Seeking advise...

Yustme · Post by **Yustme** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 8:57 pm

Hi,

At the moment, I'm trying to gathering a lots of information about game programming before i start making my own (serious) game.

So i would like to know from you guys your experience with game programming. With that i mean what kind of programs you used for making animated meshes and for levels/maps.

Which file formats (animated meshes and levels/maps) are preferred for using it with irrlicht.

And which network and sound engine would you recommend.

Any other information regarding game programming is welcome, for example the coding style you use.

Thanks in advance!

JP · Post by JP » Wed Mar 05, 2008 9:07 pm

Well make sure you plan out your game before starting the coding, as much of a chore as it is it will help you get started and save you wasting time doing silly things which, when given a bit of thought, are clearly not the way you should have done things.

Blender is meant to be good for modelling, it's free, but personally i just look at it and want to cry, it's not very easy to play with, but i guess if you put in some time with some tutorials (assuming there are some) then it's probably not too bad to use. Personally i use Milkshape ($25 after a 30 day trial) as it's pretty good and was very easy to pick up even though i hadn't done any modelling before.

.b3d i hear is meant to be the best format for irrlicht, or maybe .x as a second bet.. Those would be for animated meshes.. for static meshes/levels... i'm not so sure.. but using irrEdit to lay out your scene would be a good idea.

Network i hear raknet is good, though i've never done any network work. For audio i always use audiere with irrlicht projects, i just found it to be very easy to setup and use, rather than other ones... OpenAL i think i also tried but couldn't find any examples of how to use it. irrKlang would be a nice option to keep it all in the irr-world, but i've no experience with it so can't really comment there!

RustyNail · Post by **RustyNail** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 9:15 pm

Hmmm...
Information on game programming? I usually "just do it" and then deal with questions/problems when they arise, it keeps me happy, and the work moving; For me, just gathering information is never enough, and I rarely understand something until I try it myself, so I usually attempt doing things my way, and if my way fails - consult the Mastas` on the Irrlicht forums!

For modeling I highly recommend Blender... It's a bit hard at first, but there are good tutorials (the wikibook Blender Noob To Pro, for example) And when you get used to it, it is very easy to use...
EDIT: Didn't got along with Milkshape when I tried it three years ago... I guess it was the un-professional UI, or something... Or maybe a 11 year-old isn't supposed to be able to model...

My two russian cents!
(Oh, and don't consider me to have any EXPERIENCE, i've only recently started playing around with writing games, (Anyone want to play my totally cool game of Snake? I mean it. It's cool

))

JP · Post by JP » Wed Mar 05, 2008 9:21 pm

Hey if you've got an irrlicht game that you've finished then post it in the projects forum, even if it's a really simple game like snake it's nice to be able to play irrlicht creations!

I've put up enough simple stuff in my time, like a 3D N-Puzzle game

MasterGod · Post by **MasterGod** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 9:22 pm

A great advice I was once given is to buy a white-board as a designing tool.
I did that and it changed my world.
And about the advice, the best one I can give you is to plan plan plan. Do NOT start working unless you know what you're gonna do, what you want to achieve and if you're capable of doing it.
Oh and trust me, if you set yourself a deadline and truly believe you must finish till this deadline it will help speed-up the development which I'm sure you'd like.

Daniel FF · Post by **Daniel FF** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 9:27 pm

Hi,

Iam making a game, here what we are using:

Blender to make models models ( exporting to .obj for statics and .x for animateds )
Raknet for network (very good engine)

we use some adictionals tools for effects , tree generations etc

Thats working good to me.

A litle tip: don´t make your map with only one model, make several with same pivot.

night_hawk · Post by **night_hawk** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 9:29 pm

Always have a notebook in front of you for "outer-code debugging"

Helps a lot.
As for formats and so, .X has never let me down. .3ds and .obj have always managed to annoy me somehow. .DDS is from the looks of it the best image format to use.
Physics: PhysX. Audio: Audiere.

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 11:33 pm

First of all I am going to recommend against PhysX as for the ludicrous requirements, and also the fact that it might not even be the same a short time down the road. Use Newton if you ened ease of integration, or Bullet if you want a real good physics engine.

Audiere doesn't support 3D spatial sound, I would use OpenAL. There are quite a lot of examples in the OpenAL SDK, and on gamedev.net and devmaster.net. Use irrKlang if you want rapid sound development.

I use .irr for scenes, .irrmesh for static meshes, and .x for animated meshes.

And JP is right, Blender is not easy from the start. You CANNOT pick up Blender and think your going to do anything with it from the start! You won't learn anything, and it will just be a PITA.

