P3D 2.0 - out now!

Nice :)
Now there's nothing to stop you recreating "Ecstatica", with its unique spheroid-based 3D engine.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ecs...statica-10.png

http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/...ica1_pc_18.gif

ahh so good, I liked Ecstatica a lot, I remember its only flaw was being too short, but it was so creative, so original.
Alone in the Dark was contemporary, or even earlier I perhaps, and maybe it looked better,
but Ecstatica had something peculiar that made me enjoy it even more.

Nice run throug memory lane X) but still no spheroids, only spheres :(
Not sure I can cut the shader enough to have an additional parameter for spheroids.
I might need to get rid of rotations for that, which I had been able to implement meanwhile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqofTObWJQQ

This also brings more nice news: to obtain spheres rotation I completely reverted the logic, it's actually the viewpoint that rotates around the object.
This new template now should make me able to implement additional implicit surfaces more smoothly (as I can have them axis-aligned >> much easier to raytrace!) let's cross fingers X)

Woah this is some crazy good work. I'm speechless, pure brilliance imo :)

Thanks aenever!

And the best is yet to come :D

The other main reason (beside spheres) I was particularly interested in trying this system was for rendering "boxes".
And now I can say it worked good indeed.
We already had boxes - of course, but the most obvious advantage is that now one box = one object,
whereas before we had one box = up to 6 faces
see the test scene below with about 300 boxes
each one changing animation, moving, rotating, scaling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC-g51RBp4g

(you can spot some oddity - the "visibility" and bounding box pipeline is yet to update,
frame drops in crowded views are mostly due to the desktop-recording software though)

This would have been 1800 objects before!

Plus, as you can probably see, these single-shader-boxes are very sharply rendered, and there's no chance for the slighest seam.
They can be freely rotated and scaled in any dimension (width, depth, height) in realtime (this might answer casleziro request? :))
without any overhead related to the operation (no need to update the geometry/vertices data as happens with current "faces").

Think at how many structures and how easily you can build by customizing and merging these boxes together.


Now a little questioning for anyone possibly interested:
since these new shapes will be self-contained in a single object,
freely customizable in edit-time and runtime through its own alt. values,
(and since they have a quite different pipeline than the current "faces")
I'm thinking about using a different qualifier -- "shapes" would be perfect,
and to drag the shape away from the map layer when the game starts,
just like it happens with "static sprites", to avoid having unneeded additional objects.

I could keep "stopped" animation as topdown view you can use in level editing to place the object,
and all the other animations for textures,
but this will also mean the object won't appear anymore in the "map" layer once the game starts,
you'd need to hard-code a map "mask" for shapes in the map layer in case.
What do P3D users think about it? Do you use the "map layer" in-game? :)


There's still work to do (optimizing here and there, all the collisions routines for these new shapes, trying yet other shapes..)
so this might take still a bit before I can give you - kind P3D users :) - this goodness.
And I'll need to tweak a bit the old shaders to make everything fit perfectly together,
so the new version won't be compatible with the old shaders, and the old version won't be compatible with the new shaders...
in short, you'd have to update both the engine and the shaders if you have a wip
but it will be hassle-free (no need to modify anything on your side, beside copying the engine group and shaders)

That looks great :o
This would make larger worlds and structures tons easier/performance friendly! Definitely answers my request.


To the map layer question: I wouldn't mind. To me the map layer is neat, but if I needed a map I would probably make a custom one.

Thanks for the feedback casleziro.

I think I'll go that route indeed, the advantage of having less objects and less convolution
(pointing from object1 to object2, removing object1, having textures in object2..) easily makes more pros than cons,
unless I'm overlooking something I will discover while coding XD

And... here's cylinders!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP0b6inIcaY

It was another shape I really missed up to now.
You can make columns, poles, nice structures, they are very useful building blocks and "faking" them with multifaced prisms was very resource demanding.
Now the cylinder shader is probably even a bit more performing than the "boxes" one above.

