In search of a project

[Noiecity]

Hi! I am looking for a project to work on, commercial or non-commercial, free or paid.

I can help in 3d modeling and character animation.


I was restless to finish the assets I make and upload them (it's an island with many subway stone dungeon, npc, castles and vendors, as well as many monsters). I also have a few robots that I have yet to finish. A lot of weapons and armor.
I'm thinking whether to upload it all at once or one by one.


But to be doing something that I know it will end well is boring me, I'm still thinking whether to implement it online with postgresql and enet, or leave it as a rpg without online, besides maybe the assets I make nobody will use them, but at least they will be an example, now I'm looking for a new project, I can make menus and sounds, I can do anything within the graphical capabilities of the engine, I can also model anything. I can also program, but my knowledge with respect to other developers seems very small, but I can support.

What I am mainly looking for is to learn to kill my boredom and continue making assets for the community.

[wizard4]

Maybe

I wonder if I can code Irrlicht on a Raspberry Pi, or be able to use an old Linux Mint laptop and share?

[wizard4]

Just to throw something in...

I did want to work on a calendar/monthly income/outgoings program using C++ standard stuff, and it could tie into a "world" with varying weather, seasons, and days simulation?

[CuteAlien]

Sounds close to a tool to create environment maps. Start with just sun, sky and ground (so start with simple ground, sky blue but colors depening on sun position and a white dot for the sun). Although maybe that goes more in the direction of raytracing/physics? Not sure. I'm currently using some older version (0.5) of the Mitsuba renderer to generate those, but the UI tends to crash after each render *sigh*. Those look p.E. like this: http://www.michaelzeilfelder.de/Pics/Sc ... tkZYxi.png

[wizard4]

I'm throwing in some questions because I have a few ideas how a calendar might work...

I wondered if using a real calendar would help, or some alien days/seasons would work - the standard has days, weeks, months already (convention says 30, 31, 28/29 days etc.) and a time::now() so I don't think players want something unconventional to work with, but a game world could essentially be foreign? I can think of Lord of the Rings and Star Trek that use different dates(?) I probably don't want this.

If I do use a real calendar, the ability to fast forward time (no-one wants to wait a year), certain days give currency/take away currency (I don't think there would be a "game" if the calendar did nothing) and as CuteAlien points out change the sun, moon, stars. It is within scope and that's what I'll aim for.

I thought Noie's models can come in handy with a world. I'm slowly planning it and my mental health certainly drains days to output ratio. I may feel well at some point.

My IDE on my phone can use up to C++17 so do not have access to certain DateTime stuff when I'm out and about. My Raspberry Pi at home should have C++20. I wondered if anyone else upgraded to ++20?

[CuteAlien]

My approach to stuff - get the simplest case working first. Don't worry about abstractions. Way easier to think about those once you have simple case that works.

And I'm still working with C++17 right now in my main project. Mainly because I haven't had sufficient reason yet to update the project files to c++ 20 (I've run into one case so far where I could have used c++20, but working around that was easier than updating projects).

[Noiecity]

Strangely I had no notifications of this lmao. I use c++98 with the windows.h and commctrl.h libraries, I always try to use very little CPU in my projects and use windows, but I would still like to learn Linux programming with native c++ or c libraries.

The raspberry pi thing is a totally valid idea, it would be nice to have an own console called "Irrlicht Box", program games with low resources but that are fun... I mean, you could get income...

Although I like directx7 better than its later versions (dx8 and dx9), dx8 is very slow, very slow, dx9 is fast but consumes a lot of GPU resources

Mmm... the text is already getting long and I haven't even managed to write everything I think.

ReactOs would be a good option too if there is any raspberry or computer that is able to run it... anyway I think it is cheaper to buy an old used hp (30 dollars or something like that), but reselling that would not be legal apparently...

Now, the main thing I wanted to say, I think we could do something together, but I think we never have time, I have several unfinished robots that I want to upload to the forum, I'm finishing a job that has tied me up for a long time.

I have yet to bring you other examples that I am eager for you to see, for example, animating textures of a model using bake and other methods make them look exactly the same as in Blender... using jpg format. I haven't brought you the examples of using only sprites for one world and jpg images for everything. I haven't brought you any of the actual things I've thought of, damn I need more time.

Anyway, you are a nice community and I hope I can contribute with something later.
...By the way, I may finish the job today or tomorrow... so, I'll be back soon, I really want that

[wizard4]

Hey,

Noie, I liked minimal too and it's good you checked out DX stuff. There's too much to learn. Linux has a big issue jumping in from Windows but I did find out Windows also has lots and lots of hidden features, and with its great compatibility. I can't say which is best.

I have made a Date class from Bjarne's book and can add days, months and years. Today I used get_time to find what day of the week (any date) it is. Pretty happy with it.

I can't get Irrlicht running on Raspberry Pi. Irrlicht would draw the 3D scene and draw the calendar UI on screen. Too bad I'm having trouble building it. There is the 1.8.5 package but for some reason a quit event stopped the program staying open.

[Noiecity]

Hey,

Noie, I liked minimal too and it's good you checked out DX stuff. There's too much to learn. Linux has a big issue jumping in from Windows but I did find out Windows also has lots and lots of hidden features, and with its great compatibility. I can't say which is best.

I have made a Date class from Bjarne's book and can add days, months and years. Today I used get_time to find what day of the week (any date) it is. Pretty happy with it.

I can't get Irrlicht running on Raspberry Pi. Irrlicht would draw the 3D scene and draw the calendar UI on screen. Too bad I'm having trouble building it. There is the 1.8.5 package but for some reason a quit event stopped the program staying open.

We could use only the CPU, so we avoid using the GPU, and we would only rely on precomputed coordinates, it would have better performance than GPU, but it requires more work, if you are willing we could do something, I would still like to show that in the community.

