3D Engine
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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by ReNo on Fri Jun 24th at 8:30pm 2005


But modern graphics cards can run both well. Its not like back in the day when ATI was crappy at OpenGL and nVidia (or Voodoo) cards were bad with DirectX. Its time better spent for the developers to concentrate on optimising the game for one API than putting in support for two, as anybody who has a card good enough to play HL2 has a card good enough to work with either DirectX or OpenGL effectively. The choice would mean nothing, and probably just lead to more work for the developers and confusion for users. What do you mean you'd be able to optimise it better if it was OpenGL compatible anyways?






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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by Dark_Kilauea on Fri Jun 24th at 8:49pm 2005


This is because I have a G-Force FX card. One of those that didn't handle DirectX as well.

Until Later...



Dark_Kilauea
DVS Administration
http://www.dvstudio-production.com/



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by Myrk- on Sat Jun 25th at 12:49am 2005


Just for the sake of being awkward, please leave it in Direct X... Don't want those grubby, filthy Mac users running a program And any Linux users are obviously so l337 that they can recode the program you made to work on Linux machines themselves...

Until later...




-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by Dark_Kilauea on Sat Jun 25th at 3:06am 2005


Myrk, are you resorting to stereotypes? :P

Seriously, reprogramming anything is essentaly impossible. It's like turning a HL2 bsp into a .vmf file. You get the jist of it, but it's not complete. Even with stuff like wine, many DirectX and DirectDraw apps don't work, and I would never trust the Windows api's to do anything with my Linux partition.

There are professional Windows emulators but, who wants to pay for them? Plus the effect many of them have on system resources...

And to add, why are you stealing my closing to all my messages?
*sits there, wondering how to convey that he's not being hostile, and decides just to live a crappy note*

Until Later...



Dark_Kilauea
DVS Administration
http://www.dvstudio-production.com/



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by SaintGreg on Sat Jun 25th at 4:21am 2005


Jumping into the discussion:

IDE's for programming languages generally just bog you down. For an expert, a good text editor *cough vim* will only make things go faster. Vim has basically everything you could ever want in an IDE, but its in a much cleaner, concise package. One thing I hate about VS is that it takes like 20 seconds to start up, if I open a file its because I want to use it now, not in 20 seconds. Plus text editors are much more customizable than an IDE which has only a limited number of options. Thats one reason I stopped using dev-cpp is because I could never get it just the way I wanted. Plus everything is right at your fingertips, you never have to leave the keyboard to go poking around something; so its faster, and over the long run it hurts your wrists less. Not to mention that all you need is to have a shell open, you dont need any windowing or mouse support or anything.

I am part of a medium sized fortran program (for all the programs involved all told its about 30 files or so), and we use vi since its just so much easier in the long run. Plus, and this is especially true of microsoft, IDE's tend to use project files instead of makefiles. Which means that you have to go through leaps and bounds just to compile someone elses code that uses an IDE. For HL1/2 I used VS to compile it since they don't provide a makefile, but just use vi as normal to actually read and modify the code. I want to be able to just type make and have it compile on any system I put the code on.

I always thought it was odd that the Microsoft compilers were never very good. I mean, the ANSI C standard was published nearly 20 years ago, and yet microsoft has taken this long to produce an only semi-decent compiler.

GeForce FX was just a flop. Nothing more.

Its a tough choice to pick one graphics API over the other. If I knew anything about them I would say more. But maybe its like your choice of programming languages. You wouldn't program HL2 in perl, just like you wouldn't program a test program in assembly (test as in a driver to run test cases of some code). Programming languages are just a tool, the right tool for the right job.

For the consumer of HL2 it really doesn't make a difference whether valve programmed HL2 with DX or OGL. The main benefit of using OpenGL (beyond any ease of use type issues) is that it offers cross platform support. Since valve is clearly not going to make a unix port of HL2 what does it matter to the consumer? HL was openGL and they never ported it so what difference does it make...



To get something to work, sometimes you just have to beat your head against the wall longer; the skin grows back, but the brick doesn't.

Source hates soup!



