Archive for the ‘3D ENGINES’ Category
It appears Torque3D is going to compete with Unity3D in a browser based 3d plugin front with a Torque3D toolset and pipeline that target the web.
They announced this on gamasutra recently on how instantaction and torque3d technology is similar yet different. InstantAction is an engine wrapper where the web plugin for Torque3D is more tighly coupled with the Torque3D engine. Instantaction.com technology allows you to wrap an existing game engine for the web which is a competitor with the gaimtheory engine that is used on quakelive.com.
I have been a garage games torque developer and member since 2003 and worked/bought with each engine they have put out from the old school Torque Engine, to Torque Engine Advanced for various game development projects and now they are throwing in on what appears to be based on their instantaction.com technology but using the Torque3D engine. This is very interesting, they might even have a channel/appstore to release games on instantaction.com?
Unity3D has recently taken my time in the full immersion 3d for the web space, the mono engine that runs the scripting is a huge feature. Coding in C#, Boo and javascript is great, and the pipeline for Unity3D is unmatched.
A bit of history, I have been interested in this since Director introduced 3d in director 8.5 in 2001 (how was that not a major revision I don’t know) and the killer Havok 3d physics engine within it. Way ahead of its time. But Director 3d was extremely limited with w3d (not even a decent blender exporter) and it literally has not advanced since that time in terms of ability to develop better for it and the IDE. It was trapped in this little IDE and quirky Lingo language. They tried to save it with javascript, a valiant effort but it still withered due to lack of openness of development for the player (a mistake they aren’t making with Flash now at Adobe). So making full immersion 3d games was not really ready for the web, Director was notorious at crashing browsers and took way too many broken plugins to get a basic engine.
So I went to mods in HL (quake 2 engine), Unreal and when I realized there was no way me or my friends could foot the license fees of either engine we went to Torque in 2003. It was great, large terrains and highly compact engine because it had to run Tribes with 64 players years before anyone else approached 64 players and arguably still played better than 64 player fps now. It was affordable. I have been interested in the movements to make torque an active x control in 2005/6 and Think Tanks did just that. It was very nice, I thought soon after it would be everywhere. But it has taken until now and a new engine called Torque3D before this has been realized years later. This is hard stuff to get right creating a plugin that works cross browser and performs well (browsers had to catch up as well). The culmination of that technology progression has happened and 3d on the web for game development appears to be bigtime in 2009.
Unity3D meanwhile since 2005-6 has gotten it nearly all right so far for a few years now, especially the pipeline and the webplayer. Torque has always had an poor pipeline, not as bad as writing your own engine from scratch and all the tools but in the early days pretty close. Proprietary formats like dts for models made finding the right exporter tasking. There were just so many walls in what was supposed to be a pipeline, largely due to support for formats that were small enough for slower networks and machines of the past. Unity3D gets all this right from the start, pipeline is not an issue. Torque3D seems to address this with their new tools, support for Collada, but unfortunately still scripted with TorqueScript. If Torque3D could wire in Mono and the capability to code in Javascript, C#, Boo or other Mono languages this would have been cool, or at least a semi-standard scripting language like Javascript, Python etc that would be great. TorqueScript was a big feature and UnrealScript is very similar in how it interacts with the engine, but these days we want standard languages that have engine features built in. Maybe this will happen down the road, but the format support is very nice.
For 3d, prior to Unity3D, the web was still owned by Director but that has changed in the last few years. It won me over for immersive 3d games that are web capable and able to port to other platforms and markets. Casual is still done with Flash and mobile space is targeting iphone. Unity3D can run on web, iPhone, Wii, desktop. Torque3D can run on web and also has paths to desktop, iPhone, Wii, XBOX360. You see what is happening here? It is very cool indeed. No doubt the competition in this area is getting to a point where some good innovation and happenings are taking place, what are you going to do with it?
This is fantastic news! Unity3D 2.5 has been released a bit early before GDC and it includes the game changing windows build environment and IDE. This now opens up the Unity 3D market by a huge factor and Unity3d will find its way into many gaming companies that are heavily invested in Windows. We should see the amount of unity 3d players and content ramp up quite a bit this year.
