3d game engines

[shbaz]

I know a lot about character animation, and it's probably not a fault with 3DS you're seeing, but a problem with low-poly stuff in general. If the models aren't carefully made, they can be a huge pain to rig. If you've never rigged a character before, even a great model might be difficult to rig. Right now I'm rigging a model I made for a huge project at Crystal Space and it's all GPL so I can show you that when I finish sometime today.

I'll try to explain it as best as I can here though.

First of all, here is the best forum in the world for game art critique. Here is the second best one.

Go in these forums and look for the really pro gameart (it's easy to see one from the latter) and look at it, specifically how they did the joints. You'll notice that usually elbows and knees have three edge-loops fairly close together. This is to allow a lot of freedom with bending and prevent too much distortion in the texture map. You're supposed to parent the main bone (thigh or upper arm) to the top edge-loop and begin another bone that will only control the middle loop. The shin or wrist bone will then be parented to both the middle and the bottom loops. So now you have the middle loop controlled by both the small joint bone and the wrist or shin. The reason for this is that the knee won't buckle as fast when it has another bone it is parented to that is not moving - it moves at about half the speed that the rest of the bone's vertices would, and gives a realistic effect of the knee bending.

Probably what you have the most problem with though is shoulders (everyone does). The arm has the greatest range of motion of any large appendage on your body, able to point directly up, down, and everywhere in between. A shoulder is similar to the knee or elbow, but has a somewhat unusual second edge-loop that doesn't make a complete circle, but rather connects back to the first edge-loop. You'll just have to look at some models for this one - describing it is kind of hard for me ATM. You need one bone that comes out from the shoulder and ends just a little before the arm starts, one very small bone coming from there, and then the big bone that will extend to the elbow joint. The first bone will allow you to move the shoulders up and down as the model moves its arms around a lot. The second is a control (like the small bones in the knee and elbow) to allow you to keep that shoulder from distorting too much when the arm moves a long way. The third bone has an obvious purpose, I think.

More important than the skeletal structure isÃ,  the way that you parent your vertices to the skeleton. This is also very hard to sum up in a small place, so if you want I could just examine your model with one of the .3DS to .Blend scripts and see what could be causing you problems.. though I don't know how trustworthy those things are. In Blender when I parent the skeleton to the mesh it asks if I want it to automatically assign vertice groups to the bones and I let it do that. It will then find all of the closest vertices to the bone and parent those to each bone. After that, I look at each group and try to find mistakes, I edit out the vertices that don't need to be selected, and then start testing out the rig and adjusting slight problems, before making my animation loops.

$50 in the USA will also buy 100 liters of Coke, or 200 liters of an off-brand soda, or a used video camera. It is a lot of money, but most good games here also come out costing $50. If it's something you really want you can save the money (here, anyway). In Estonia though, I'm not sure how life is, so sorry for making the quick judgement.

Make fun of me for liking Blender all you want, I think it's funny too, I never had tried the search. Even I can admit that Blender still has it's faults too.. the game engine is missing a lot of standard things (rendering functions) like bumpmapping and shadows. I don't know how well 3DS models would transport to it. There are a few problems that could arise, but if you want, we can try it.

[InCreator]

Shabazjinkens, you're a hero. Can you really use blender? Damn, it even doesn't have recognizable "File" menu! And one view only? Huh. After three hours of figuring out how to see top, side and perspective views (spacebar-menu didn't do anything), blender is outta list, because  I have only time until october, then army and no game design for a long time. I'm not going to spend all this time trying to figure out how blender works.
Damn. And it was free.

[shbaz]

Shabazjinkens, you're a hero. Can you really use blender? Damn, it even doesn't have recognizable "File" menu! And one view only? Huh. After three hours of figuring out how to see top, side and perspective views (spacebar-menu didn't do anything), blender is outta list, becauseÃ,  I have only time until october, then army and no game design for a long time. I'm not going to spend all this time trying to figure out how blender works.
Damn. And it was free.

Are you joking?



You're not going to figure it out if you expect it to be just like 3DS Max, it's far different from what I've heard.

The documentation might help.

PDF, if you have broadband
PDF Volume II (Hotkey reference)

I wouldn't switch totally if I were you, you can import models from 3DS (though I don't know how well the scripts work) and just place them and use only the game engine.

Try to learn the very basic things (Middle mouse button is free rotate, MMM+shift is grab, MMM+ctrl is zoom) and then see if you can use this tutorial to set up a 3rd person camera to follow a character.

Really though, you're probably better off with DarkBasic or something that will directly import 3DS models, to be honest. You can get a free demo from the site to see how it works out. I wouldn't want to totally switch apps either, not because of functionality, but just because of having to learn a new program.

[shbaz]

Sorry to dig this topic up again, honest, but one of the features of Crystal Space escaped my notice:

3D triangle mesh sprites with frame animation. Convertors for Milkshape, Maya, Cal3d, 3DS, Quake MDL and Quake II MD2 formats to Crystal Space are included. Importers for 3DS, MDL, MD2, OBJ, POV, and ASE are also included. The meshes are actually progressive meshes allowing for dynamic LOD (level of detail) changes. There is also support for skeletal sprites.