I didn't make top and bottom "caps", I could add them, but this would need having a few conditionals more,
(including the option of having or not having the caps) and easily slow down things a bit.
So I was thinking at making different shader versions for caps/no caps,
but it would be already at least three shaders (no caps, only top cap, 2 caps), four shaders for total freedom (+ only bottom cap)
this wouldn't be a big problem perhaps, just having a dozen of P3D shaders in the effects folder X)
(only the "dynamic loading module" would suffer a bit, as it "caches" objects and would find difficult reusing objects when so many different shaders are applied)

Same problem for boxes: adding a conditional for "clearing" faces would damage performances even more in that scenario
(even if I would obviously limit to a few options to avoid all possible permutations with 6 faces..)

So, not sure if pursuing the "lots of shaders" way, will think still a bit on this.

Now I'll (probably) stop adding more shapes and implement all the modifications needed to the engine to handle everything correctly,
and then publish the update. Additional shapes "might" come later...

Can you do a shape similar to a cube, but with a top face that slopes towards one of the four edges, and with different textures on each of the five/six sides (where each texture is a tile in a single tilemap image)? And display a lot of them at the same time...? That would be my dream :)

eg.
http://i.imgur.com/YcurpjF.png

I'm just thinking that you could forget spheres/cylinders/polhedra/etc (everything except sprites) and just make it a cube-based engine (so everything is aligned to a 3D grid of cubes), similar to Minecraft but with the possibility for slopes as well, and that would be pretty much perfect (this is essentially how the original GTA games worked, and while those games used a fixed overhead perspective, there's no reason why you would have to). It would make level design and loading very simple because levels would map perfectly to a 3-dimensional array. In an ideal world, you could even create a super-intuitive grid-based level editor for it, along the lines of "Crocotile3D" ( http://www.crocotile3d.com ) or the original GTA map editor "Junction25".

http://alexhw.com/art/c3dscreen.png
http://media.moddb.com/images/games/...Comparison.png

Anyway, that's just my opinion. You'd lose some of the flexibility, but you'd still be able to do what most people need, and it would be so much easier to work with.

I'm also guessing it's probably not an option anyway, as it would be pretty heavy on objects, but just in case...

Cylinders came together quickly and look great.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MuddyMole

Can you do a shape similar to a cube, but with a top face that slopes towards one of the four edges, and with different textures on each of the five/six sides (where each texture is a tile in a single tilemap image)? And display a lot of them at the same time...? That would be my dream :)

eg.
http://i.imgur.com/YcurpjF.png

---

This shape is a neat idea if it were allowed with the shader limitations (could let you make true 3D slopes).
I had been brainstorming about a way to do something similar in the current engine myself by finding a way of colliding with the actual texture images of a cube's faces instead of the built-in collision. You can technically already make a shape like this with 2 objects (although it won't collide properly):

-a cube, with top face cleared, sides drawn as triangles and front and back faces at custom heights
-a regular plane as the new top face, with X angle however you want it. This could use standard slope object collision.
Attachment 23737

The idea is to have a collision mask object that has all the shapes you would need to collide for each special case. Then this is positioned against the player object whenever they enter the 3d space of the cube and they test collision against it (face animation changed depending on your orientation, z collision handled by some trickery etc). It might be better to just use the "model" objects tied to each shape in some way, too. This could let you have some really unique shapes going on, if applied to the other shapes P3D provides.

I know i'm crazy XD

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MuddyMole

I'm just thinking that you could forget spheres/cylinders/polhedra/etc (everything except sprites) and just make it a cube-based engine (so everything is aligned to a 3D grid of cubes), similar to Minecraft but with the possibility for slopes as well, and that would be pretty much perfect (this is essentially how the original GTA games worked, and while those games used a fixed overhead perspective, there's no reason why you would have to). It would make level design and loading very simple because levels would map perfectly to a 3-dimensional array.