- Forum Announcement
- What’s new in Unity3d 2.5
- Download the 2.5 update
- Mac OS X: http://unity3d.com/unity/unity.dmg
- Windows: http://unity3d.com/unity/UnitySetup.exe <- well look at that
Dont’ get me wrong I love my Mac Book Pro and continue to use it for development in Unity3D, iphone sdk etc. But being able to use my windows machine as a dev box is great and I know this will be huge for many windows users not wanting to shell out the $1500 for the unity license AND $3000 for a decent macbook. The cost wall has been lowered and it is a great investment if you are an indie game developer or a large game developer.
I usually only get excited about open source tools on this blog because they help everyone with skills have access, I hope one day there will be an open source 3d browser based engine as well. Right now though there is nothing price competitive other than maybe torque instantaction plugin or the gaim engine (quakelive) that comes close with hardware rendering and none of them beat Unity in ease of pipeline.
One thing about Unity3d is it was a game engine from day one, it is only a game engine. It isn’t like Director or Flash that are also application development kits, rich internet application kits etc. This is pure game engine baby with hardware rendering for the win. Also, if you want to make 3d games for the iPhone without going hardcore OpenGL ES you can do so with an additional license that opens up your distribution channel to the iphone, flash can’t do that currently unfortunately.
And so it begins… GAME ON!
Libspark from Japan is a treasure trove of great flash advancements, they seem to realize the great things that can come from porting in existing solid libraries from C/C++ etc into flash and have been scoring lately including augmented reality in flash porting the ARToolkit to FLARToolkit. Recently a port of openCV for as3 called Marilena was found and it is for object detection and decent facial recognition (it is a computer vision library from intel) considering the processing power needed to do this.
Face Detection: Here is the sample included with Marilena showing facial detection on an image.
Lots of recent action has blown up on this front from Mr doob, quasimondo (optimizing the Marilena classes for better performance) and Boffwswana. Also there is a kit called deface by sshipman that is the first foray into this a year ago doing similar things but it was just a bit before it’s time and a bit slow in previous versions of flash, it performs decent now in this sample. Flash 10 performance of the AVM2 and future directions with Alchemy will lead to more interesting stuff just like this.
Mr. doob head tracking sample, be sure to check lots of other examples there
Boffswana example of head tracking Johnny Lee Wii style with only a webcam and flash, no wiimote needed since it uses facial detection to check where you are and how close you are in the screen and then moves accordingly.
This is stemming from the recent explosion of the FLARToolkit and augmented reality in flash as well as the gimmicks used by Nintendo with the wii and Johnny Lee’s great head tracking advancements. Porting great libraries to flash seems to be the phase we are entering now judging by the recent excitement around Adobe Alchemy and the LLVM along with the lead from the libspark.org contributors. We have also seen this heavily last year in ports of Box2D for 2d physics and other toolkits using established working code and porting that to flash now that is is mostly capable of handling the performance.
OpenCV (Open Computer Vision Library by Intel) is quite a powerful platform that allows you to do all this and now it is available in flash. There are other great libraries for nearly all platforms now. I have done some previous work with Aforge which is also a port of OpenCV mainly for motion detection. This was always around but not until the recent performance updates and the innovation that has come with Alchemy and the thinking that goes along with that (porting in libraries to flash from C/C++ etc), has allowed this to flourish in flash and thus the web.
The amazing new things we can do with flash by porting in existing libraries is only going to get more intense as alchemy and flash 10 are even more mainstream. It is almost as if Flash will eventually just become a web renderer and simplified front end to many great toolkits that exist in more native environments like C/C++ but with the speed and distribution access of the web with Flash. Exciting times ahead.
Looks like it is a javascript day here at *drawlogic. Here is an interesting example with some demos of a javascript and canvas based pseudo 3d engine. Anything this cool you know it has to be from Japan.
Also of note, it has been rumored that Silverlight 3 will have fully hardware accelerated 3d and canvas and javascript engines are getting much faster with great demos like this. Adobe needs to leap into hardware acceleration for flash on a broader scale soon.
But I digress, this demo it appears, was inspired by Papervision3D due to the naming and the javascript reference of “parpevision.js“. I wasn’t able to find much more information about this but it is very well done and this example even shows some environment mapping. It is not close to flash pseudo-3d engines like Papervision3D yet but at the rate of javascript engine development lately this could rival flash AVM2 in the next couple of years.
