Why so few 3D games on Pandora?

[fusion_power]

One bad example (IMHO) of an Pandora Homebrew 3D Game is this (quick port?) of the 3D Arkanoid thingy "Birquolo". It just feels wrong for me, Controls, Handling, timing, overview...stuff like that. Graphics are fine but this doesn't save the gameplay, sadly.

My first gl->gles conversion. the game was choosen based on code change requiered...

from the technical aspect, your port is good, the game looks nice and is smooth. It's not your fault that the gameplay itself is more or less "early beta". ^^"

 

[skeezix]

Writing a 2d engine is easy -- put this at (x,y); writing a 3d engine is -- putting it in 3 dimensions, but also putting a camera in and pointing it right, worrying about texturing instead of just using a raster bitmap, and then spending half your time working on the math so that your FPS guy doesn't fall between the cracks between your triangles (a very common problem.. how many big name productions have you fallen through the floor in? And of course, theres GL versus GLES, and the different versions of GLES (which lose features over time


3D is a PITA But the hardware accel is nice...


jeff

 

[pmprog]

You said in the description the driving was 3D, but did you mean the actuall driving somehow or just the rendering? If the gameplay is 2D like old GTA for ex then what you do I think is create a map of cordinates for all scenery, the camera moves around that, and moveable objects have their own player cordinates that gets added to the vertices after you have processed the rotations of them. Hmm mayby my simplistic explenations only brings more confusion?

3D, in the sense that some buildings are taller, and the roads can have a gradient, like the old GTA, and you can drive off an "edge" and fall down. That said, I suppose I could ignore all the 3D aspects of the world other than "height above ground" (ground being the floor height of the particular tile the car/person/bullet/explosion is on), and limit rotation to driving direction. That'll make the game engine easier to code, then the actual graphics section could really be abstracted to 2D or 3D.


Good thinking Batman!

 

[mcobit]

Yeah, you basically want the good old buildengine

 

[fusion_power]

Yeah, you basically want the good old buildengine

Sweet Memories...


With Duke3Ds Build Editor I've spent quite alot of time to make some cool Levels or just messing around with the engine abilities. Alot of cool stuff was possible with BUILD, more than in some modern Shooter engines I would say. I wish that modern Editors for 3D games would be that easy to handle like BUILD did (after you've learned all these Keyboard combos...)

 

[Caine]

Sweet Memories...


With Duke3Ds Build Editor I've spent quite alot of time to make some cool Levels or just messing around with the engine abilities. Alot of cool stuff was possible with BUILD, more than in some modern Shooter engines I would say. I wish that modern Editors for 3D games would be that easy to handle like BUILD did (after you've learned all these Keyboard combos...)

Indeed. After build editing levels was never quite the same. The way build basically faked all real 3d was awesome


Though especially the Duke3D version allowed for some really weird sector overlapping (which became impossible in Shadow Warrior).

 

[Jourdy288]

If I could sell my free time, I would be a very rich man. ^^ I have time but no talent for coding, so no 3D games from me, except from some graphics maybe. Of course I also want to see more good 3D games on the Pandora.

Once I get my Lyme disease treated, I'm going to try to learn to program again. Lyme messes with my cognitive abilities pretty badly- I bet that if I get better, I could code like a boss!


But don't give up trying to program- keep developing your art skills, yes, but don't be afraid to keep on trying with programming! You can do it

Ohh, that sounds nasty. Apart from chronic tiredness, my cognitive functions are pretty good, but I don't know anything about programming (except C64 BASIC and enough C to compile some sources). It's a shame, 'cause with my deteriorating motor skills and your impaired cognitive abilities we could have made one helluva team. I suspect though all the fun would come from hilarious videos of us attempting to program!

LOL, that'd be pretty amusing


Also, I've created some scenes in 3D using Blender, was never really amazing at using it but I could make some... Interesting things.

I think Asmo might be better at making 3D things.

 

[Rockthesmurf]

I must admit, maybe this is a question for another time, but how do you tell if a 3D object is "off-screen"? In 2D, you have your co-ords which go beyond the boundaries, but with a movable camera with FoV?

I've started a thread here with some ideas in http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/6244-clipping-in-3d/ it's a bit long winded, but might at least point you onto the right terms to Google for to get a better answer.


Steve

 

[pmprog]

I've started a thread here with some ideas in http://boards.openpa...clipping-in-3d/ it's a bit long winded, but might at least point you onto the right terms to Google for to get a better answer.

Thanks for that. The first time I read it, my eyes glazed over, but I'll give it another couple of reads and hope it sinks in

 

[ibisum]

WakeBreaker is a *not bad* way of learning the basics of the GL ES 1.1 profile. It isn't sexy as a game, but it has all the very basic stuff in place for a good demo of the GL ES 1.1 API, how you use it, and what you can do with it.


To learn the GL ES 2 profile you will definitely need something else, but if your intent is to learn the real basics of GLES, you can do a lot with someone elses working code. Wakebreaker isn't much more than a tech demo of the basics of GLES1, sure, but if you can understand how it works and why it works the way it does, you'll definitely get a good grounding in the basics. It has real working code for frustum culling, animation, camera, translation, primitive collision detection, and all that. Using it as a codebase, you could quite easily develop your skills and build a much more full-featured game, but all the very basic stuff is there (except .OBJ loading, but thats a subordinate exercise).


For learning 3D, I've been following a few paths myself. The first has been diligently reading and tweaking the code from the book "iPhone 3D Programming", on O'Reilly. It is a superb treatise on the differences between ES1 and ES2, and how to deal with both frameworks productively while giving yourself a suitably fun abstraction layer to be doing real 3D with. I can't recommend it enough for the case where you want a solution to the platform issue, and great understanding in the materials themselves to be gained.


Another good thing is the Blender tutorial. This particular section was a great help to me in understanding the rudimentary concepts behind GL ES profiles:


http://en.wikibooks....Transformations


Understanding transforms is going to take a while - so its important to really, really grok the basics, so that you can prosper as you go on. Transforms, and matrix math in general, can rapidly expand to consume ones entire being, so choose your limits about what you want and need to know, and set real targets for it. If you want to make your own 3D engine, matrix ops are your friend; if you want to *use* a 3D engine to make a great game, you don't need to know so much arcane stuff about it.


The important thing to always consider is that you need content, and 3D content is very, very expensive - in time, in effort, and so on. Its a lot of work to build a 3D world, make sure everything fits together, and so on. So, be prepared to have a lot of weight associated with the learning effort - if you haven't yet worked out how to parse an .OBJ file, or know whats in it, and why it describes things the way it does, don't expect to make much progress with building an engine in the meantime. A lot of the basics weave their way through all the tools and nodes that you're going to develop as you learn 3D yourself; those basics, poorly understood, will get in the way.


Edit: Oops, hit save by mistake ..


These tutorials are superb, by the way:


http://pandorawiki.org/GLESGAE


.. and I recognize a few good tricks in the Context department .. my only gripe with these tutorials is that they're not finished yet! Needs more screenshots!