Try running the official example 6 (with the cpu)that features rendered sprites, something like that we could do, you can build a world just using sprites(a very realistic 3d world, cinematic, or pixelart).

It would be rendered in Blender in jpg format taking into consideration the position of the player, instead of rendering the camera we would create a small sphere (about the size of a human eye hole) and we would bake the reflections, then we would have a more realistic perspective.

We would have thousands of jpg images based on the player's events. It would be realistic and beautiful, and would be easily run on a raspberry pi cpu. Something like this would look like with gimp waterpixels(Filters->Artistic->Waterpixel).
70kb kb per image, in 10 images 0,7 mb, it is likely that an RPG game would weigh 10 or 20 GB, we would pass images to the ram and we would clean it up, I still don't know enough c++ about pointers and stuff, but I understand something. I would use little ram also, like 2 mb.

This kind of images can be scaled in a better way if no interpolation is used, i.e. they can be upscaled to 4k and still look good.
(63kb)


(waterpixels filter, 64,5kb)

[wizard4]

P.S.
The power and ease of makefiles. I ran make in the examples/ and have Irrlicht 1.9 running on both Mint and RaspOS. I didn't link the compiler right, but at least it works.

[wizard4]

I'll go with that Noie. How, I'm not sure, but let us give it a go. Feel free to jump to side projects.

[wizard4]

We could use only the CPU, so we avoid using the GPU, and we would only rely on precomputed coordinates, it would have better performance than GPU, but it requires more work, if you are willing we could do something, I would still like to show that in the community.

Yes, I did read the CPU can be excellent for graphics. Not many sources and it was a while ago. Sounds like you have many projects.

I quickly used the software renderer but remembered Irrlicht uses that for UI/2D. Is that what you meant? OpenGL flew like a bird, software was very slow and buggy. Is that the CPU you meant? (my fault)

[Noiecity]

We could use only the CPU, so we avoid using the GPU, and we would only rely on precomputed coordinates, it would have better performance than GPU, but it requires more work, if you are willing we could do something, I would still like to show that in the community.

Yes, I did read the CPU can be excellent for graphics. Not many sources and it was a while ago. Sounds like you have many projects.

I quickly used the software renderer but remembered Irrlicht uses that for UI/2D. Is that what you meant? OpenGL flew like a bird, software was very slow and buggy. Is that the CPU you meant? (my fault)

Yes, it has errors for 3d, but for 2d rendering it has no problems, and it looks better, the GPU uses many techniques and filters to reach an optimal performance, but the visual quality is usually inferior, although sometimes it is imperceptible. It is more noticeable in 3d graphics.

The cpu when working with 64 bits (even if it is an x32 program, since it is converted to x86, since the cpu continues processing it as if it were 64 bits, adding zeros in the equation...) can easily render images in excellent quality.

Besides, you can hardly control the GPU flow using only c++ or graphics APIs like directx or opengl, while using only the CPU you can considerably reduce the load, maintain a program that does not overheat the raspberry pi, maintaining a constant flow of fps, reducing the chances of typical memory errors that cause crashing or skipping conditions in a program (as often happens in modern games). For example controlling the percentage of CPU to use, it is also easier to use several cores for different tasks. Working with CPUs is the most optimal option, but requires more work.
It is not the same rendering on a 64-bit CPU that will make you a very accurate calculation, to a GPU that will end up surrounding most (getting more noise, depending on filters or algorithms that smooth the noise).

We could do something if you are interested, an adventure game, I would also be interested to see a project like this.

And yes, I have many debts of projects, but I have thought once I finish a program of finances in c++98, finally to be able to dedicate the time to Irrlicht, especially in giving compatible models, I have about 500 models, but they lack retopology and animation, and I still don't know if to keep the textures already arranged or to use some more style like the filter that I put to the second image of the comment above.


I've worked with devices that shut down when using the GPU or drastically raises the odds of memory errors, or outright stops at the drop of a hat, I'm not a big fan of the GPU really, I've always had problems like this. I just need to lower the CPU hz, put a timeout and that's it, the timeout still helps the GPU but errors still occur. I think that 20 fps stable should be optimal for the hardware...

[Brainsaw]

I had my game (MarbleGP) running on a Raspberry (400), but I stopped as I didn't get a decent framerate when going to Full HD or more. But I may give it another try soon, mainly trageting the Pi Boy 2 handheld. It should work nice there. Maybe I'll also get a tiny little handheld for a Pi Zero 2 and try that - just for the fun of it.

Generally, if I remember correctly, it wasn't too much work to get it running - just can't recall what I had to do to build the Irrlicht lib for the raspi. I think I used the cross compilation feature of Visual Studio, because since MS decided to create a version they give away for free I don't want to miss it - imho the best C++ IDE available.

[Noiecity]

I had my game (MarbleGP) running on a Raspberry (400), but I stopped as I didn't get a decent framerate when going to Full HD or more. But I may give it another try soon, mainly trageting the Pi Boy 2 handheld. It should work nice there. Maybe I'll also get a tiny little handheld for a Pi Zero 2 and try that - just for the fun of it.

Generally, if I remember correctly, it wasn't too much work to get it running - just can't recall what I had to do to build the Irrlicht lib for the raspi. I think I used the cross compilation feature of Visual Studio, because since MS decided to create a version they give away for free I don't want to miss it - imho the best C++ IDE available.

Interesting, I use dev c++, it goes faster, but for irrlicht I am forced to use visual studio... visual studio is beautiful, but it is heavy, and I usually use old notebooks that do not heat almost(since I am lying down)(+1000 stats into comfort). It is very nice to use the notebook comfortably and without heat (the heat goes straight to my brain lmao)