[Nephilim]

I was in bed all day with a sore throat and got bored, so I tinkered up a little 3D walkaround engine. Here's what it looks like (beware - programmer art ahead!):



I built it from the ground up except for a few of the textures, which I cannibalized from my "Sacraments" game. It's kinda similar in structure as the engine I was working on for the "Final Fantasy Noir" game for the compo that never happened, but this one uses LightWave models instead of that custom format I was using, which saves a lot of time developing assets.

I made the 3D assets in LightWave, some new textures in Flash, and the engine itself is in Director. It's got animated water, a map file reader, and it lets you walk an animated avatar with a point light source around the map. No collision detection, nor does it do anything interesting except let you walk around, but considering I was loopy on antihistamines all day, I think it turned out pretty good. Heh.
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[zenogais]

lol Looks very cool, I like it.

[RuneLancer]

Very nice. I like the overall look.

A suggestion: double the size of your sprites. Working on Endless Saga has led me to realize that it's impossible to have good looking sprites in a 3D engine if you stick to the more traditional sizes (most SNES RPGs used 16x24; yours looks to be... 16x32? (edit: nope, 16x24; you rock for using the traditional sprite sizes :P ) ), and the pixelated look really sticks out like a sore thumb when your other textures are nice and smooth.

How's the water animated? Do you deform the surface in the fountain to make the water bob about, does the waterfall animate, or both? Not too clear on that one.

Is there a camera system, or does it face the same direction at all times?

Got anything we can try out for ourselves? :P
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Endless Saga
An OpenGL RPG in the making. Now with new hosting!

[Rainer Deyke]

I disagree about doubling the size of the sprite. Right it looks nice and crisp, whereas the background is a blurry mess. Why fix the one part of the screenshot that already looks good?

[RuneLancer]

[Terry]

This looks fantastic - I'm very envious of anyone who can put together a 3D engine in a day :) Makes me wish I had time to get around to learning how to do it.

Are you going to develop it? A 3D remake of Sacraments maybe?
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http://www.distractionware.com

[Nephilim]

Mostly, this was just bored tinkering to see what I could do, but yeah, the idea in the back of my mind was to make a 3D version of Sacraments. Because it was for a compo entry, the story told by the game is a much-abbreviated version of the original storyline I had in mind, so I've been wanting to revisit that story. Not sure if people would want to play a remake, though, since the plot elements would have a lot in common.

I agree that there is a visual disconnect between the character and the scenery. In fact, I'm also kinda bothered by the difference between the ground textures and the textures on the houses, since those have the same pixelly / painted disparity, too.

Not sure which way I want to go. The pixelly look can look really bad close-up, but might have some retro appeal and saves TONS on texture memory (since each square is, like, 32x32 pixels). The painted look looks better close-up, but I'd have to make all textures from scratch (I've already got a library of pixelled stuff from Sacraments, natch), and they'd take up more texture memory so I could have fewer textures.

Which way do you guys think I should push it?
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[RuneLancer]

I say go for it.

One thing I did for Endless Saga, to cut down on memory usage, was to create my own image format. It basically implants RLE for transparent pixels, and ended up really reducing the amount of disk space used up by my sprite (32x48, though fitting it in a power of two texture is a pain, heh.)

Also, I wrote a resource management system that, instead of loading a texture multiple times, will maintain a reference count. This really saves on memory, so what seemed to be a huge amount of textures really ended up being cut down on. A typical scene doesn't use up more than a few megs of video memory for textures.

The amount of effort is quite considerable, but it's really worth it. With decent effort, your game will end up looking like an early 2k PSX game. And having done that on your own is quite ego-inflating. ;)

Don't hold back, but don't get carried away.
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Endless Saga
An OpenGL RPG in the making. Now with new hosting!

[Nephilim]

Okay, I put up an online demo of the walkaround engine. (You'll need the Shockwave plugin from Macromedia to play it.)

I've changed the sprite style to a more realistic form, but I only have the left and right walk cycles so far, so moving forward and back is going to look strange.

The 3D engine allows reusing texture maps across multiple shaders/objects, so that isn't an issue. It can also use several formats for textures, depending on the bit depth I want and the level of transparency (1-bit transparency vs. 8-bit transparency, for instance).

The water is animated only by scrolling a texture - the geometry is static at this point.

The camera currently faces the same direction at all times, following the avatar, but there's no reason it couldn't swing around to follow behind or whatever. The only real issue there is that when using 2D billboards, you have to compute which pose to draw on the billboard so that it maintains character facing in relation to the camera. That's pretty minor (unless you don't have all the poses drawn yet!).
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[LeoDraco]

[Nephilim]

[RuneLancer]

One thing I've seen debated a lot is the use of RAM, and the most common conclusion is that, if it's available, you may as well use it.

Unless your game has to load over a thousand 256x256x32 uncompressed textures (that's about 256 megs right there; your average graphic card would choke at this point) you're in the clear. And seriously? If you have that many, there's something horribly wrong with your game. ;)

For instance, the Endless Saga demo takes about 2 megs of video RAM. Considering the average map may be 3-4 times more complex than the demo map, along with sprites and the likes, and seeing as system graphics (windows, fonts, etc) will probably remain loaded at all times, I don't expect it to go over 32 megs of memory, display lists and vertex arrays included. Most cards are at least 128 megs nowadays, and I'm pretty sure OpenGL is smart enough to default to system memory if video memory is insufficient, so at worse if you somehow manage to go over 128 megs, you'll just experience a slower access to texture and model data...
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Endless Saga
An OpenGL RPG in the making. Now with new hosting!

[Nephilim]

More fun tinkering with 3D. Tonight, I modeled and textured a low-polygon version of Luthien, one of the central characters from Sacraments. I'm thinking of doing the characters in 3D instead of as 2D billboards. Here's screenies of the model inside my 3D environment (as opposed to LightWave, where I was building it):




She's not rigged for animation yet, but I don't anticipate it being too bad - I planned for motion as I modeled, so there's geometry at the joints for motion. Also, the textures could use some tweaking here and there, but I'm not too worried about it, since she's going to be much smaller on the screen during gameplay than this - I'd only need to really perfect the textures if I decided to do cinematics.
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Visit the Sacraments web site to play the game and read articles about its development.

[Terry]

Unfortunatly I can't get Shockwave to install on either Firefox or Mozilla in Linux, so I was unable to try it out. The screenshots look pretty good though.

I think a 3D version of Sacraments is an excellent idea, for the record.
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http://www.distractionware.com

[LeoDraco]