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by $loth on Sat Jun 25th at 6:42am 2005


? quote:
Lol, If you find a tutorial of opengl for VB6,



No! noooooooooooooo! Please don't mention this horrid thing to me ever again!


(I had to use it for computing along with access, I am now sick and tired of them both).




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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by Crono on Sat Jun 25th at 6:51am 2005


Apparently, HL1, under WineX, runs great (or so I hear).

By the way, Dark, WineX IS a professional Windows emulation (Wine with DX support) application. It also costs money. I don't remember what they changed the name to though. image

After all, it doesn't matter what video interface libraries you use if the rest of the application is strictly written for one OS.

I think whats-the-whos-its-who-made-chrome had a really good idea. Make the base engine in Java then have the run time intensive stuff talk to that engine (Meaning that changes only need to be made to the small engine portion that interacts with the OS, which generally is performance tweaking). It's almost instant multi-platform-ification.

Just a note, I can't imagine anyone jumping into using OGL or DX without suffecient knowledge and experience with C/C++. Not to mention assembly. Because, you can't do EVERYTHING with graphics libraries.



Blame it on Microsoft, God does.



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by RaPtoR on Sat Jun 25th at 12:26pm 2005


Haha, cool :P
Looks like you set up a direct draw surface and loaded a pre made directx model onto it.
Surely DirectX has lots of features and stuff but i'm just the kind of guy who has to be completley original.
That's why i'm making a completley pure 3d motor witch uses my own functions to project a world of coordinates on a form. It's currently capable to spray a cloud of dots(XYZcoordinates) onto a form. You can navigate through the cloud using your keyboard and mouse. And it's a perfect perspective <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif">
Currently working on a way to draw triangles and later on i will attempt to fill them .

And oh, loth cover your eyes now: it's vb. :X



God got tired waiting all sunday for the world to compile and finaly had it.
On the Eight day, god created func_details, and he saw that it was fast.



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by Damic on Sat Jun 25th at 6:17pm 2005


Yeeah Raptor <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif"> VB6 or Vb.net?
mmh maybe I can help you with something <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif"> ??



Thx in advantage



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by RaPtoR on Sat Jun 25th at 6:54pm 2005


Hehe maybe ;D

It's VB6, and here's a screenshot for you:

image
(Coordinate line with a coordinate cloud)

Currently working on drawing triangles so i can make surfaces and that kind of stuff. The problem is that when i project XYZ positons on the XY surface, some coordinates that aren't in the FOV can be at unlimited XY distances away so it's not just to draw lines between 3 point's. Therefore i have to calculate the triangle lines using the XYZ data before it's projected...
It may sound advanced but it's really not when you into it. <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif">

If you want i can send you the source too but you'll probably have a hard time getting something. My swedish comments wont help you... :P



God got tired waiting all sunday for the world to compile and finaly had it.
On the Eight day, god created func_details, and he saw that it was fast.



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by SaintGreg on Sun Jun 26th at 6:20am 2005


? quote:
I don't remember what they changed the name to though.


I think its called "Cedega". You gotta pay though. You can download free versions from miscellaneous places, but building it may be less straightforward. Plus you don't *legally* <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_wink.gif"> get point2play which is the main benefit of paying for cedega.

Then again I think Wine is every bit as good as cedega, so you might as well just use that and go straight to the source. http://www.winehq.com/



To get something to work, sometimes you just have to beat your head against the wall longer; the skin grows back, but the brick doesn't.

Source hates soup!



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by Crono on Sun Jun 26th at 8:20am 2005


WineX did cost money... Wine never cost money though.


Blame it on Microsoft, God does.



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by Myrk- on Sun Jun 26th at 10:18am 2005


? quoting Dark_Kilauea
Myrk, are you resorting to stereotypes?

Seriously, reprogramming anything is essentaly impossible. It's like turning a HL2 bsp into a .vmf file. You get the jist of it, but it's not complete.

Actually someone who visits this website on rare occasions actually created a perfect program to do it, but he was advised not to release it, and I don't think he has. I think HL2 has one built in aswell somewhere in the SDK for examing the SP maps? (Correct me if I'm wrong about that last one).