What I recommend you do, as this provided the best results for me, is watch the great video tutorials on blender.org. Then use Blender: Noob to Pro as a reference. This will give you the greatest knowledge of Blender, and then you can impress you friends. Really I can't imagine working with another modeler know that I have experience with the Blender flow. Blender does provide for some very fast modeling with its shortcut-driven interface.

The truth is that Blender provides a crapload of features that you will most likely not use, just like any application. The thing to do is focus on the ones you need, and memorize memorize memorize.

My mentality when learning things from Blender is: if I don't know it, find it in the menus, then memorize the shortcut. I almost never use the menus because there is absolutely no need.

RustyNail · Post by **RustyNail** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 4:46 am

Hey if you've got an irrlicht game that you've finished then post it in the projects forum, even if it's a really simple game like snake it's nice to be able to play irrlicht creations!

I'd post it.... if it was Irrlicht

It's written in pure VCL Delphi and is a bit...bland;
But even has collision detection between two line segments and stuff

...

night_hawk · Post by **night_hawk** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 7:41 am

@Halifax: with the risk of going offtopic, I'll have to say that PhysX is faster than Newton and easier to use (imho) with Irrlicht than both of them. True, the "System Software" was annoying and still is, even if they reduced it to ~5 mb, but PhysX is a good choice in the long run. Unless you want Havok.

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 9:24 am

If you got money you can buy the book called "Essential Blender". It will get you started with Blender in a short period of time. I bought one and it's really nice (although I haven't done anything cool with it yet).

Yustme · Post by **Yustme** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 11:12 am

Hi guys,

Thanks for the reply's!

I'll go with the majority who is recommendating blender for creating animated mesh files in .b3d/.x file formats as JP suggested.

I'll see if i can get a hold that book about blender which Virion mentioned.

But what do you guys think about EMotion FX? Is that supported by irrlicht? Check out this site: http://www.mysticgd.com/site2007/

Not sure yet what to use for static meshes at the moment. I'd like to make a map with objects that move, so i'm not sure which program

to use for that, if its possible to have that in maps using irrlicht (to be continued).

For networking i was thinking about racknet too, since no one else recommendated anything else, I'll go with JP on this one

For the sound engine, I'm thinking about these 3 engines: FMOD, Irrklang and audiere.

As for a physics engine, i wanted to use Physx but it's really hard to use it in combination with irrlicht. So far i've managed to update the tutorial on the irrlicht site (ageia physx integration).

And their examples are really hard to follow and understand. I'm totally not liking the way they code their samples. it gives me a headache reading them.

The next 2 things I've tried with the physx engine from ageia was a character controller and a contact report notification. Wasted 4

weeks and failed at it getting it to work.

I've heard newton (which i used to use in my last project) made some great updates. So i think I'll use that engine for physics

simulations again.

Too bad, because i really wanted to buy that physics chip ageia sells for their physics engine and see if and how that improves the performance.

Two more thing i'd like to know is, 1) which program to use for static meshes and 2) is EMotion FX supported by irrlicht or not.

Thanks again for the reply's!

cassini · Post by **cassini** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 6:31 pm

do not know anything about Havok but I am testing the later Newton beta and I find it equally fast or faster than Physx in software, it is also more accurate.
@Yustme if you ask for the beta evaluation you can check out the character controller, it has improved a lot since the annoying one in 1.5.

night_hawk · Post by **night_hawk** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 7:33 pm

@cassini: I don't know what testbed you've used, but try a trimesh with ~1 million polygons. Newton failed. Miserably. On my machine that is. PhysX got a steady 60-70 FPS. Both tests were rendered with Irrlicht.

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 10:19 pm

night_hawk wrote:@Halifax: with the risk of going offtopic, I'll have to say that PhysX is faster than Newton and easier to use (imho) with Irrlicht than both of them. True, the "System Software" was annoying and still is, even if they reduced it to ~5 mb, but PhysX is a good choice in the long run. Unless you want Havok.

First off, I didn't even compare the speed of Newton to PhysX as thats a clear one. Newton is much more easier to implement with Irrlicht, then PhysX.

And for a second note, Bullet basically is Havok, and is used in many commercial games already. Ever heard of Insomniac Games's Rachet and Clank:Future Tools of Destruction? Bullet was engineered by an ex-Havok employee, and is developed as an open-source, zlib licensed, multicore-optimized, SIMD-optimized, SCEA supported Physics SDK.

So my choices still stand as Newton, or Bullet.