Demos
Code
- Sample iPod iTouch Mesh data (meshdata.js) – contains models
- Code from the main engine (parpevision.js)
- Sample Viewport and main app (touch.js from demo 3)
Here is the code for the parpevision.js file and the mini engine, it is an MIT license. (more…)
The unity3d platform is about to realize about 900% or 9x more possible market for selling their wares and I believe will blow up with unity 2.5. Unity3d 2.5 will bring a windows IDE and development environment to unity3d developers. Many game companies are heavily invested in Windows and having this option is breaking down a huge wall to get this development platform and engine into many new hands and companies.
The best part about unity 3d development is the hardware acceleration, the fantastic pipeline, the ability to publish desktop, web, mobile (iphone) and console (wii) is pretty amazing. All using the powerful mono open source .net framework as a base.
Windows Editor Support
Unity 2.5 adds full support for Windows Vista and XP, with 100% feature parity and interoperability with Mac OS X. The Unity Editor has been rebuilt to look, feel, and function identically on both operating systems, each running the same underlying engine. The best part? Unity on either platform can build games for either platform — cross-platform in the truest sense.
A Whole New Look
Find the tools you need quickly and easily. The Play buttons are front and center, clearly visible and inviting you to play, test, and improve your work. And when you do, they light up, dimming the rest of the application, drawing your attention to the most important things in the play experience you’re creating.
Precise Navigation and Placement ToolsImproved Usability
Snap any object to customizable increments of position, scale, and rotation values. Drag objects around, clamped to any surface collision. Manipulate objects in local or world space. Use the new flythrough controls to get around easily. And did we mention the completely redesigned rotation tool?
3ds Max Importing
Drag and drop your .max files right into the Editor, including support for all skeletal based animation, multiple UVs, and vertex colors. Autodesk 3ds Max now joins the existing support for Maya, Blender, and all other 3D applications that integrate with the latest FBX plugin on the Windows platform.
Completely Customizable Editor
UnityGUI, Unity’s own GUI creation system, now powers the entire Editor and allows you to integrate your own unique level design tools, AI control tools, debugging tools, difficulty tuning tools, or anything else you need. Over 130 new API entry points enable you to create specialized, customized editor tools and build them into the existing Editor interface.
Tabbed Interface
We took cues from the best designed applications, and the rewritten editor has received dozens of improvements. The most visible change is the tabbed interface, where every part of the interface can be moved, undocked to a secondary monitor, and even stacked to achieve logical grouping.
Information at Your Fingertips
We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that you always have the info you need, when you need it. Model files have previews right inside the inspector. Audio Clips show their waveform with click-to-play behaviour. Meshes show the detailed rendering stats – and that’s just scratching the surface.
(use arrow keys and spacebar to control the red ball)
A new 3d physics library is under development and in early stages called jiglibflash. Like the Box2D ports it is based on a C++ library of the same name called jiglib, only this is 3D instead of 2D. It is similar in purpose to WOW Engine which is the other current open source 3d flash physics engine. For more on this toolkit see the links below.
UPDATE: katopz has also ported this to use Away3D as the renderer.
UPDATE: Also updated for the sandy3d engine as the renderer.
I have mentioned before that flash to unity3d communication is a key part of game development for the web now where you are using Unity3D as a higher end renderer and some of your other page elements might be flash. Now there is a new open source kit for this called u3dobject.
To get Flash and Unity3D to talk to one another in an HTML/XHTML page is pretty simple with javascript and with the internal Unity3D Application object and the ExternalInterface in Flash. But there are lots of elements of that communication that can be consolidated and reused so you don’t have to recreate that over and over. Various studios and programmers come up with their own kits but when it becomes a shared activity to get the best integration and make it more of a platform that is where things like swfobject, swfaddress and u3dobject come in.
So far swfobject is the standard for flash html embedding and unityObject is a similar take (but a bit dated) on that but now we have u3dObject that is open as well and a more official open source project for unity3D <–> flash integration and test harnesses for development when those two technologies are used together.
Unity3D <-> Flash Embedding Info:
Unity3D is a great platform for developing 3d games where you need hardware acceleration beyond what Flash 3d can give you for the web.
There are lots of great independent gaming companies and web gaming companies realizing this and here in the #phx Arizona market a few good ones including Flashbang Studios on their Unity3D gaming site Blurst. I have been developing Unity3D for about 6 months and it is great where you want 3d environments over 2000 polys for the web. The power of 3d hardware rendering on the web combined with a great development environment is making it possible to make really fun games with unity3d.