---

I'd like to keep spheres and such myself :o

Huh. I had no idea the old GTA was in 3d! I thought it was 2d lol

@ MuddyMole: that customizable cube would be neat. Technically would be doable.. for sure if we had shader model 3 available XD
I fear this won't be possible within current available constants, and if possible (by cutting away some feature like fogging i.e.),
it would probably perform half as good as regular boxes.
I'll think at it and maybe try some testing though. Until you don't try, you never really know X)

Ah, as for individual graphics for "box" faces, currently not,
but I'm already at work for trying a "cubemap" texture format so you could nest all faces in a specific format inside a single image.
Still not sure the shader will allow though!

You can already have al of that of course with individual faces right now:

Attachment 23738

(jaggy edges can be improved by upscaling graphics and downscaling the cube)

but as casleziro pointed out, this won't work very good with collisions:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/37y2yrlix1..._test.zip?dl=0
(try if you want)

the "sloped" vertical faces (cutted lizard faces in the picture) will behave as if they were full solid even in the missing triangular transparent area
Since P3D has world coordinates at collision point inside every touched face, this could be solved by sampling the texture RGB at collision point, if color sampled=transparent color of that texture (transparent color should be stated somewhere, i.e. in values) collision does not happen.
I thought about this as it would give some interesting new possibilities, but RGBat is pretty expensive, and it would be performed in a loop, 3-4 times x physical object (players and the ones with "fine collision" enabled) so not sure if this would cause issues.
I could make some tests if this is interesting.


As for making it a cube based engine - well, you can use P3D this way if you want :)
you have Fusion snap to grid, and with the new boxes the process would be as easy as now, if not even more:
the way I'm going to do it is they would have three values for x,y,z "origin" position (center of the object),
three values for x,y,z dimension (where applicable), and three values for x,y,z rotations.
I think there could be an option to auto-fill these values basing on object position in the frame, texture dimension and ratio (to read x/y/z dimension).
So within the minimal editing setup you would basically just put the cubes in the frame, snapping to grid, change z position when needed
(or use different layers for different Z positions in same objects, as some users ingeniously thought of)


As for the number of objects you can have, I'm still not sure myself right now, tests indicating 300 objects were of course meaning you can have 300 objects (boxes, cylinders, spheres)
"in sight at the same moment" (on my moderately decent desktop pc)
but you can likely have thousands in a full level, if you don't use huge render distances.
I'll have more clear data on this once the new pipeline for shapes is perfectioned.


@ casleziro: thanks!
cylinders were a quick job after the sphere indeed,
the cool thing about "quadrics" is they all look very similar, once you solve one equation, you have a template for the others.
Here's a list of quadrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadric#Euclidean_space (scroll down a bit to see drawings)
not sure everyone of those would be doable (sme have a few additional parameters.. more work for the shader)
but mt next targets would be circular paraboloid (nice for hills!) and circular cones (nice for many things)

Hi schrodinger!
I've tested the version 2.0 of P3D and the performance improvment is impressive!
With the previous version I judged it was too slow (on my PC) to start thinking about a project with P3D but this problem is now solved!
I get 60fps most of the time but, strangely, framerate goes down when the "camera" rotates (with the castle example : framerate can goes down to 30-40fps during a rotation and then goes back to 60 when I stop rotating).
Do you know if there is something to do to reduce slowdowns during rotations ?

Hello BenjaminG,
thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you're experiencing the new "powers" of 2.0 :)

For the rotation drops, there's not very much to do probably, rotations are the most expensive operation, because lots of objects can enter the viewfield in a very small time, and so the engine must pick the new set of objects to render and hide the ones currently on screen. This is in fact more noticeable if you go i.e. behind the castle and turn around: looking at the empty meadow and then at the whole playfield will cause all the objects in the playfield to come in view together and bring the higher performance cost.
One thing you could consider is lowering the rotation speed of the player, turning around slower will mitigate a bit the effect by having less of this object pick-and-drop per frame, but depends on the kind of gameplay you're after (perhaps rotating speed in the examples is currently too fast for yor needs, but perhaps not!)

