Source for Alpha Foundation

x4861 · Post by **x4861** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 7:33 pm

Hey guys, every animation in my game is framerate independent! It would indeed be silly to be otherwise... The thing is, that all animations are coming from MDL models themselves, and if door is opening too slow, then just change the model to open it faster (running speed is not animation, but the leg movement is).

And as for CEP: it is indeed very very impressive. If you add MDL support to Irrlicht, you never ever again have to worry about where to get your models

veegun · Post by **veegun** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 11:31 pm

x4861, you ought to write a game programming book and use your game as an example. Kinda like the ogre3d book:

http://www.amazon.com/Pro-OGRE-3D-Progr ... 1590597109

Maybe call it "Pro Irrlicht RPG Programming" or something like that.

Midnight · Post by **Midnight** » Sat Mar 17, 2007 12:59 am

nevermind

veegun · Post by **veegun** » Sat Mar 17, 2007 5:43 am

What's up, Midnight? What were you going to say?

Drats! It doesn't like DirectX.

Also, I did a clean then rebuild. Bam! 549 warnings!

That's got to be a record.

Most of them are related to:

depreciated
unsafe calls
possible loss of data
truncation from type a to type b
performance warning.

OMG, this stuff is out of date. Get with the time, x4861.

I just noticed this from the dos window:

Irrlicht Engine version 0.7

x4861 · Post by **x4861** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 6:37 pm

LOL!

Yes, it uses old Irrlicht! But guess what.... once you start to change core files (which is quite needed to get MDL format recognized and somewhat incorporated to Irrlicht itself; for one, it has quite unique texture format where user can change colors during runtime - like skin colors) it is not easy to update to newer version... That was the latest Irrlicht when I started this project.. loong time ago! hehe

But what I would probably suggest: create a clean and pretty MDL format loader, you won't regret it

MasterGod · Post by **MasterGod** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 11:12 am

Where from did you get the MDL loader in the demo? or did You wrote it?

GameDude · Post by **GameDude** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:53 pm

Thanks for this, this will be useful to study over.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:57 pm

Edit: I'll try to update the loader to recent Irrlicht versions...

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 3:59 pm

imo, for animation, for characters at least, best are b3d and md5(I really hope this, with its normal maps support, is added too, someday) and...maybe md3 one-piece (not chunked in parts, I think that's a sovisually bad thing...even if coded a "automatic melting") , alla md2 style, but without the normals and other problems/limits that md2 have... (I guess vertex animation formats are still needed for RTS games and other with so many units...)

GameDude · Post by **GameDude** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 8:26 pm

I'm having trouble dowlnoading the file, it keeps giving me a corrputed download, cause it dosen't download all the way, is there a different place this could be uploaded?

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 8:52 pm

(I guess vertex animation formats are still needed for RTS games and other with so many units...)

Why do you think this? Vertex animation is indeed alot slower than bone animation, _especially_ combined with modern techniques like vertex buffers and hardware skinning, etc.[/quote]

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 9:59 pm

probably that is true for a number of meshes, but for a tad load of meshes ? wouldnt the cpu calculations of weights kill it...? I dunno. Maybe it's a bit oudated info which I have...I certainly like more a b3d than a md3 or md2...

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 8:02 am

The problem with vertex animation I think is that it would have to re-send vertex data to the cpu every frame, this is kinda of what irrlicht is doing anyway.

BUT if you were to use vertex buffers and hardware skinning, this would mean that the mesh data is only sent once for the whole mesh, and the bone calculation are done onboard on the GPU using vertex shaders without having to send anything over the bus.

Infact for a very good example of this sio2 made a demo right here:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=18987 (Although Im not sure if this one uses vertex buffers or not...)

Cheers

belfegor · Post by **belfegor** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 7:00 pm

vermeer wrote:...best are b3d and md5(I really hope this, with its normal maps support...

and ".X" format supports all that but Irrlicht doesnt use all features it has.
for example:

1. irrlicht uses only 2 tex coords instead 8 posible with .X

2. .X can hold tangent, binormal info but irrlicht uses FVF (fixed vertex format) witch cant use that propertly.

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 8:56 pm

...anyway, few 3d packages export all that...