3D characters in AGS?

[shbaz]

The solution of using 2 different programs would be a good solution if there were some kind of coordination, AGS could execute another exe passing some parameters and recive a return value in order to know what has happened in the other program.

So it is possible?

Only problem I can see is CPU usage - 3d games demand a lot or a little depending on what you put in them. I guess AGS isn't that demanding on recourses, so it could make no noticible difference at all on 2-3 year old machines.

[Pumaman]

I did have a brief experiment with 3D characters. My conclusion was that it was certainly possible to do, but would require quite a bit of time and effort to integrate it properly into AGS.

The biggest stumbling block I found was trying to get a 3D program to export a file format that AGS could read in easily. Not managing to find one was what put pay to my experiment. Even 3dsmax's "ASCII export format" was hideously complicated and seemed to be missing bits.

[Vel]

I dont think that more than 2-3% will be using 3d characters, if implemented, that is.

[Meowster]

I think it would be sexful.

Still, I'm not going to use a different engine. I like AGS, and I want to stick with it. I know perfectly well other engines allow 3D characters, which is why I started this thread instead of finding another engine. Because I don't want to use another engine.

Mr Colossal has a good point about lighting. I'd never thought of that. Hmm.

I still think it would be a great feature, though. I think it would be improving on AGS as a 2D engine. It would allow people to try something different, as well. Sure, as Vel said, only 2% of people may use it. Maybe more people would use it. Maybe people might find it a better feature than they thought it would be.

I guess it would require a lot of CJs time and effort. Well, CJ, I am here to say that I am prepared to make that sacrifice. For you.

Anyway. So it is possible...but is there any chance it may be added in the future?

Also:

But I believe firmly that AGS should stay 2D. To go beyond that and implement 3D would no longer make it AGS. It was originally built with Sierra- and LEC-style games in mind. This is the same with implementing higher and higher resolutions. This debate has been done to death before. Sure, it would be nifty to have 3D characters on a 2D background, but then people will want higher resolution, more 3D.

I think that's natural for people to want more. I mean, right now we're wanting more. Not giving it to us isn't going to make us want it less. I kind of see where you're coming from, but I don't think that's a good argument for keeping AGS 2D.

[Haddas]

I would for one make 2D games only. I can't model in 3D at all, neither can I do things right in 2D. Those who like and know how to do 3D stuff might like it though. Couldn't there be a kind of "separate" AGS for the 3D people, although it might seem pointless and be too much work.

Diablo 2 is a 2D game. It just looks 3D, and It's darn nicely done. Only the cutscenes are actually in 3D.

[shbaz]

I would for one make 2D games only. I can't model in 3D at all, neither can I do things right in 2D. Those who like and know how to do 3D stuff might like it though. Couldn't there be a kind of "separate" AGS for the 3D people, although it might seem pointless and be too much work.

Diablo 2 is a 2D game. It just looks 3D, and It's darn nicely done. Only the cutscenes are actually in 3D.

It doesn't have to be one way or the other, so there wouldn't be a split in the program.

I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea how complicated it is, but you can download the Blender sources and get a really good idea of how this stuff works Chris.

[Joseph DiPerla]

Hey Chris, have you tried www.planetsourcecode.com ? They may have some usefull source code for you to look at.

My suggestion would be that rather than using 3ds, you might want to use Milkshape or Blender files, or even MD2. Blender is opensource, so knowing the file format shouldn't be as difficult as 3ds. MD2 is widely used, and in fact, I model in MD2. Plus it has all frame animations set. All you would have to do is just choose which frame is for walking, talking, picking up etc...

I would find 3d characters and objects useful. I use blender (With MakeHuman) to make some other 3d comics and games(Escape from Godzilla, Transformers), and I animate them using MED (MD2 editor) for actions.

So in my opinion, 3D characters and objects is something I would use. Only thing is, I am not currently planning on making a 3d game. Atleast not until my Simpsons game is released.