Beside this, most of the suggestions in the "performance improvement" chapter of the user manual apply here as well,
so i.e. reducing the framerate will surely smoothen the effect (you notice a drop from 60 to 40 only if the game runs at 60 fps - if the game runs at 30/40 fps natively, you shouldn't notice drops) you'll have to modify (raise) your characters speed to fit the new framerate accordingly, framerates from 30 fps up are perfectly fine for a game, imo.


***

But there's very big news in stock, really another new chapter for P3D.

If you've looked at latest posts, the new "shapes" I'm adding will significantly increase performances (and they will be super easy to use and freely moved/stretched/rotated in realtime without any performance drawback)
I'm still refining the new routines and I'm very satisfied with results so far, yesterday tested about 400 boxes in sight at the same moment at 60 fps on my machine (-> 2400 "faces", about ten times what we had before!)

Still some additional work to do, some for the good and some for the bad (on performances side) so I'd expect final results to be at least like what I'm experiencing now.
If things go smooth with the additional modifications I need to do, I'll try to post a playable example later (today/tomorrow) so you can try with your hands :)

Finalizing and publishing the update shouldn't take too long hopefully!

*cough* I'm a bit late on that example I promised X)
sorry I've been ill during last couple days,
but I've now a couple updates to share on the new boxes,
I made the "repeating" textures and a "cubemap" format to use different faces on cubes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o20ytXA4XoI

cubemap format will be specific for P3D,
and will be like this:

Attachment 23765

(you will nest all faces in a single picture)

might look a bit strange, but I made it this way to save on some shader operations..


Being "square", it can be better optimized for performances
(and so it should work fine on casleziro's graphic card ;D)

Unfortunately, to have these features, I had to get rid of spotlights for boxes, the shader was too "full".
I thought these ones were more interesting/useful.

Another nice feature of repeating texturing on boxes is that their "ratio" can be freely changed,
even for "cubemapped" textures, and even during runtime:

http://www.lizardking.co/P3D/gifs/rs_box_tratio.gif


Another day was spent mounting a new "matrix" math for all the rotations, this was a very important technical change,
as it allowed to save on a number of operations both for CPU and GPU, and should probably allow better "spacecraft" movements
(still have to test it to be sure though)

To the next update, with hopefully that example ready!

Nice update.
And it seems to be the season: I'm actually recovering from a pretty terrible cold myself D:<


Is the grid inside the cubemap image just for an example or are the images actually separated like that? I.E does the shader accommodate a pixel gap between each image. EDIT: (nevermind, I see they're in the gif being scaled)

Just out of curiosity (not a big deal if not) can cylinders and spheres be cut in half currently? I imagine not if that would require more constants.

Yeah gridlines were just an aid to make the test image,
there's no pixel gap, I'll make a better example pic for the manual X)

Speres and cylinders can't be cutted half at current stage,
but I think this should be doable, I'd probably put it in another shader.
The good thing with this system is that the engine feeds the shader "axis-aligned" objects,
and so it's easier to project them and to find solutions for customizing the bits you need to take from the geometries.

So we'll likely end up having a wide stock of shaders for many different situations,
it's already three for boxes (scaling, repeating, repeating cubemapped)
perhaps using conditionals could have been nicer in some way,
but the constants available won't allow to,
and anyway having a different version of the shader is faster than requiring a single shader to perform additional condition checks for each object, so in this case I can't totally blame the constants limitation XD

A bit of a last-minute announce,
but The Reactor will be streaming an introductory P3D video about an hour from now,
the video shows some of the engine's main mechanics, and some brief anticipation on the upcoming features.

