Orthogonal Rendering

[darkliquid]

I've been playing with orthogonal rendering as a means to creating a 3d/Cubic tile-based game engine, using the example from Saigumi.

What I've been doing is basically seeing how it looks with different types of nodes laying around the world among all these cubic tiles and a got some weird stuff happening.

First of all I made a spiral staircase out of cubes and it began disappearing, that was easy to fix, in my case I changed to near and far values to 10 and -10 (or the other way round )

Secondly a looked at rotating everything. Even though somewhere saigumi said not to rotate using the camera, I did it anyway ( I'm a rebel ) and everything worked fine, I did that using a fly round animator on the camera. I guess to rotate the actual world you would apply an animator to the root scene node right?

Next, I added a sky box (easy), the sydney mesh standing on one of the steps (scaled down of course) and then a dynamic light ( and this is where my problems begin...).

The dynamic light circled around the staircase in the opposite direction to the camera just fine, but the shadows were messed up, basically I would only get block colours, either fulllighting colour, black or grey (similar to #777777). No nice fancy shading. No faded shadows. Nada. This is after I changed all the material attributes to support lighting/shading/etc. And this was with a default light setup.

Anyway, I thought I'd try something else out while I racked my brains, a particle fountain on top of one of the steps. Whoops! Basically, using a simple particle fountain (just slightly tweaked from the default values), I got tons of grey solid walls covering the screen, it was as if each particle was infinitely high and the colour was always dark grey, regardless of colour setting.

I then decided to give up on that and try applying a different texture to each side of the cube used as the template for the cube-tiles. But I couldn't work out how to do that, I guess the weird errors had just thrown me off.

Anyway, to summerise:

How do I fix...

• Lighting in orthogonal space
  Particle systems
  Applying textures to individual surfaces on a mesh

The system I'm using is:

2600XP+
512MB DDR333
GeForceFX5200 128MB
Linux OS
Nvidia Linux Drivers (latest at time of writing)

[Krampe]

The dynamic light circled around the staircase in the opposite direction to the camera just fine, but the shadows were messed up, basically I would only get block colours, either fulllighting colour, black or grey (similar to #777777). No nice fancy shading. No faded shadows. Nada. This is after I changed all the material attributes to support lighting/shading/etc. And this was with a default light setup.

I think shading is not supported yet. Have a look here: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... ight=#2243

Anyway, I thought I'd try something else out while I racked my brains, a particle fountain on top of one of the steps. Whoops! Basically, using a simple particle fountain (just slightly tweaked from the default values), I got tons of grey solid walls covering the screen, it was as if each particle was infinitely high and the colour was always dark grey, regardless of colour setting.

I guess the particle texture is missing, so you get this grey rectangles. I would check the path to it.

I then decided to give up on that and try applying a different texture to each side of the cube used as the template for the cube-tiles. But I couldn't work out how to do that, I guess the weird errors had just thrown me off.

I think this is easy to achieve with loading a cube with uvw mapping and one texture. Or check this thread (Saigumi:"If applying one texture is confusing, look at the cube ms3d in the orthogoanl tutorial. Pharoseer set it up to load all the sides from 1 texture."):

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... ight=#2054

[darkliquid]

I think shading is not supported yet. Have a look here:

Well, that explains that problem

I guess the particle texture is missing, so you get this grey rectangles. I would check the path to it.

Hmm, I'll try out manually defining a texture, but I thought that the particle system had a default texture built inot the engine (or thats what it seemed from the docs)

I think this is easy to achieve with loading a cube with uvw mapping and one texture. Or check this thread (Saigumi:"If applying one texture is confusing, look at the cube ms3d in the orthogoanl tutorial. Pharoseer set it up to load all the sides from 1 texture."):

Well my code is based straight from that example, and I using the same tms3d cube file and texture. I tried changing the texture to 5 different colours (for each visible side of the cube) but only the top colour (blue) was displayed in the correct place, every other side was coloured with the part of the texture from the bottom of the bitmap (purple in my case). None-the-less, I'm going to try writing a simple 'Individually-sided Cube Mesh' and optimise it, as really thats all I'm going to need for this engine I'm planning, all other objects will most likely be MD2/3 whatevers for complex scenery/

[Krampe]

but I thought that the particle system had a default texture built inot the engine (or thats what it seemed from the docs)

You can examine the tutorial about special effects; there a particle.bmp is used (so i dont think there is some kind of default texture - other than this grey rectangle^^).