JD

[shbaz]

Using .blend files is a bad idea. It'd be best to use a standard like .obj or .dxf, maybe VRML. Not .blend though. Why? Because if you do that, people who don't use Blender will have to export their files to a format Blender will read, then open with Blender, sort out the weird things that happen with file conversions, and then save as a .blend. Not fair.

You wouldn't be able to use the MakeHuman models in realtime either, unless you decimated them, which would look not so great. Realtime models need 5000 triangles or (most of the time much) less.

Yufster, what do you think about releasing two versions of the game? If everything was already in 3d rigged and posed, why not make another version in a 3d engine? The only new work would be coding the 3d engine.

[Miez]

Has anybody given any thought to just how much work this is going to be? Making a full game in 2D is a task many of us have trouble finishing. Throwing 3d characters in the mix  is gonna make the task only bigger and bigger. Building character models, boning and skinning, keyframing and animating ... it's a huge task.
It would be cool to have this feature in AGS - but will it be used to it's full potential? I doubt it.

[Vel]

I absolutely ditto Miez, it is not worth it at all.

[Meowster]

I would.

[Miez]

I'm not saying it wouldn't be a NICE thing to have, I was just wondering if the time CJ will have to invest, outweighs the amount of time people are going to be using it ... I just have my doubts.
But, again, as GF is one of my fave games: it would be awesome to have the power...

[Peter Thomas]

As has been said, I think AGS should become an absolutely freaking fantastic 2d engine, as opposed to a pretty-darn-good 2d engine with basic 3d capabilities. Though at the same time, I think the possibility of 3d is quite exciting.

Maybe there could be 2 versions of AGS or something? Of course the primary emphasis would be to improve it the way it is, and the second would be with some minimal 3d capabilities that would slowly be added to. That way, people who only want to work with 2d aren't bogged down with theÃ,  extra file size, and those who want 3d can't complain.

Yeah - I know that'd require a lot of extra effort, but this is a Great Suggestiong - not a Great Commission.

EDIT: Admittedly I don't know how the lighting etc would be handled, but that doesn't mean no-one else does...

[shbaz]

Miez, making 3d characters isn't all the work you make it out to be once you get used to it. I made the model in Yufster's avatar in about 3 hours, then spent another three unwrapping (but due to new tools just being released - that's probably about 1 and a half hours now). Yufster painted the texture over a couple of days, and had never painted a 3d texture before. Rigging and posing it will take a few more hours once I get time to work on it again. I think that's comparable time to painting and animating a good 2d walkcycle in 8 different views - plus you get much more work cut off for cutscenes etc. 3D is the way to go, even if there isn't a 3d engine in AGS. Once I have the walkcycle done it's just a matter of aiming the camera and rendering the walkcycle.

[Kweepa]

The magic words there are "once you get used to it"
There are many different skills to learn - modelling, rigging, mapping, texturing and animating.
Big game companies have a different person doing each of these.
And then there's the software.
I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

Although, we could have the equivalent of Eric's walkcycle - just slap a new texture on the supplied animated character and bingo, new main character.

I think it might be quite interesting to have a Moho like character system - supply a body, heads, and broken up limbs, and the game animates them in 2d. That could be useful and speed up development. Of course, it's not for everyone.

[Wormsie]

Wintermute supports 3d characters, yufster.

No it doesn't.

How do I know?

I use Wintermute.

WME will support 3D characters in the future, though. At the moment it uses 3D acceleration for faster alpha blending and such. But no actual 3D objects.

[Pau]

Nobody will be forced to use 3D if that is implemented. You could continue using 2D and maybe use 3D in some details, making a mix to get something new.

Imagine a scene in the space, the characters and background are 2D but the spacecraft  is 3D and you can push it and make it rotate in order to find the entrance.