I'll be online available for questions regarding P3D along the stream,
so if you're interested you can check it out, less than one hour from time of this post, at this link:
https://www.twitch.tv/clickteamllc

Hi schrodinger , i like P3D,and i have one.
the part of ZOMBIE CITY, Whether there is a way to change the manipulation of the mouse is aimed at the part,
he is not like a first person shooting game,I'm going to start using it to make my work.

And I really like the future of the cyber city style, I saw only a short show on the reactor video,
Is there a more complete exe or video that can be viewed?

Hello 3DBBQ, glad you're enjoying P3D :)

Not sure I understood the mouse question:
do you mean you'd like the "mouse lookaround" feature working in a different way,
or you'd like an example on how to shoot at specific body parts,
or something else?

If the first one, there's an "advanced mouse lookaround" code nested inside the engine, you can unlock it by adding the "mouse object" extension to your project,
and going inside "custom movements - movement types and options - mouse lookaround" groups (and follow instructions inside)
Of course if any doubt let me know!

As for those jaw-dropping cyberpunk city videos, they were made by Sinclairian, taken from an amazing game he is working on,
he's been posting some in the old P3D (1.0) thread and on his own online pages,
you find a couple more in P3D2.0 trailer video too, from this minute on: https://youtu.be/1El2NI6RGzM?t=43


*****

Since I'm writing here, sorry for the lack of updates in past weeks,
but be assured: more time = more stuff coming!
And there's really big news in stock, won't anticipate right now,
(almost) everything is well set and I'm working hard to optimize and unleash this new awesome P3D update XD

Have to make some new examples, and update the manual too due to many news coming, so it might take a little bit still..

Btw, for anyone interested who might have missed it,
this is the full Reactor video with a 30 minutes tutorial/introduction to P3D:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLlhFEvvO98

Jumping at minute 35:20 you get a few anticipations on next update
(nothing you don't already know if you followed this thread, just showing the new shapes)

You have an awesome accent Schrodinger, I didn't expect it. Where are you from, if you don't mind me asking?

Looking forward to the next update! :)

And here's me thinking Schrodinger would have sounded like a Cat trapped in a box somewhere :) Good overview of your engine, Schrodinger. Splendid accent too :)

ahahah thanks casleziro and Caesar, *cough* I'm definitely not used to that,
my biggest surprise was seeing Youtube automatic captions actually understanding what I was saying XD
(that's an impressive piece of software intelligence)

@ casleziro: the Lizard Kingdom is located in a secret spot across the middle longitude of Europe ;D;D

@ Caesar: thanks, it was a bit rough and rushed overview in fact..
I'm not really a tutorial-guy and it takes me at least twice the time regular people do,
but hope to do more in the future, perhaps on specific features of the engine :)

accent caught me by surprise to, i was expecting sum sort of ethereal reptilian sounding voice XD

nice to know that the great lizard king schrodinger is one of us & that his genius is actually obtainable by mere mortals (unless he's fooled us all, maybe the voice we heard was an..."impressive piece of software intelligence" XD)

XDXDXD

argh you got me - I've used Fusion (with some arrays of course) to sample and playback a random guy who couldn't speak english very well!

I'm actually a reptilian so my voice sounds a bit metallic and crappily '80s echoed (you know, like Visitors)

i thought sumthin was a bit off >:)

now had u used fusion 3, it wud hav been completely unspotable XD

hi! Its BenTheDragon again! And man has your stuff been incredibly wowing me! I can't wait to see the new updates to P3D, if there is a place where I can donate to you, I would love to toss in abit more cash! I am even recommending your engine to my friends!

In the meantime, I do want to do some basic requests and things:
Can you make a video of you building a building the way you normally do? I would love to see your steps into constructing your buildings! it doesn't even need to be a tutorial, rather just build whatever you like!
And the next request, I want to see you build more terrain, to see if you can scale much higher or lower than before. Maybe even make a tunnel maybe?? These are just suggestions anyway and I would love to see your new stuff come out faster.

