Now I know Blitz does not do DX9 but...
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Now I know Blitz does not do DX9 but...
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| What exactly does this mean in pratical terms? What am I missing out on? |
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| Fluff. Against popular belief I hear you can actually make a game without shaders. I don't believe it though. |
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| You need shaders to zip up for you after a slash. How else could you do it? - Blitz will never be dx9(imo), but will be gl, which is even better..so all is good. |
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| Antony is right, Blitz will never go DX9, until BlitzMax and then the rendering engine could be whatever gets coded. This is currently looking like OGL however, from what I understand it should be possible to strap pretty much any engine on the arse of BMax. I'm sure there'll be plenty of Blitz Max Strap-Ons. Big ones that will penetrate any engine you care to handle. You might have a vibrator strap on that will work with the rumble jobbies. Anyway, this post should increase the hits from google for people looking for programming languages! |
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| Yeah what langugaes is that Rob, Cxxx or Adult++ |
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| In real down to earth practical terms it means that boned animations aren't as fast as they could be (on newer hardware), normal mapping isn't as fast as it could be (on newer hardware), shadows aren't as fast as they could be (on...). Water, glass, grass, particle, smoke, haze, fog effects aren't as fast as they could be (on...) etc. But, it also means anything you write in Blitz3D will run on almost any hardware. Which is a big plus point. |
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| you can pretty much do anything the PS2 can in blitz at the moment only with fewer polygons and a lot fewer unique brushes. But otherwise they have quite a lot in common from the artist point of view. |
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| Ah, I see. Thanks for that info. |
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| umm whats done on the ps2 is much better than what ive seen done with blitz... lets face it blitz is getting pretty dated and needs an upgrade. |
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| Ummm, everything graphicaly on the PS2 can be done on blitz if not more. Believe me PS2 is a dino. I've spend 3 years of my life struggling with the stupid thing. It mainly gets by because it can throw alot of polys around. At the end of the day what makes blitz games look worse is that there isn't that much artistic talent around, and what is there can't possibly make a AAA game on their own. When you consider a lot of the BIG games have 30+ artists working on them if the game has a short turn around, and most blitz games have one or perhaps 2 artists doing ALL the art, both 2D, 3D, textures, UI, FX, characters, terrain, scenery, Web pages etc. Each of those are seperate specialized jobs in the commercial games industry, Indies can rarely afford that luxury and have to scale down their games to something managable. But Blitz is perfectly capable of matching the PS2's graphical prowess. PS2 doesn't have pixel shaders unless they are software coded which is too CPU intensive in most instances, has too small an amount of Vram, so they use small textures, rarely more than 128x128 and more commonly 32x32 or 64x64 4 bit texturtes. They only get away with it because of the low resolution |
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| Evak is totally right ... I'd say that Blitz could actually go beyond PS2 by quite a margin especially on the hardware we have today (mainly due to textures). The problem comes down to the fact that there are only a few people working on titles ... with no dedicated 30 person art team you cannot match the titles you see on PS2 ... but this doesn't mean that Blitz is at fault or any of the tools really (with 3DS Pipeline and Blitz you're good to go). Also, many of the programmers here are just now really understanding the methodology to making everything efficient in Blitz. The programmers doing PS2 work have years of experience already and also work in larger teams. If you look at Aerial Antics it's very good looking ... and was mostly made in under 6 months. I have to admit ... I didn't know as much then as I do now and our next game will really push Blitz and be a faster performing title. |
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| Everything I've seen done on the Playstation 2 I can pull off in Blitz with approximately same speed on my system. I know I can produce a great deal of the same quality artwork as seen in games such as Manhunt and similar. |
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| The artists hang around mod teams who have a pre-existing engine. They'll do Blitz, but you have to have an engine that they think is as good as HL2. Until then, your artists will be few, and will eventually leave you unless you are always making progress. I am lucky to have 3 modeler/skinners, but they just finished an assload of work, and have no playable game to show for it yet. Right now, I have enough media and am not asking for anything from them until I return a playable engine. You really have to give something back, and that's pretty tough to do without a pre-designed engine and game. |
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| I'm tweaking my prices as I have more template meshes to build off. So therefore a figure might cost a lot less. |
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| Everything I've seen done on the Playstation 2 I can pull off in Blitz with approximately same speed on my system. GTA3? |
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| Why not GTA3? Give me a team and the physics lib. Don't see anything technically unachievable in GTA3. Look at Future Tactics. That uses the Renderware which is the same platform GTA is built on. Future Tactics was completely prototyped in Blitz and then ported. I'd imagine with the right team GTA could be done from a technical stand point. |