In 3D you can have an idle animation (the radar of the spaceship moving...) and combine it with the rotation if the character pushes, and continue with the idle animation in a new angle, once it's stopped by the character.

In 2D to make this you'll need a animation of the rotation and an animation of the idle animation for each rotation...

So I think the key is not to use the features just because they exist. I know 3D features could became the new lens-flare fever (and some of you are afraid of that), but it also could bring us a lot of possibilities to create innovative concepts and improve the adventure games.

I also understand that is not a HI priority task as I said before, but it could be interesting.

For an easy 3D format, you cold take a look at the .egg format. It's used by the panda3D engine http://www.etc.cmu.edu/panda3d/ (a engine released opensource by Disney). This format has exporters for max and maya. I'm not an expert in 3D but that maybe could be useful.

[stuh505]

I really hope that AGS does incorporate capability for 3D characters.

I was originally going to argue that AGS didn't need 3d characters for the following mentality:

"You can already render your characters doing their different animations, and then use sprites.Ã,  This will give greater character detail than is possible by using a runtime rendered 3d character."

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was wrong.

1) Using game rendering could allow for much smoother animations.

2) There are a lot of technical pains I went through to get my animated walkcycle into the game.Ã,  First of all, my rendered cycle was 30 frames...but I can only used 20 in the game.Ã,  This means I had to use only 10 frame animations because I wanted to have the start/stop animations be the correct ones, while mainting even frame spacing.Ã,  The process is quite painstaking also...the character has to be set up to walk through a path that is evenly lit from all sides, and the camera must be animated to follow at the rate that the character is moving, then each frame must be rendered which took me an hour or so, then each frame needs to be cropped...this is difficult because the centerlines must be maintained, I used actions but even so it's a lot of work and a lot of room for error.Ã,  Then all the walkcycles must be scaled to the same level.Ã,  Then they all need to be imported into AGS.

2) It would drastically conserve file space.Ã,  Using a SPARTAN 10 frame walking animation with 1 standing still animation, it costs 10 MB for each character (suing 800x600 alpha channel blended) just to have sprites for walking in the 4 directions and standing still, not counting diagonal animations, and animations for other things such as opening doors, gesturing, idle animations, handing things, taking out of pocket, stooping down to pick things up, random cutscene animations, etc.Ã,  AGS does not compress the sprite images internally, unlike backgrounds etc, so these 10 MB's go straight to the file size.Ã,  Using 3d rendering, only the small 3d information would need to be downloading.Ã,  In a well-made game that used 3d rendering and had equivalent animations to a game like Broken Sword or something, this could reduce the downloaded file size by hundreds of MB's.

3) People would take advantage of it, making many more animations in their games.Ã,  I love animations, they bring the character to life...and I feel there should be animations for basically everything the character does...this is really discouraged in AGS presently.Ã,  ALL of the newer adventure games are doing this.Ã,  Not only would people have MORE animations, but I think it would be less work to do all these animations than to do a single frame by frame animation for walking in AGS...because once you've spent all the hard time of modelling, texturing, and rigging a character....making new animations is easy, and only takes a few seconds to make him bend down, walk, whatever.Ã,  It's such a struggle with sprites.Ã,  I find errors with my animation, but it takes so many hours just to re-render, re-crop, re-put into AGS (and keep having to start over the uploading into AGS because I can't tell what frame # I am looking at from the sprite so I ahve to keep starting alll over)....so instead of fixing them, I say screw it.Ã,  This is not the kind of problem an engine should be encouraging.

4) It would allow for more advanced character shading/lighting.Ã,  Not a big issue for me, but a point nonetheless.

5) AGS already seems to have the most well developed fanbase and forum life.Ã,  Why force people who want to make modern-quality adventure games to leave the dear AGS community, or not become involved in it from the start?

6) There are enough people here with 3D knowledge already, I think, that would really take advantage of this.Ã,  There would also be more people coming to AGS from other engines, or choosing AGS from the start, to make this worthwhile.