-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by Damic on Sun Jun 26th at 11:19am 2005


@Sloth: VB6 is NOT VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), I hate vba, beacouse its so different

@Raptor: nicely done, but 43FPS is'nt that a little bit slow? I work without timers (GetTickCount, Do ... loop, ...) <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_wink.gif">





Thx in advantage



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by ReNo on Sun Jun 26th at 11:39am 2005


I haven't heard anything about a built in decompiler Myrk, and wouldn't imagine there would be one. They provided the source files to a few maps - why would they bother if they had a decompiler there to use (or why bother with a decompiler if they could just include the sources)? I think that even the guy who had made a "perfect" decompiler was most likely not quite on the ball there. I dunno if HL2 BSP's do include enough info to get a perfect replica of the orginal VMF, but I highly doubt it. Most likely he had made a pretty good decompiler that can give a fairly accurate output, but perfection is most likely impossible with such reverse engineering.






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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by RaPtoR on Sun Jun 26th at 12:25pm 2005


? quote:
@Raptor: nicely done, but 43FPS is'nt that a little bit slow? I work without timers (GetTickCount, Do ... loop, ...)


First of all, it's not complete yet so there might be several things that can be easy to optimize.
Second, i don't work with timers eather. I use do...loop to redraw.
And third, it's not the actual drawing of the dots that's slow (i know i checked). I always have 35 fps for some reason, no matter if i have 500 or 2 coordinates. I't may be memory allocation or something like that witch slows it down a bit.

:P



God got tired waiting all sunday for the world to compile and finaly had it.
On the Eight day, god created func_details, and he saw that it was fast.



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by Damic on Sun Jun 26th at 12:37pm 2005


mmh I had allso 70->75FPS till I see the he was using vsync , ha you use the timer only for the FPS smiley

? quote:
Public lFps(2) As Long
Public Function FPS(OldFps As Long) As Long
FPS = OldFps
If GetTickCount - lFps(0) >= 1000 Then
lFps(0) = GetTickCount
FPS = lFps(1)
lFps(1) = 0
End If
lFps(1) = lFps(1) + 1
End Function




Thx in advantage



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by fraggard on Sun Jun 26th at 3:48pm 2005


? quote:
? quoting Dark_Kilauea
Myrk, are you resorting to stereotypes?

Seriously, reprogramming anything is essentaly impossible. It's like turning a HL2 bsp into a .vmf file. You get the jist of it, but it's not complete.

Actually someone who visits this website on rare occasions actually created a perfect program to do it, but he was advised not to release it, and I don't think he has.


He did release it, despite some whining from some guy.

http://www.geocities.com/cofrdrbob/vmex.html

? quote:
I dunno if HL2 BSP's do include enough info to get a perfect replica of the orginal VMF, but I highly doubt it. Most likely he had made a pretty good decompiler that can give a fairly accurate output, but perfection is most likely impossible with such reverse engineering.

I think he said the Source engine's BSP files had a lot of extra information in them, which made decompiling them easier. I've never tried it though. I heard it wasn't perfect, but fairly good, and much better than ye olde WinBSP for HL1






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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by Damic on Sun Jun 26th at 4:02pm 2005


Vmex does it job much accurater then any other bsp decompile program. Mostly I use it to decompile HL2 maps and they are accurate <img src=" SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">



Thx in advantage



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Re: 3D Engine
Posted by BlisTer on Sun Jun 26th at 10:32pm 2005


? quoting Myrk-
? quoting Dark_Kilauea
Myrk, are you resorting to stereotypes?

Seriously, reprogramming anything is essentaly impossible. It's like turning a HL2 bsp into a .vmf file. You get the jist of it, but it's not complete.

Actually someone who visits this website on rare occasions actually created a perfect program to do it, but he was advised not to release it, and I don't think he has. I think HL2 has one built in aswell somewhere in the SDK for examing the SP maps? (Correct me if I'm wrong about that last one).

yeah it's Rof and its not cause he doesnt post much that he's rarely here. i think he visits quite often.




These words are my diaries screaming out loud




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