And I have a question regarding 'hills' in P3D version 2, I was following a past tutorial of yours when you worked on P3D Version 1.2 and I see that there are a ton of assets to make hills and things, however when I tried to follow using version 2.0, I couldn't find the basic assets!

I am currently reading your manual, but I am having abit of difficulty reading it.. not because the instructions are clear, but my eyes wander most of the time when I didn't find what I was looking for sometimes.. Is there a different method to building hills that I've missed? Of course I will keep reading until I find it of course!

Hi Ben! That's super kind of you, I really appreciate your words and support, thanks! :)

Most of the buildings in the examples I made were just simple textured "cuboids"
(save for a couple things like an internal balcony or protruding columns in the Zombie City example)
but of course more advanced constructions are possible, and I agree some focused tutorial would be interesting,
I'll put it in the (hope-)to-do list X)
I'm sorry I generally tend to focus more into coding new stuff and less into tutorials,
and I really understand there's shortage of information,
more video tutorials would be surely very, very useful
(..in fact again I'm mainly focusing on the new update now... XD)

And since the new 2.1 update will introduce the new shapes talked some posts ago,
(and other awesome things)
soon it would be a good time for a new tutorial.

Regarding the assets included in previous P3D 1.2 version,
you likely talk about the "sample objects" frame where I had placed, among other things, many "hill" pieces?
Yeah I decided to remove that frame because you could already borrow those pieces (and more) from the examples you liked most,
so the hill pieces i.e. are still available in the castle example, in the monster-kart example, in the snowland example,
and in the 3D platform example, and in the latter, differently from other examples, triangular pieces are made with the "triangle" shader, so they are visually a bit sharper.

You can make your own slope pieces of course: take a plane (a 3D object with shape="" -empty-) and set its X or Y angle to reach the steepness you need.
For triangular pieces you could have a fitting texture (>> a triangle drawn on a rectangular texture) or use the "triangle" shape,
and then orient it the way you need with angles or with "custom" offsets, that's a bit more advanced and explained in the manual.

I understand how the manual, now 100 pages and more, can be a bit dispersive, and finding what you need might be difficult at times.
I'd need to review it a bit and probably simplify or rearrange some chapter, but you know, I'm one man, and trying to fit everything in decent release times XD

If any further question, or if you need further insight on what I've written above, no worries and feel free to ask!

If you want to help focus more time on the coding, by all means!

Once I have this thing memorized and fully understood, I will maybe even pitch in my own tutorials to help make things. I just can't wait to mess around with this kind of stuff! I feel like making a discord channel purely for helping other people with P3D could be arranged.. who knows for now! But for sure do I want to make all kinds of games with this engine.

Good luck, Schrodinger!

Holy cow, upon studying this thing.. I went into the example files and just viewed at each piece of terrain.
And then it clicked and now I understand evveerryyythiiiinnnnng about the cubes anyway.

I think since there isn't much tutorials out there, I will write myself a script and make my own tutorials for you! Once I completely understand this engine, things will be more awesome.

Glad you found what you needed :)

Awesome, sure it would be great seeing user-made P3D tutorials,
and I'd try my best to support you if any question!

New shapes are soon to come and they will be even more user friendly and flexible,
I've completed optimizing and feature-fitting all the new shaders (there will be 7 more in this release, for a total of 12, and possibly additional ones in the future)
they all work great but unfortunately they will come with limited "light" support, due to shader constants limitations.

Not a big deal I'd say, as "spotlights" were anyway of limited use (max. 1 x polygon, mainly due to the lack of multipass support),
but the new shapes are very handy, good looking XD and well performant,
my goal is publishing within a couple weeks, hope I'll find time enough for everything!

Allright then, I want to ask my first programming question.. may not be directly related to P3D itself, but I want to make a 3RD person control scheme that works a ton like any 3D mario game, can I get a guide or something that can help me out with this?
Will be willing to work with other people on this mini physics project along with my city building! I am also still abit of an amateur programmer, so please bear with me!

