What's the lowdown on Blitzmax 3D options?
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/What's the lowdown on Blitzmax 3D options?
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| I'm thinking about having a play with 3D again. What options are there now, bearing in mind: 1. Must be cross-platform. 2. Speed. 3. Stability. |
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| Manual use of Plots. |
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| Manual use of Plots. Thanks for that insight, but I was looking for sensible answers. |
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| MiniB3D? Or a roll-your-own OpenGL engine. |
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| But how stable is MiniB3D? Its only version 0.53 and that's more than a year old. Anything version 0.x I'd expect to be at least a tad wobbly. |
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| See http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=72893 at the top of this forum. Personally I use MiniB3D for cross platform, simplicity, and it has an iPhoneOS port as well for more development targets. It's plenty fast enough for me and have never had stability issues with it. And free is always nice. |
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| I'd chalk the 0.53 version number up to personal perfectionism on the part of Simon rather than a representation of true stability. I've had no problems. It also works much better on legacy hardware than anything else I'm aware of. |
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| yes it also has the same collision engine as Blitz3D so its easy to use. |
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| But how stable is MiniB3D? IIRC, it has been used in commercial games. |
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| Only the hamsterball one as far as I know? What others? |
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| It's my birthday today. |
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| That soccer game uses MiniB3D as well. I'd go with gman's Irrlicht module. If you don't need all those other features Irrlicht offers, you'd probably appreciate at least the option to use DirectX renderers on Windows machines. |
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| I've used MiniB3d for 2 commercial projects! Very compatible, even with Intel GMA chips which was one of the main reasons i chose it. It's not quite as fast as i'd really like, but i do tend to go overboard with the effects! Looking forward to seeing how this Ogre module turns out, 'cos Ogre's compatible AND fast! Cheers Charlie |
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| Rather than use MiniB3D by itself, adapt the source to your needs. You have a standard engine framework from it; you can discard anything you don't like\want, and include or extend any part that you need (although some might think this sucks, it's actually better than using any wrapped DLL that you can't do anything with the internals). It deals with raw OpenGL calls, so it's very open to whatever [educated] fiddling you might do. You get the 3D engine (with GLSL shaders if you write a quick interface for them), plus Max's modules Max2D and Audio (even 3D sound, if you download Ziggy's mod) and Input. Sounds good to me. |
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| GfK: I had forgot about the hamster game, however others have answered your question ;) That soccer game uses MiniB3D as well. This has received a lot of praise on various gaming sites. Did he use this for other games? |
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| The football game is called New Star Soccer 4 and had good reviews, see http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=77135 The user siread created this game, and this is what he mentioned on http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=87479#991612 This is his site: http://www.newstargames.com/ |
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| New project in the works, Dave? |
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| sounds big :) (or not!) |
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| ogre's looking promising- cross platform, had higher level rendering minib3d is good cos you can still use blitz3d with blitzmax via the dll, and just use minib3d for the mac port/iphone port etc... I'll prolly give mini a look one of these days. |
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| I don't know, I think even using OpenGL is better than the D3D7. |
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| Nope you don't know, unless you have some data or a link. |
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| To do what you (Robert) are saying, you would need to buy the Blitz3D SDK (to get the dll), whereas MiniB3D is free... |
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| Regarding OpenGl vs D3D, for me it depends on what my client needs. Right now a big part of what they need is the ability to use Nvidia 3D Vision, which is so much more straight forward with D3D. I am hopeful Bruzard comes through with his Ogre project - this could be great for my stuff. Gman's Irlict mod is wonderful for this as well. |
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| Irrlicht is also free and supports OpenGL, DirectX 8.1, DirectX 9 and a couple of software renderers. Compared to MiniB3D, I'd think many would appreciate the support for various mesh formats as well. Gman's Irrlicht mod is already done. Just download and start using! :) No need to wait for some other solution to get finished in the coming 6 months or 2 years. Do I sound like Lumooja yet? :) |
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| I like the look of the ogre engine in another thread. Therevills, yes the dll isn't free but it gives you guaranteed compatability on windows platforms of all kinds. It does not need any real code change either. I personally think that if you are doing 3D in this day and age opengl is fine but again I don't have any hard data so I'm sticking what I 'been tawt like a good boy. |
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| New project in the works, Dave? Not yet.... just going to have a play about with a few ideas and see what occurs. I'm still doing Magicville fixes/tweaks as they crop up, plus I got the dreaded Mac version to think about - so I don't want to get waist-deep in something else when I really need to be focusing on that.Hopefully there'll be plenty of people about to answer my Mac n00b questions. |
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| ...and hopefully you'll share with us the secrets to a successful mac build. |
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| You mean hitting compile with the exact same code on a mac? That works for me with blitzmax. |
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| You mean hitting compile with the exact same code on a mac? That works for me with blitzmax. Its not all as simple as that. For instance, I have some code which changes desktop wallpaper via Windows API. So I'd need a Mac equivalent of that. There's also a question mark (for me) over folder permissions as I don't even know if thats an issue in MacOS, and if it is, how to do it. There's probably a load of other stuff as well but that's just two instances off the top of me head.BTW: I've never used a Mac before so I guess most of my question marks will disappear as soon as that changes. |
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| I've never tried it before Rob (don't have a Mac); if it works that way, then that's peachy! I see what Gfk says. For Externs and things like that, some adapting to the Mac API is needed. Let's say you want to center the game window on the desktop, for instance. |
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| Let's say you want to center the game window on the desktop, for instance. I take your point but I think that *might* be a bad example as Blitzmax does that by itself now (at least on Windows, so I'd assume it does on Mac, too). |
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| Geez, ok... then "setting a window's position", "style", etc. (that is, if the Mac API allows such window-attributes to begin with). |
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| If you're doing 2D, you can take BlitzMax. If you're doing 3D, you can take Unity. Nothing has changed, sadly. |
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| Nothing has changed, sadly. Change you can believe in ;): http://blitzmax.com/Community/posts.php?topic=90468 The BlendELF engine seems to be high-level, cross-platform, actively develped, free ETC.. at least I'd give it a try! |
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| The BlendELF engine seems to be high-level, cross-platform, actively develped, free ETC.. at least I'd give it a try! Is it webbable like Unity? |
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| Is BlendELF/BlitzELF cross-platform? |
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| GfK, did you take a peek at Xors3D? I checked it out several months ago but not recently and I know MadJack is using it for Tank Universal 2. |
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| Chroma Not cross-platform unfortunately - DX9 based. |
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| Right now I'd go with MiniB3D or Gman's Irrlicht port as they're multiplatform. |
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| I had a quick look at Xors3D but all that physics and shaders and whatnot isn't really "must have" stuff, for me. Not really looked at Irrlicht.... |
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