P3D 2.0 - out now!

[schrodinger]

Jonathan: thank you for purchasing P3D
Sure you can use it for making 3D backgrounds in a 2D game,
but I checked out that video link you posted,
and while I know SOTN pretty well as it's one of my favourite games ever ,
now I can't remember, beside savegame "boxes",
which 3D elements/in which stages were shown on background?
Can you point me to the minute you're interested in?
Then we can continue this talk in the other thread you opened.

btw - can you confirm you got 2.0 version from the clickstore and not the old 1.2?


Hey Mehrdad, thank you!
But no - it's currently NOT cross platform, I want to state it clear, even though it's extensionless
since it heavily relies on pixel shaders, written in HLSL language >>> DirectX
which is only supported for the Windows runtime
(actually, I didn't investigate on UWP still... so I don't know about that)


You could have it "polygonless" in other runtimes,
(ditching the "P3D_sprites" shader, since also sprites now have a shader applied for depth buffering)
and even though amazing things could be made that way without polygons,
with a good amount of creativity and skills (see the "Rock Rock Rocket" project),
so far I didn't think it was worth walking that lane for P3D.

The only chance is Fusion3 - then porting *could* even be easy
(mainly converting HLSL to GLSL and hoping the Fusion3 porting routine will do the rest )
but it's very early to say, it depends on lot of things we still don't know.

[Volnaiskra]

Mind-boggling stuff. Really impressive! What are the main differences between P3D and Firefly? Do they both do similar things, or can you use both together?

[Jonathan]

btw - can you confirm you got 2.0 version from the clickstore and not the old 1.2?

I've bought it yesterday, so I guess it's the 1.2

Can you point me to the minute you're interested in?

It's 1.43 with the tower behind!
Do not hesitate to answer on my topic or by MP if you want to keep your topic clean!
Thank you very much!

[schrodinger]

@ Volnaiskra: thank you!

I'm not the best person to answer this as I still didn't have chance to try out Firefly
(my actual interest was making a 3D engine, not making 3D games ), which looks great both for visual rendering and performances.
From what I've seen and read around, my impression is Firefly is an up-to-date modern 3D engine, since (if I'm not mistaken) uses "Irrlicht" at its core,
which is a well trusted 3D engine with a long history, and (probably) supports most of today's standard features, and I'm pretty sure can import external assets too. So I'd say it's a modern day 3D engine ported to Fusion, which sounds great.
What I can't really answer you on is how exactly the system is merged in the Fusion interface, how the "two systems" interact together, nor how other gaming aspects have been implemented (movements, collisions, etc.). I guess you can find more on this in the Firefly dedicated forum or seeing tutorials/videos around.

P3D is a very personal take on a 3D engine, so it lives a bit in its own place, it was build from ground up in Fusion, so it's naturally merged in its interface.
It has limited modeling capabilities (basically no "real" curved faces, as of now) and while you could have a moving 3D character, it would be currently pretty uncomfortable to animate/move it.
It's best suited for sprites+polygons setup, and thus particularly suited for retro games, although there's no limit to texture sizes you can use, so you can have pretty realistic scenes too. It can't (currently) import external assets, but on the other hand, you can (and it was developed to) directly "model" your objects (create shapes and join them) by filling values and moving elements in the frame editor, so you can build everything from the ground up directly in Fusion with little effort, but a little practice and knowledge of the solutions you can use (there's a 110 pages manual included for this).
It has a solid builtin code for different movement types and automatically handles collisions, plus all other things I've mentioned earlier in this post.
I find it fun and easy to use (of course.. ), but it's very personal, so you may like or dislike it!
If you like Fusion, chances are you'll like it ()

They somewhat do similiar things, in the sense they present a 3D representation of a world,
but they do it in different ways, and they focus on different aspects, and different audiences and needs.

Firefly has likely much more "horsepower" for really big and high-poly scenes,
P3D is still more suitable for "moderately" low-poly scenes.

Well, don't know if I answered to your question, feel free to ask more insights!

[schrodinger]

@ Jonathan: aaahh I see, the tower clock!
I've put up a quick tower-clock model for you, can be ok?



(you can use the brick textures if you like them, I made up them on my own and are free to reuse for any mean,
but the clock I've found googling, so don't use it
ah - of course you can have the clock animated too, if you want!)

Here's a quick test of it in action:
http://www.lizardking.co/P3D/example...ower_clock.zip

If you use a 3D placement for the character too you likely have easier time setting up the scene in the way you like.

I've added a moving background and tilting camera a bit for a dizzying effect, just for fun
change camera to player see the "trick"


*** edit ***
oh, forgot to include the model, here it is,
free for anyone to use (but change the clock graphics!!):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zquwr7deal...clock.mfa?dl=0

Sorry but you need version 2.0 for this to work though, so you'd have to wait for the correct version to be uploaded to the clickstore, I really hope very soon (please confirm me when it happens, anyone, I can't directly check this unfortunately)

[Jonathan]

Dude you're just awesome... thank you so much this is perfect x)
I use my 2D engine but I'll see to embed that in my background!

[schrodinger]

Great, feel free to ask for other questions if you need!

[casleziro]

Wow.

BIG update, Schrodinger! I guessed you might be working on something recently since you were less active on here, but I never thought it'd be something of this scale.

As soon as clickstore lets me download the update (still only lets me get 1.2) i'll try it out. I'm especially interested in the new way you handle collisions.

[schrodinger]

Ehehe thank you casleziro, and you're totally right, both in the fact it's a really big update,
and the fact I've been locked in the lizard castle for the past three months

I'm sure you'll appreciate the new collision system, it's really handy to use, as you don't need to make anything in practice!

Can't wait to have that link updated so you guys can try it
(but I'm fearing clickstore guys might be not available today, perhaps being saturday.. I still got no news)



*** edit ***

btw, let me share some "behind the scenes" videos, while work was in progress,
this is some collision test with pointy shapes and angled planes:



(this has improved since then)


And this is one of the first early tests with the new shaders:
(yeah, I really like Mario Kart )



see how the engine works to minimize the rendering area of each polygon to optimize performances (the red bounding box)

this has of course improved as well since then

[casleziro]

Hey Schrodinger: I tried the examples you had for 2.0 and unfortunately it seems like the new system breaks on my trash laptop. I think it has something to do with the new system for meshes you were talking about:

p3dcastle1.jpgp3dkeep1.jpgp3dtower1.jpg
p3dcity1.jpg

Textures seem to rotate or morph themselves oddly when I move the camera.

I'm running a (very) terrible laptop with these specs:

-Windows 7
-Intel T2300 1.66ghz
-2GB RAM
-32-bit

So at the very least I think this will only be a problem for a small number of users if it's something you can't figure out.


Also the first video you linked in your edit about testing collisions is unavailable.



UPDATE: 2.0 is now available for download on clickstore