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| i have to agree, it's not so much the engine its the crap artwork. to be honest most blitz games look like the art was done by a coder, because in most cases it was. re modders - i just got one on board with me, i think. i think one reason is that i made a playable engine first, with placeholder graphics i ripped off the web. i have what i think is a compelling idea, but more than that i have something already in process, already playable. it obviously needs a lot of work, obviously needs the graphics, but the artist can see beyond the graphic art need, and even more, see where he can contribute. i went as far as i could with the engine before approaching an artist because i feel i have more to offer now, and can sell the idea better. i also feel that i'm at the point now where i really need art to continue - it's holding me back. as far as 1 guy doing all the work, i think it can work with a really productive guy. the guy i'm talking to is psyched that he gets to do all the graphics himself. but i don't think you can really go and get a modder with nothing but an idea. because they can just hook up with a mod group that's going to build on top of unreal and they don't have to have quite so much imagination that there's going to be something working in the near future. they already have something working. but in general, the modder idea is really the way to go, if you aren't going to be building a 30 person team and spending millions. there's some really talented people out there, most of them working for (literally) $0 per day, just for the love of it. if you *can* afford to pay anything, you are going to get a lot of people's attention, and i'm not talking big bucks. if you can't pay, you can still get people, i think. |
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| Why not GTA3? Give me a team and the physics lib. Don't see anything technically unachievable in GTA3. Look at Future Tactics. That uses the Renderware which is the same platform GTA is built on. Future Tactics was completely prototyped in Blitz and then ported. I'd imagine with the right team GTA could be done from a technical stand point. I doubt it, blitz doesn't offer any threaded streaming of meshes, which gta3 uses heavily.(You can noitce it with a dirty/scratched disc. parts of the city are white/missing as they're still streaming in slower than normal) Take metal gear solid 2. Even the native pc version wrote in C++, for high end gpu's only, runs like a dog on most setups from what I've heard. And no blitz game come has even come remotely close to that level of fx/ai/what not(Technical term) going on in real. (That I've seen, I've love to be proven wrong :) ) |
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| Don't know, MGS2 doesn't really seem to have very much going on to me in terms of AI. There are never a ton of enemies etc ... I don't see what couldn't be done in that with the proper team. I think more than likely they just did a quick and dirty port and didn't really care about the game. If you take any of the teams that wrote these games originally and give them Blitz I'm confident they could recreate their own games very closely. |
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| I'm pretty sure Future Tactics was 2d when it was in Blitz. I'm always intrigued when people quote GTA3 as a project which is unachievable in Blitz. It's true that GTA3 does things in ways that you couldn't/wouldn't do them in Blitz3d, but it's not drawing an awful lot at a time ( redraw is very, very visible on a high spec PC. ) Ever taken a good close look at the architecture in GTA 3? It's very, very low poly ( and the textures aren't huge either ) Add to that the fact that big city games have been around for ages now. Urban Chaos ( was that the title? ) is yonks old and that was a GTA-style game. That was a modified version of the Tomb Raider engine, I think, and it ran pretty nicely on a Voodoo 1. There's a big thread on this subject on BC ( my fault ) and we've discussed it in IRC a couple of times too. I remain convinced it's very doable, though unconvinced I'm interested enough to do it myself. It would be hard work to achieve, and I think it would have to be a labour of love to manage it. |
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| EpicBoy: It's doable, but the last thing I want to make is a GTA clone. People whine a lot about occlusion culling, lack of support for normal maps, etc. when they should get their ass to work and do it themselves. Occlusion culling can be done in Blitz3D given you have the knowledge how to do it. An Octree culling method would work quite well for a GTA sized environment, I think. |
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| It's doable, but the last thing I want to make is a GTA clone. Well, since I don't know what you WANT to make, it's hard to cite a related example... |
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| My two cents: From a business owner standpoint - artists are available IF YOU PAY THEM and tell them what to do. Otherwise, artists, modellers, etc have no incentive. You have to be insanely motivated, a self-starter and not mind going broke to be involved in a game creation that has little possibility of ever seeing a store shelf. |
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| It's kinda obvious that the appearance oif games is down to the modellers/artists but it's also so very true and unfortunately, unless the engine/structure is really something else, most artists wont 'waste their time' even offering payment isn't a fantastic incentive, unless you're offering stupid amounts. The PS2 is still not so old that new innovations are being made on the graphical side of things. So the limits are still quite high and I think it extremeley unlikely that any game produced with Blitz3D will really reach such limits regardless of the team working on it. |
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| I just want to be able to render straight to a texture. No Copyrect and backbuffer issues. |
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| heh your right about Artists not wasting their time if th Engie is poor. I once started work on a Torque game a couple of years ago doing buildings in 3DSmax. After a week of modeling I realised that the exporter totally sucked and I would have no control of the lighting (which is really poor in TGE) not to mention super restrictive feature support for 3D apps. I ended up deciding that even though I was getting paid, I simply wanted nothing to do with TGE as a development tool and gave them what I had allready done for free. Been offered a couple of paid jobs since, and turned them all down as I've decided not to use TGE untill modify the engine to support a proper Unwrap3D type art path or preferably B3D pipeline. Thankfully Jeremy turned up and introduced me to blitz, which allthough extremely primitive with about 30% the functionality of what it has now in regards to 3dsma support, was by far the most flexible tool I could find to create an indie game with. |
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