Posts by schrodinger

+1 for P3D running in DX11

Quote from NaitorStudios

The creator of the engine gave up a while ago, he seem to have lose interest in the development...

Just to elaborate on this, I actually lost *chance* to continue development.
I've spent so much time with the engine I can safely say it will never fail to interest me XD

Hope Yves will find a spot to perform the magic trick it takes to bring the current version in DX11 (>> enabling the depth buffer, and then whoever can make the shader conversion happen).
I think P3D2.1 is still a pretty solid engine and would be interesting to see how it could perform in DX11.

[MENTION=15682]Volnaiskra[/MENTION]: thanks and cheers to you Vol I'm keeping up moderately well X)
but programming works are mostly out of my radar right now.
Miss the forum, all of the super nice people in here, the fun and the puzzling mind-challenges!

JumpUp_Games: none of what you mention unfortunately. It is a simpler environment with limited modeling capabilities.
As for android, it's currently not supported due to the fact P3D heavily relies on pixel shaders
(in case anyone's interested, I should have a "wireframe-only" 3D *engine* for android sitting somewhere.. but it's just wireframe lines and no faces/occlusion so I doubt anyone would make any relevant use of it)

[MENTION=37858]Chriz45[/MENTION] really appreciated, thank you,
glad the docs and examples are standing together and hope you're having fun with it

Thanks [MENTION=18480]elvisish[/MENTION] and [MENTION=14672]aenever[/MENTION] for the replies

As said P3D was developed in 2.5 and no optimization/upgrade to 2.5+ has been made.
2.5+ with DX11 could bring some really neat addition to the engine,
newer shader models allow for many more constants, shaders where dramatically squeezed to fit limitations in P3D2.1 and this led to features cuts, primitives limitations etc.,
plus converting shaders to DX11 alone *could* (speculation) bring better performances.
But sadly this is all out of my reach right now so the current version is all P3D can offer.
If anyone would be curious/willful/corageous/silly XD enough to jump in the daunting task of converting current P3D shader pack (20+ shaders) to the latest supported DX version for 2.5+, I would happily welcome him and give all of my blessings X)

Hello!
Have you tried removing the "C" option from P3D_engine object "multi_options" string? That's the so-called "Cardboard" effect P3D applies to sprites,
removing this character will disable the sprites "squeezing" and just leave them flat, don't know if this can be a solution for your need?
Other than that, there's no additional builtin processing for sprites.
If you scroll some pages back this thread I think I was mentioning a "billboarding" solution with shapes, but perhaps it's not what you were looking for either...?

Still couldn't get to tinker with Fusion unfortunately but wanted to add just one thing that popped in mind yesterday: isn't what you need basically what the "look-at" camera does in P3D? >>> always orienting towards a target location
You can check the expressions I used to set the look-at camera orientation for Z and X angles in the camera code - look at camera group, shouldn't that work for your needs too?
(considering obviously the target being not the player XYZ position but the desired aiming XYZ location)

[MENTION=5137]MrCyberpunk[/MENTION] that's a quite interesting chunk of code I'll like to dissect, in better times, thanks for sharing!

Yeah as you mention I've chosen a quite arbitrary set of conventions for angles, mainly, my goal was keeping it "readable" to a Fusion user having a topdown view of the axes in the frame editor, but this also causes headscratching when you have to implement non-native expressions!

This is weird though, as you only need "yaw" (Z angle in P3D) and "pitch" (X angle in P3D) and not need "roll" (Y angle in P3D) for projectile tracking, gimbal lock shouldn't be an issue, and it shouldn't be so painful to make, unless I'm overlooking something! I'll try hard to find a spot and give it a look (as you can see from my very rarified presence unfortunately I'm not sure when) and post eventual results of this search

Quote from funmaker

i ended up finding the angles set in the projection engine group, I made it how I want it, but now I found a different problem...
is there anyway to stop the weird thing on the side of the screen?
the cubes aren't being rendered at the edge for some reason (these are cube shapes, not cube tiles)
Please login to see this attachment.
if your wondering why the resolution is so low, im trying to make a ds-ish game

Very nice work funmaker!
Mmmm that look weird,
if you're not into the discord channel you might have missed some of the few additional snippets I posted some months ago, to enhance or fix a few issues,
you could try this one and see if there's any improvement:
Please login to see this link.
(it is a very suggested download for anyone using P3D2.1 by the way!)

in the original code there was an issue in the way the view frustum was calculated (this also slightly improves performances because of a better early-rejection of polygons to render)

if you tried this and it does not work, feel free to send me your .mfa to support[at]lizardking.co
I'm not sure when I'll be able to take a look though

funmaker: the isometric camera has fixed angles to recreate an "isometric" perspective (well, kinda-of, a true isometric representation is actually not something a realistic 3D render can do, since it mimics "real" vision and isometric projection is an idealized "distortion" of reality, not the way eyes perceive)
so if you want a different set of angles from the ones it gives, the quickest way is probably setting your own customized camera using the "free-cam" template, and setting its X,Y,Z angles the way you want (and the camera X,Y,Z position to some fixed spot relative to the player, i.e. Xplayer+200, Yplayer+200, Zpos player + 300)
Hope this helps!

MrCyberpunk: thanks a lot for the appreciation
If I get the issue, you'd like to control a projectile by tracking both the left-right angle (Z angle in P3D) and the up-down angle (X angle in P3D). I think that should work ok, so if when firing you set:
projectile Z angle to (OAngle(playerXY,targetXY))
projectile X angle to (OAngle(player(d)Z,target(d)Z) >> where (d) is the Phytagorean distance
it doesn't work right?

