners Area/Advice from the Gurus Needed.
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| I'm sure you've guys have heard this before, and I'm not trying to start a war as these types of posts tend to get crazy so I'll try and be direct and to the point. I'm starting a small project and I'm wondering if I should use Blitz3D or DarkBasic PRO. I'm not looking to make the next Quake 4, but I am interested in character animation quality. The reason I mention DBPro is they have this .DLL called "Enhanced Animations" that blends different actions together. Is Blitz3D capable of Playstation 2 type animation, How about all the special effects that are possible on PS2. I'm really leaning towards blitz3d for it's stable coding platform and it's community which seem more indie developer oriented vs. DBPro's Demo coding flashy graphics. Is the .B3D format robust enough to handle PS2 or WoW style characters with a couple 512x512 texture maps each? What type of Polygon count per character can I expect to have if I'm looking to have half a dozen animated models in a scene? I'm not planning a MMPOG or anything unrealistic. I'm just wondering how good the Blitz3D engine is, and if I can expect PS2 style results with the appropriate talent. I thank you for any insight you can provide. ~John |
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| Blitz3d is on DX7 so you've not got shaders, apart from that it's great. The B3D format supports weighted vertices on the bones so given the right talent you will be able to perform very nice animation. Regarding the size of textures 512x512 is fine, 1024x1024 is fine, I've never gone bigger than 1024 but I would suspect it's not a problem. Blitz Animation blends from one set of animations to the next, however, does not allow different animations to run on the same model, ie, Shooting gun torso with running legs. There are however ways round this by semi handrolling your own animation system by creating these animations on empty meshes, then picking up the entitypitch, roll and yaw of the bones and applying the selected ones to your real model. A bit of an arse but generally not a biggy. That said, there are plenty of people that say this style of animation is rubbish because you wouldn't fire a gun in the same way if you were stood still or running. But that's a whole different debate. I've never used Dark Basic Pro, I had Dark Basic a long time ago and the syntax is pants by comparison to blitz, however, dbp runs in DX9 so you get all the whiz bang effects that come with that. But I'm not a guru. |
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| Say guys, do you look at the demos that come with the package. Try looking at the castle demo under Mak's name. That alone sold me on Blitz3d. Other than that, I haven't looked at dbBASIC since the early days. I know that they have upgraded the language, so I cannot give a fair comparison of the two products. But I plan to do 65% of my 3d work in Blitz, the other 30% in Torque, and the remaining 5% in 3d GameStudio (when I buy the package of course). |
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| With todays average hardware you may use about 6 characters with 3 thousand tris each, plus a lowpoly world/scene with about 25 thousand tris without problems. But the polycount is only one factor. Also very important is the number of surfaces (or materials) onscreen, plus the number of overlapping alpha objects and their onscreen size. Weighted vertices/bones in the B3D format may also be a speed issue when you use too much multiweighting, that's when each vertex is affected by a number of bones. Best use a max of 2 here. If you plan to linepick the characters for some reason (eg. wound decals of bullets) then note that the B3D format will use only the initial pose of the mesh for the linepicks. There are some workarounds for this limitation, but it's one of the cons, thought i let you know. |
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| Thank you all so much for your help, so far. Thanks Rob for your reminder about DB's syntax, I had forgot about that and it hasn't changed in DBPro and doesn't seem to be changing in the DX10 version either. That Castle Demo is very cool and Mario64-ish Amanda, what sold me on Blitz3D was AGore's Head Demo. I have both products, as they are both good, and I don't want to see RAD Tools die off anytime soon. I was just trying to decide which I should choose for my project. I'm not too familar with these post type systems but I have a question about surfaces. Thanks for the polycount info JFK. I guess I'm suppose to put it under a different heading? ~John~ |
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| Hey BasicMonkey, One thing that B3d does allow for is re-using one set of animations on multiple characters (as long as the rigging stays the same). We are gonna have to re-skin our two extra characters, but other than that the animations already in the can will be ok for these chaps. Another thing which is sooooo cool is controlling a characters bones on the fly, I have a character which now tilts as he runs around corners, inspired by the Mario RPG demo which (tu) sinu created, you should try looking for it. Because position, scale and rotate can all be affected, you can like wise affect any mesh attached to any bone, as long as you can find the child name of the bone. (look up the Findchild command). Also, check out www.smartscreenuk.com for the projects I've done over the years, B3d rocks for most things, sure you don't have some of the more recent fancy stuff, but what you can do is awesome. B3D is very stable and works on a really high number of all kinds of low end and high end PCs without any fuss, it also has a very active forum community, a heap of fab stuff in the code archives, and some very clever gurus you can call on, along with extra libraries and tools available already. IPete2. |
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| These kind of animations can be acheived. What you can do is "animate" individual bones. you can have a walk animation for each of the lower limbs and sets of animations for the upper half too- so you can make the top half swing a sword whilst the bottom half runs around like a freak :) |
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