So it will import your 3DS files. You'll probably need to find some help with scripting since you said you weren't apt with that, but this engine seems to suit your needs. I don't think I included a link last time, so here:

Features of Crystal Space
Screenshots (for this kind of look it is necessary to use bump maps)

I hope you haven't given up.. it's hard, but possible.

[Edwin Xie]

I strongly believe that Reality Factory is for indoor enviroments but please! Somebody prove me wrong!

[shbaz]

I strongly believe that Reality Factory is for indoor enviroments but please! Somebody prove me wrong!

This is a misconception.. there are no indoor or outdoor game engines. Sure, maybe the easier thing to do is indoor or outdoor, but if you can import a half-sphere and put a skymap on it, you can do outdoor scenes.. If you can do outdoor scenes, you can most certainly do indoor ones.

[MrColossal]

however...

It is my professional opinion that Reality Factor is ungood.

Dr. Frankenstein

[shbaz]

however...

It is my professional opinion that Reality Factor is ungood.

Dr. Frankenstein

I'd have to agree, looking at the features..

but..

It looks easier to use than most 3d engines I've seen, because they automated a lot of processes you'd normally need to script.

[InCreator]

Hey, thanks... and I'm still on the hunt!
Crystal Space? But what's this? Open C source code only or what? I didn't figure out what to download!

Argh. Just tried to achieve something with 3d gamestudio and I'm still pissed. 299 entities maximum per level! Damn, I have to make a forest, this means that I have to make trees. Now, being user-friendly, I make leaves as 2-d sprites. three sprites, turned at all axis excactly 90 degrees (as they do in other games) make a leaf group. or bush. For every tree I need about 6-9 of these leaf sprite groups. Just imagine how fast I reach this damn entity limit, considering that 2D sprites and 3D-models with interaction of any kind are both counted as 'entities'! I was able to make only 20 trees... Not much of a forest. Or engine worth anything...

Doing things with any Basic seems stupid, because I have to build level editor first or something like that, I really don't believe I can script whole levels!

What would be really useful is a program that supports 3d models with already applied skin and UVW maps directly from 3ds max. Or has plugin for max which understands max's mapping and converts max files to needed format.

Damn.Ã, 
These 3D-wannabe-engines are giving me a headache. Back to old lovely X-Y-Only-AGS to finish my first game!

[MrColossal]

if you're using DarkBasic check this out:

http://darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view=32172&b=8&p=0

or this

http://www.delgine.com/

or this

http://www.dbforums.co.uk/~hamish/contents/multiscape.htm

[Raggit]

Wow, I should take a look at some of these.  I've always wanted to make a storm chasing game.     It'd be a cross between a driving sim and... well, storm chasing.

[Al_Ninio]

I recommend Blitz Basic.
If you decide to use it, check Blitz Coder for tutorials.

[mätzyboy]

If you program c++ i think irrlicht shows some decent potential:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/
I made some simple tests and had a rendered animated character on screen in no time.

Someone also made a DLL using Irrlicht for Game Maker which seems to be some kind of non-programming alternative. Have not tested this though...

[InCreator]

OMG! Blitz basic looks sooo good! But it's... commercial!
<happiness reduces to -10 immediately>

Every moment like that increases my respect to AGS and CJ, which often seems like lonely happy island at the center of ocean.

Irllicht? Game Maker? Weird, but Game Maker and AGS are two GCS's where I just am able to bring ever the craziest idea into reality - opposite to even simplest scripting in any 3D-related GCS, yet they both use C++...Ã,  I'm going to try this out immediately!

Thanks!Ã, 

edit: irrlicht looks good. Which brings to question number two: What's a good program to make .MD2 files out of .3DS or even - is there any good/free 3ds max plugin to export files into MD2?

[InCreator]

Last update: hunt stopped.
Irrlicht seems to be a powerful and free toy, and being equipped with some other none less powerful tools, such as...

- 3ds max 4.2 (for every damned triangle)
- GtkRadiant (Quake level editor, for doing nice .bsp levels)
- Artgem (for all the 2D artwork I do - this time textures)
- Digital camera (which is ordered and should arrive real soon - for photorealistic textures)
- spare time

...I think I'm going to try to make something. This was a basic list of what is needed and something is still missing from the list... oh yes, MD2 texture exporter plugin for 3ds max, I'm still searching for this one. And maybe a copy of Visual Studio 6.0 In case I really get some levels, mesh and textures done some day, that is.

Well, whoever was interested about my hunt - here's the things you need to do it my way.

[shbaz]

Awesome. I'm glad everything worked out for you.

Good luck.

I'm still trying to figure Crystal Space out.. heh.. I'm making models for a showcase game (Crystal Core) on a team, but can't even figure out the damned engine.