7) People keep saying that there are other programs for 3D, use those for that, use AGS for 2D.Ã,  First of all...if you already know AGS...you don't want to learn some other program.Ã,  But, I did some looking into this...Wintermute isn't 3D, and it has no forum presence, meaning that it's going to be much more of a pain to learn when you don't have a community like this one to help beginners along.Ã,  I looked at Reality Factor too...the games made with that are 3D sure enough, but they're all first person (yuck) and they suck, and I couldn't find any real adventure games made with it.Ã,  So there doesn't really seem to be any other good options for people who just want to have good character animations.Ã,  Why would you want to push these people away from the AGS community anyway?Ã,  AGS should evolve with the times, I'm not saying it should be the end-all-be-all of freeware game engines....but shouldn't it live up to it's name, and be the end-all-be-all of adventure games?

[Miez]

2) It would drastically conserve file space.  Using a SPARTAN 10 frame walking animation with 1 standing still animation, it costs 10 MB for each character (suing 800x600 alpha channel blended) just to have sprites for walking in the 4 directions and standing still, not counting diagonal animations, and animations for other things such as opening doors, gesturing, idle animations, handing things, taking out of pocket, stooping down to pick things up, random cutscene animations, etc.  AGS does not compress the sprite images internally, unlike backgrounds etc, so these 10 MB's go straight to the file size.  Using 3d rendering, only the small 3d information would need to be downloading.  In a well-made game that used 3d rendering and had equivalent animations to a game like Broken Sword or something, this could reduce the downloaded file size by hundreds of MB's.

True, to a point: the 3D model itself would not take up much filesize. But keyframe information and textures might still take up quite some space.

[MrColossal]

I feel saying that AGS doesn't need 3d support because you can use rendered images is a bad arguement also, however some of your points are awkward

1: I think I have very smooth animations and I'm using 320x200 256 colours. It's all the amount of work you want to put into the game.

2: If you have a 30 frame walk cycle why can't you just cut out ever other frame and knock it down to 15? I've done this many times with 30 frame walk cycles and they always look well. Guess I'd have to see your animation

also you say that it's annoying to have to set up a camera to follow the character and lighting and all that... Why don't you just make a walk cycle not an animation of the character actually moving through space? A stationary figure with his arms and legs moving as if he's walking. If this isn't how you work how is supporting 3d characters going to help this? You're still going to need to make a stationary walk cycle anyway.

5: It's not like not allowing 3d characters would force anyone to leave. AGS doesn't support importing GIFs and all this has done is people had to make a sprite sheet. People can come and go and do what they please, if CJ doesn't really see the desire to have 3d support in AGS he's not doing it to push people away.

7: Just because there aren't other adventure games made with other engines doesn't mean they aren't worthy engines. I don't think AGS has to evolve with anything because there are tons of free engines out there that already do millions of things AGS can't and won't be able to do for years. DarkBasic and BlitzBasic are cheap and very worthy engines that support a lot of advanced 3d features, people have made tons of things out of them, people have made programs out of darkbasic that help you make darkbasic games, the same with blitz. People have made word processors and physics simulations and tons of things, if these engines can do this then why can't you use them to make adventure games? You'll have to learn a new engine and coding system but... Well.. Tough. You'd have to learn all new parts of AGS if it supported 3d anyway.

To imagine AGS having 3d support next year, let's say you can import .X models and animate them and some how you can set up lighting. What about particles? What about collision detection? What about advanced shaders? What about what about what about? Other engines already do all this and for all the time you spend waiting for AGS to get up to speed with them you could have learned another engine [as well as AGS, you don't have to leave] and made significant progress on your 3d game, and you could even use fully 3d environments.

Blitz and Darkbasic have huge forums with a lot of members and a lot of users and they are quite helpful. So why not check them out?

Also, there are things AGAST can do that AGS can't, so AGS isn't the best engine out there in a few situations.