How To Do / Make The Transition From 2D To 3D Game Programming

[joyrider]

I've made a whole bunch of 2d games myselve from scratch most of them were puzzlers or board games like checkers where i used minmax for the theory.

Now 2d programming is rather straightforward. It's been years since i last did a complete game from scratch since noone seems to care much for them anyway and emulator or ports get most attention.

Anyway i was kinda wondering how hard it is to do the transition from 2d to 3d game programming. I don't know anything about geometry, nor matrix calculations so i would not be able to program the transformations for rotating etc myselve. But if i understand correctly you don't need to actually know them unless you write your own engine (most engine's have the 3d stuff for you).

i never thinked in 3d either.

So i'm just wondering how people did this themselves ?

 

[sebt3]

It's been years since i last did a complete game from scratch since noone seems to care much for them anyway and emulator or ports get most attention.

Emu wont have my attention much, but a puzzler Any of your games avail on the caanoo for me to try ?
EDIT: just saw your sigs, so i clicked to get your games : all 404....

Anyway i was kinda wondering how hard it is to do the transition from 2d to 3d game programming.

That's pretty much adding an axis to your drawings So codewise is not realy a problem. But sure the "sprite" hae to go 3d too, which is the hard part imho.

I don't know anything about geometry, nor matrix calculations so i would not be able to program the transformations for rotating etc myselve. But if i understand correctly you don't need to actually know them unless you write your own engine (most engine's have the 3d stuff for you).

I've never done anything 3d just yet either, but from what I gathered so far, that's just it.
Stuckie from the pandora's world is doing a very well documented engine. He is providing all the math requiered for the engine (projection matrix and such), so you wont need to provided them, and anyway it doesnt look-like very hard math either

 

[kayuz]

for a 3d engine, have a look on this http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/55551-wiz-game-engine/, it's an engine made by kurtkz for Wiz and Caanoo

 

[Pickle]

I've made a whole bunch of 2d games myselve from scratch most of them were puzzlers or board games like checkers where i used minmax for the theory.

Now 2d programming is rather straightforward. It's been years since i last did a complete game from scratch since noone seems to care much for them anyway and emulator or ports get most attention.

Anyway i was kinda wondering how hard it is to do the transition from 2d to 3d game programming. I don't know anything about geometry, nor matrix calculations so i would not be able to program the transformations for rotating etc myselve. But if i understand correctly you don't need to actually know them unless you write your own engine (most engine's have the 3d stuff for you).

i never thinked in 3d either.

So i'm just wondering how people did this themselves ?

Im part way into doing exactly what your asking about.

My first look into opengl was working on ports and getting familiar with the API in general.

My first step was to draw a cube and move it around the scene.
Next was to load any shape defined by the obj format.
At some point I had to understand the purpose of matrices. Although I did have linear algebra back in my schooling days, its not as fresh since I dont use it. Like you said you really dont need to know that much. I think understanding which mathematical operations do what is enough.

Im using this matrix library : http://cmldev.net/
Its nice since its a bunch of headers, no library. It also means I can dump GLU. I only use SDL and opengl right now.

Once you understand matrixes you can use them to scale, rotate, and translate the object into the scene. exmaple: matModelview = matTranslate * ( matRotate * matScale )

Once you can get things moving around look into textures and lighting.

 

[tryone]

It's been years since i last did a complete game from scratch since noone seems to care much for them anyway and emulator or ports get most attention.

Emu wont have my attention much, but a puzzler Any of your games avail on the caanoo for me to try ?
EDIT: just saw your sigs, so i clicked to get your games : all 404....

Same here. I really love those homebrew games, even if ports are nice, but they aren't anything "special".
And the 404 is because this are all links to the old OpenHandhelds.Org Archive ('www.gp2x.de') and not the new one ('www.openhandhelds.org'). The cgi adress is still the same.

 

[joyrider]

Same here. I really love those homebrew games, even if ports are nice, but they aren't anything "special".
And the 404 is because this are all links to the old OpenHandhelds.Org Archive ('www.gp2x.de') and not the new one ('www.openhandhelds.org'). The cgi adress is still the same.

i'll change the sig to reflect the changes. All games are on my "official" website though www.willemssoft.be but i haven't done much on the caanoo, did a few things on the dingoo but most was on the gp2x

caanoo wise there is a port of dynamate partial port (it's semi self written, only game logic was availible) i did for gp2x, fbgrab deamon, sms_sdl, and i have other sources laying around but i want to move on just doing ports of the same stuff isn't fun anymore and all thouse gp2x games should be playable through ginge since it was just sdl it used

So the best thing to start with would be opengl and start basic like drawing a polygon and trying to move it then move on to loading self made objects and then textures i think the game logic itselve is basically the same, i mean if one could make sokoban in 2d i would be able to make it in 3d as well since the game logic is the same.

i always thought of it being really hard and having to know lots of maths which i'm not good at even though i program everyday. It's also diffrent to think in 3d then 2d it's not as abvious i think once has to get used it. But i won't know if i never try i guess

edit: links should be fixed in signature, but it was a signature from the gp2x days

 

[crow_riot]

i was just clicking through my bookmarks and rediscovered this http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/ ... it's called "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming" ... i think it may help