(actually, OAngle won't allow you to use (d) to get the X angle, so you'll have to use the Atan2 expression which if I'm not too rusty should be like: Atan2(Y1-Y2,X2-X1))

Awesome, congratulations!
It's indeed a lovely game with stylish and heartwarming graphics

Looks really nice, super-neat and very funny concept XD
Will make sure to get it next time I have access to the smartphone
(which might take some day, I'm like a lazy wolf hanging out of his den with a super-old cellphone just for the required life tasks, but have a smartphone sleeping somewhere specifically to -test projects- and check out Fusion games :D)
Thank you for crediting, honored & appreciate it!

Best luck to the Nudgy Cat

Best luck Emerson, sure you have a lot going on in your life, and making a game is always a much more challenging task that one can foresee - as much as Fusion is the coolest and fastest tool ever invented for the purpose of course X)

No worries - it's a common regret "having started too big", but one can't put constrains to ideas
(not before first dozen abandoned projects at least XD)
Making some simple game is often a good idea to keep alive the interest, learn things and feel rewarded!

And thanks Bejeers, I'm trying to get along with the ominous things,
sorry to hear about your bad year, wish the same good times to you

Yo Emerson!
Two more?! You have to be a quite busy dad!

I'm on a little hiatus due to a ominous catalysis of negative forces (XD) but just a few steps behind the corner,
glad to see you around again, hope Shinbaxter will come soon with one of his lines X)

Thanks a lot therickman!
That's really appreciated.
If you (and any other user of course!) need some assistance,
or just want to share some thoughts/suggestions/projects,
be sure to check out the P3D discord server,
invitation link is printed on the last page of the user manual!

ratty: ehehe glad you noticed, yeah I remember the new episodes were out since few weeks when I was working on that example,
I had to do that XD

markofthedog: thanks for the support and appreciation!
It depends on how the ground is made, since P3D features different solutions to create polygons,
in most of the examples the "ground" is a 3D object, you'll likely find a "repeating ground" object lying around in the frame,
in that 3D object's alterable values you'll find a reference to "my_model": that's the name of the object containing the texture.
It's very likely a "3D_P3D" object sitting on top-left of the frame, in the map layer. You can change the animations there to modify the texture.
Check out the user manual for "3D objects" for a complete guide on how to use them!
(just seen the same question on Youtube, it was probably you I guess?)

crian: thanks for the kind words!
I would say it's not possible, no shadow casting in P3D within Fusion2.5,
unless a higher shader model becomes supported, which is very unlikely I think

*******

Now sharing a little WIP for a realtime 3D preview feature
which is coming soon to T-mesh, the scene editor for P3D
(this feature was suggested by users on the discord channel, btw!)
The video is very crap, but I was on a very rush, sorry XD

Please login to see this media element.

Another option, you could use the Surface Object as a screen-wide layer of "shadows" (set color/set opacity of pixels).
Assuming the shadows are static (or mostly static), otherwise it might become quite awkward to handle and probably not efficient enough.

Perhaps a shader could be made for the purpose, it would need to be applied to all objects, and:
1) sample the background, don't draw shadow if color is different from (background texture at that position)
or
2) use the "depth buffer" to assign apt depth values (i.e. Y position of the pixel + ID/1000.0) to the shadow and so avoid drawing multiple times on the same spot

Or simpler: a single shader, covering the whole screen, where shadows locations are sent through fake objects (your current shadows) painted in a palette of specific colors you don't use elsewhere; when the shader finds the colors, it replaces them with a darkened version of the background texture (so you'd need to feed a background texture to the shader).

There might be other ideas too...

Surface object, if applicable, or multilayer with multiply/subtract effects as Muddymole suggests are probably the simplest approach though XD

Adding to all the cool options explained above,
I have an extensionless (>>>cross platform) example here,
which is rather short and uses a simple approach and should be customizable a bit (iirc XD):
Please login to see this link.

Quote from MuddyMole

To create the LUT image files, just take one of the default images included, and apply your effect filter directly to it. A nice trick is to take a screenshot of your game, then copy and paste the default LUT image onto the screenshot. The you can apply whatever effects you like, until the screenshot looks the way you want the actual game to look, and then just cut out the LUT part and save it as a new file - and that's your new LUT image, ready to use

What a neat trick!
And awesome job (as usual)

you could split the level in a grid of positions (say, width|height/32)
make a pool of numbers out of it, and rule out the available positions while you place items
(there's a random pool object around or you can easily make one with a list object)

A bit more prosaic but possibly quicker XD:
1.make a detector same size of your set of object (5 nuggets columns wide)
2.fire a loop "make set" 7 times to create the sets
3. on loop "make set"
- set detector flag0 OFF
- place the detector on a random position
- if the detector does not overlap a nugget, set detector flag0 ON
- detector flag0 is OFF: create the nuggets at detector positions (fire loop "make nuggets"...)
- detector flag0 is ON: fire loop "make set" one time

could result in a endless loop if the level is not big enough to hold all nuggets without them overlapping,
or if you are extremely extremely unlucky XD
(a flower on the moon kind of thing)

Another simple idea (if I understand the requirement!)
would be making all lists you need as differente instances of same object (duplicate them)

then simply:

start of frame
>>> spread value 0 in value A (list)

and add in your eventline 12:

on loop "read_values"
+value A (list) = loopindex("read_values")/16
>>> append the content

in this way the loop will automatically pick the correct list where to put data in