Messages

A. Wake?
I don't think that IP'll be selling for $50m.
Max Payne was a cheesy name, but good cheesy.

The screenshots are pretty nice though.

It shouldn't kill the framerate.
Most of the framerate drop that happens now (when a lot of spheres are thrown into the scene) is due to culling and clipping using the scripting language. If necessary I can optimise this with view frustum culling.

The best option would be perspective textured triangles. I'll check what Allegro has to offer.
I'm not sure I want to go that route (fully textured), but I guess it would be useful to texture map one side of a cube (for signs, posters, etc)...

[EDIT] Allegro has plenty of options (probably triangle3d() is the best). But part of the point of this 3d engine to see what can be done with AGS, not to start changing AGS to add features just to support it that would be no use to anyone else. And as you say, the graphics have an old-school charm that texture mapping might ugly up if overdone.
It is working out to be quite an easy way to make a 3d game though. AGS's scripting system is a beautiful thing.

Current todo list:
- player collisions
- primitives (cylinder , hemisphere, toblerone, tetrahedron) [EDIT] done
- improve sorting
- inventory system (cycle with [ ] keys or mouse wheel, use with left mouse button)
- look at on right mouse button

#3.
Thanks to Gilbot, I have animated talking characters!
Also
- limited the look up/down to 60 degrees.
- added an invert mouse option on F8.
- the bar from RON.



http://www.steporg.com/step/ags/games/ags3d.zip

Thanks a lot, Gil!

Thanks!
I'll check that out.

So you just removed code - you didn't add anything?

Yeah, I was planning on limiting the camera pitch to +/-60 or so, since the sprites look odd when pitching the camera.

Going under the ground sorts wrong because I intentionally draw the ground first, to avoid having to sort it. I will do the same thing for the walls and ceiling inside a room.

(In the game that this will become, the up and down keys will obviously be disabled.)

Cheers!

Hi,

I'm trying, with 2.71beta3, to get a character to animate when he talks.
Sounds simple enough...

I imported the WEIRD character from the RON resources.
He has a Normal view and a Talking view.
The talking view previews fine.

In on_mouse_click, I call
cWeird.RunInteraction(eModeInteract);
and in the interaction, I call
cWeird.Say("My name is George.");
The text appears, and the character changes view, but the cWeird.Frame never budges from 0 (there are four frames in the loop).
The talking speed is something reasonable, 1 or 4 (I tried both).

Anyone have any ideas?

Here's a zip of the offending game (source + compiled).
Approach the bum with the cursor keys and press the left mouse button when "Bum" appears in the status line.

You really make me proud for having started this "little" project, it would've never came this far without your amazing work.

Heh, of course it was your framework that encouraged me to try it!
A script module should be possible from this I'm sure...

I assume texture mapping and/or gouraud shading is out of the question?

You assume correctly
Unless AGS supports gouraud shading of triangles... Of course that would slow down the game a little bit more.

...I'd be surprised if the game slowed down after a few low resolution triangles.

The memory usage is minimal. Projecting 50,000 vertices and clipping 100,000 triangles per second is a chore for a scripting language. (I had to clip the triangles to the viewport after all.)

[EDIT] PS. I added a second room and a character that you can "talk to".

I can collide the camera against the objects *fairly* easily. Sliding along them is doable, although harder. I'll be giving that a shot.

Physics (stacking boxes etc) is a whole other ballgame, particularly in a scripting language without struct-within-struct or pointer-to-struct support. I might be able to do some bouncing balls but that's not a priority right now. Full physics is out of the question - although it would be relatively easy to write a Novodex plugin, that would be cheating - at that point I might as well write the 3d part in the plugin too.

I don't get the memory cache question. The only AGS cache I know of is the sprite cache, and I don't know why I'd need to make that bigger.

Cheers,
Steve

I know about the sorting bug.
The solution is to find a separating plane between each pair of objects and swap them depending on which side of the plane the camera is. Like I said, not easy (in script).

As for it slowing down, I should be able to make some frustum cull optimizations and some bounding box optimizations. If I feel like it. I did limit the number of objects to 50, but 50x120 triangles to be culled and clipped is rather a lot.

I'll make invert mouse an option.
Ozzie, I am aware of that bug, hence the TODO of better sorting. It's not particularly easy, unfortunately. The easy fix is to break the blue box into two smaller boxes, but that's a bit lame.

The latest version has full editing capabilities!
TAB changes editing mode between move, rotate, scale, colour.
F5 cycles through the objects.
C copies the currently selected object.
O, P, L place Sphere, Pyramid, Cube at the camera position (back up to see it).
WASDQE move or rotate or scale or change colour of the currently selected object.
Shift-X deletes the last placed object.
F4 writes out code to recreate the scene, which can be pasted into an enter room script.
There's also a "Door" hotspot between the two red boxes which will soon be triggered with a press of the space bar...

http://www.steporg.com/step/ags/games/ags3d.zip

It's WIP so there may be some crash bugs...

The PAGEUP and PAGEDOWN might be because I compiled with 2.70 and didn't have support for those keys. The latest version uses 2.71b3. They may be inverted.
If you feel like jumping in and doing something, let me know and I'll put the latest version on steporg.com.

Meanwhile, I added rotation of primitives.
Disco ball!

Don't go through the blue box then
Thanks for the report - very useful. I'll take a look at it.

[EDIT] Ok, I see what I did wrong. Poor assumption on my part. Fixed and uploaded. Ta!

Nice work on the mouse look!

I updated it a bit more to make the mouse look more responsive, and added:
- clipping
- primitives (sphere and pyramid)
- movement relative to the camera
- basic draw order sorting
- movement and scaling of primitives
- some speedups



http://www.steporg.com/step/ags/games/ags3d.zip

Now todo:
- collisions (stop the player walking into the primitives)
- primitive rotation
- multiple lights
- drawing scaled sprites
- better sorting?
- make game.

[EDIT] Updated progress

Awesome improvement!
You are right about the pipes in front. They look too flat now.
Since it's a scrolling background you could have a couple of smaller, fatter pipe elements that hang from the ceiling or protrude from the bottom, and that move with parallax.

However, I'd move on - I don't want this to be another FoY

I did some work on this to encourage you to continue, [...].

http://www.steporg.com/step/ags/games/ags3d.zip

I changed it over to 320x240, 16 bit so that the lighting would look better.
I also fixed the rotation, the lighting, and the backface culling.

Still to do:
- clipping at the near clip plane - AGS clips at the screen edges.
- other primitives (pyramid and sphere would probably be enough).
- movement, rotation, and scaling of the primitives.
- sorting the draw order of the primitives.
- mouse look.
- multiple lights.
- movement relative to the camera.
- drawing scaled sprites?
- making a game out of it!

Yes - for every inventory interaction, you need to have a script function rather than using the visual scripting.

You need to make the interaction "run script".
Then you can just turn off the GUI before displaying the speech, and turn it back on again afterwards.

There's a walkthrough on Yahtzee's site.