Unity3D Games Released Recently
Flashbang recently released Minotaur China Shop to add to their Blurst.com site of Unity3D games and community. They detailed the launch day at their blog. It is a pretty fun game and once you get further into the game design with different paths, selling products or thrashing your china shop for insurance and strategic upgrades it has legs to keep interest.
Minotaur China Shop Trailer
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/2474951[/vimeo]
There are lots of great Unity 3d games out there here is a list of the best of 2008:
- AXE – Billions
Play it!
Provide Feedback - AXE – Dark Temptation
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Banzai Ball
Play it! (Mac OS)
Provide Feedback - Beijing Conspiration
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Chicken Target
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Circuit Defenders
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Colony Defender
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Downhill Bowling
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Feist
Play it! (Mac OS)
Provide Feedback - Flip Sorter
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Hordes of Orcs
Play it!
Provide Feedback - IndieRiffs
Play it! (Intel Mac OS)
Provide Feedback - Jeecheereen1
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Jetpack Brontosaurus
Play it! - Laka Game Show
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Lander Commander
Play it! (Mac OS)
Provide Feedback - Lies and Seductions
Play it! (Mac OS Universal)
Provide Feedback - Manta
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Mars Explorer
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Nuddz
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Oddball
Play it! (Mac OS)
Provide Feedback - Off-Road Velociraptor Safari
Play it! - Outpost
Play it! - Pirates n Dragons
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Project Cloudwitch
Play it!
Provide Feedback - RastaMonkey
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Seamulator
Play it! (Mac OS)
Provide Feedback - Sperm Racer
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Sphaira
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Super Splashdown
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Super Volei Brasil
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Tag Ball
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Traces of Illumination
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Tumbledrop
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Turret Master
Play it! (Mac OS)
Provide Feedback - Turtle Trap
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Vimto Jetski
Play it!
Provide Feedback - Widget TD
Play it!
Provide Feedback
[source]
This is pretty impressive. This is Moonlight for mono (a silverlight clone in mono.net for multiplatform) running inside of Ogre3D (a 3d renderer) as a material.
Argiris Kirtzidi (one of the developers behind Managed OGRE) modified Moonlight to run inside the Ogre3D engine. You can render Moonlight applications or XAML files inside Ogre3D.
Some details in no particular order:
-Moonlight uses cairo for the graphics. I developed a new backend for cairo that fully utilizes the GPU (through Ogre’s RenderSystem) for rendering. This is completely independent from Moonbeam and can be used standalone.
-Moonlight’s core is a native C++ engine and is not dependent in Mono. It is flexible enough to be scripted by anything, javascript, managed code, native code, etc. I’ve got it working on both Mono and the .NET framework and I plan on embedding and trying out Lua for more lightweight stuff.
-If you opt for using managed code, it should be possible, in theory, to utilize the silverlight controls, develop a silverlight widget using visual studio and have it run through moonbeam with full debugging support.
-Getting it to work on Windows was no small task as the moonlight team is completely focused on linux, and there doesn’t seem to be much consideration about cross-platform-ness. I think this is reasonable, though, since moonlight is a young project and their specific goal is to implement silverlight for *nix systems. The downside is that it reduces its flexibility, e.g. in order to inject keyboard/mouse events I will have to create and pass to it GDK events or make heavy patches to it.
Hopefully, there will be more push in the future to get the *nix dependencies abstracted away from the core moonlight engine.
- The Moonlight Calculator Example.
- Miguel’s post about this
- Original post about the technique from the author
If you are exporting from blender to actionscript directly so you can get your models into flash as script you can use the Blender to .as3 exporter which so kindly supports all flash 3d engines currently Away3D, Papervision3D and Sandy3D. Dennis Ippel made the Blender exporter a while back but the update supports papervision 2.0.
- Post on the exporter and how to use
- Sandy 3.0 Example
- Away3D Example
- Papervision3D 1.7 Example
- Papervision3D 2.0 Example
- ActionScript 3.0 exporter at the Blender wiki
The benefits of COLLADA are nice but there are so many differences that you can run into trouble. With the exporter it is a direct faces and vector export without all the bloat of DAE/COLLADA xml. This works if you are only developing for flash and dont’ need to use the models in other platforms/systems/engines that aren’t in flash.