Oh yeah! I have one question relating to textures: The tree textures are always facing the camera, right? I want to make it so when looking in vertical angles, it doesn't 'flop' on down when you look up. Can you somehow make it so the vertical angle never changes while the horizontal angle always face the player? https://gyazo.com/cedac50b1278cb1208c0d980369fb203
Behold my tests!

Cool project!

Mario 3D controls: my last Mario was some Yoshi's island on the SNES so I completely missed Mario 3D adventures, I'm not aware on how control schemes worked for that, though I would guess it's something similar to:
- P3D "follow" camera + "firstperson" object type for the player
- P3D "look-at" camera or "isometric camera" + "8directions" object type for the player
You can customize cameras position/distance/angulation/height etc and check out "Medieval Keep" example to see (somewhere at the bottom of event sheet) how to take advantage of the "automatic slope detection" feature to make the camera inherit terrain angulation.
Don't know what else you might need so if you have specific requirements for the movement or camera let me know!

On the "textures" question, I'm not sure I understand: you mean the "sprite" shouldn't "squeeze" down a bit when you look up, or is it the buildings "textures" that you'd like to behave differently?
As for sprites (moving or static), you can enable or disable the "Cardboard" effect by adding/removing "C" character in the P3D_engine object "multi_options" string.
With effect enabled, sprites will look a bit like cardboard pieces, so i.e. if you "fly" over them and look down, they will become thin like a piece of paper,
with effect disabled, they will always look the same from any angulation (no squeezing/flipping).
If you want, you can have up to 32 directions for animations, directly from the animation editor for the sprite, the correct face will be automatically picked depending on where your camera is looking the sprite from, and the sprite's orientation itself (consider "bottom" direction in the animation editor is FRONT face of the sprite)
or you can have up to 360 directions by using animation frames and setting the appropriate value (to the number of frames you want to use), but only for "static" sprites currently.

Don't know if this answers some of your questions, if you need other details just drop a line :)

Check out my coolnew building! Yay

Is there a way to 'flatten' a shape from any direction? Cuz I want to get a certain angle on my roof and the only way I can do that is by making a 9 sided object and the next thing I need to do now to cover up the empty hole in the roof is to eye a texture.. which is quite abit of work and all for just a cap on the roof. Otherwise, here is my first actual building! YAYY Showing off a couple of images of my WIP:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8d6jze7bum...12.58.png?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ovtymwwgzb...13.09.png?dl=0




And I got a question regarding mouse controls!
Here you've mentioned earlier in this thread:

Quote:

---

If the first one, there's an "advanced mouse lookaround" code nested inside the engine, you can unlock it by adding the "mouse object" extension to your project,
and going inside "custom movements - movement types and options - mouse lookaround" groups (and follow instructions inside)
Of course if any doubt let me know!

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So i followed intructions until I got stuck at this part.. https://www.dropbox.com/s/kxgra7yrz1...32.01.png?dl=0

I am not actually sure how to 'activate' the mouse controls, I've followed instructions and placed code where it belongs and all. But then it occured to me that I don't really know how to even change control schemes.. whoops! I even download the mouse object and everything, but I am still a novice programmer.. Dang!

hey Ben!
that's a very nice buiding :)

if you can come away with a slightly higher roof,
I would suggest you try
shape= 3TB
will create a triangular prism with top and bottom face
you can then just set its X_angle to 90 to rotate it and make it an horizontal roof

you can see the same solution used for the roof in the little house at the beginning (right after the moving platform) of the Medieval Keep example

but if you want a specific angulation,
you can also just create two single "planes"
shape= (empty)
and then change their X or Y angle to find the orientation you need

for the "vertical" roof hole part you can use:
shape=1triangle
will create a vertical isosceles triangle
whose height = height of the texture
(so just make the texture as high as the difference between the top of the roof and the top of the building walls)


For the mouse lookaround,
if you already added the code written in that picture's comment,
you just need to deactivate the "basic mouse lookaround" group (right click the group and "inactivate")
and then just append the word "mouse" for any physical object's object_type in which you want to use mouse lookaround

i.e.
object_type= firstperson_mouse


if any issue let me know!

Time for an update on the update X)

New shapes are well set with everything they needed, including "fine" collisions, rotations and even pivot points,
I'm quite happy with them because they are very easy to use, really feel 100% friendly in the way I wanted P3D to be from the beginning.

Here's a little extract from the manual if you are interested on more details on how shapes will work:

Attachment 24114

The only drawback is they require more calculations on the shader, and so I could only fit limited features for them due to constants limitations.
Each of them has different features, so I've been cleaning up things to make it as clear as possible (for me too XD),
and made a chart so one can tell exactly what to expect, and how and when to use a shape over faces:

http://lizardking.co/P3D/gifs/P3D_primitives_chart.png

I think the bigger letdown is global light missing on cubemapped boxes, so if you want global light effects on those, you'd have to change its animations.
"Spotlights" (glowing objects) have always been a take-or-leave feature as there can't be more than one per single 3D entity (without multipass) so I think that's not a very important limit.
P3D has never been much about realistic light effects (not having shadow casting) so I favored the "fogging" effect over light whenever I had to choose.
In case, I could make custom versions without fogging and with extra lighting features upon request.
And anyway, of course you keep using faces whenever there's additional light features need.

As you can notice a jokey lizard covered a couple things up there, part of the very cool news I've been keeping under cover so far,
but you can get some little hint... XD
I thought these news could also benefit from an additional external tool for users have easier way dealing with it,
and feeding data to P3D, so I've been working on that as well, but I'll probably complete and make it available after the update release
(crossing fingers next week..)

I'll be tinkering with some examples so some little screenshot or video might come later.

Thanks for your interest :)

[hype intensifies] XD

I saw the X, Y and Z dimension values added there in the manual, too :)

Can't wait for the update!

Just wait til you see what's hiding under the lizard - trust me, you're going to be impressed ;)

Man, this all sounds very exciting! I can't wait to see what you've been cooking up for it. :)

Seriously, this engine is basically a technical marvel, it's impressive that it can exist at all.

Good Job man! Could I suggest you to release a Doom/Hexen like example. There's a lot of people that are still working on those titles and I think it would help you to promote your "engine".

Thanks guys! :D

And thanks Muddymole once again for your invaluable contribution to P3D,
this time we joined forces to bring these new features to life! :)

I totally agree Crian, I've thought of that at times, but delayed this and other examples I would have really liked to do.
Hope I'll find some time after releasing this new update.

So to let you test first-hand instead of cooking some video, I've made up a little "test" demo,
sadly I've been busy with other things today and it's been put up very quickly so don't expect anything mindblowing.. XD
just a little showcase of the new shapes (99% of polygons in are the new "Implicit Surfaces",
save for the hex tower and the big water texture at floor)
and some of the new things you can do with them:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yj20c6d3qm...eta_6.exe?dl=0

Would be glad if anyone willing to try it could tell me how it goes on his machine
and if there's anything particularly odd happening,
like graphic cards exploding or anything I couldn't foresee XD
(hope I've not overlooked some texture dimension not in power of 2...)

I've noticed some little bug myself (some shape disappearing when looked from very specific positions)
so I'm going to fix that asap.

Aaand... if you have good eye and are skilled enough,
you can finally get some glimpse of the first "hidden new feature" inside! ;D

I borrowed some CC-BY texture around the web to make it quick,
credit is due to "The Chayed KIIRA", "booscaster".

Usual P3D movements: move with arrow keys, jump with shift

More cool things coming next days!

Everything perfect!
Intel core i7
GTX 970
32GB ram
Great job. The voxel are a good addition! ;)
A couple of things:
- Once I jumped in the inclined cylindrical tube and I got stuck inside it.
- In third person when i move, the character doesn't seem smooth, but a little bit bouncy.