3D Library Adventure

In september 2017 I had these numbers:
Dropping to 30-40 FPS when hitting the number of meshes bound to Stencyl actors
Flash in VM      100
HTML5 in VM      50
Windows in VM   200
Mac OS        200
iOS Simulator      40
Android(nexus 6)      80

Note: I was using virtual machines and a MacBook from 2011 so newer (real) hardware might do it better.

Since then I worked on combining meshes and particle effects with array movement with which you can add much more.
I think rule of thumb here is the limit of actors in Stencyl.

50 seems like a pretty decent size for a 2D game with 3D effects. I was curious what performance was like compared to vanilla Stencyl. Seeing how well LIBERADO's examples work would probably be a better test, though. Some of them had a lot of actors.

This week I've encountered bug upon bug.
Some of them I had before and always thought it would be easy to fix once the new OpenFL stuff was here.
It is very frustrating to see that some stuff works on HTML5, some on Flash.
Some platform needs timing to load all the 3D stuff and other platforms load faster.
Material Methods that worked before stopped working.
I have spend two days to get controls back to work. This is really two steps back! I fear for this extension

I will discard this week and work on some ports of LIBERADOs work since currently this is ruining my pleasure of coding.

This week I've encountered bug upon bug.

Ugh, been there recently myself. Hang in there!

Ugh, been there recently myself. Hang in there!

Thanks mate!

I'm stubborn and I can't really stand if things don't work! So I still worked on the issues this week

I've managed to get few of them sorted out:

• SpriteSheet Animation didn't work on Native & Mobile (but worked on HTML5/Flash)
• Materials didn't work on Native & Mobile
• Textures&Materials combined didn't work on Native & Mobile
• HTML5 : MD2 file end-of-file encountered

The solution for the combined materials was that it needed some time after a load before it could be added to the scene.
The SpriteSheet Animation and the Materials had to do with the fact that combining blendmodes interfered.
The MD2 on HTML5 was solved by using a different call to the MD2Parser.

The thing left is the Image Particle System that uses the color transform particle function. That works on HTML5/Flash but not on
Native & Mobile.

Hope I can tackle that one this week.

This week I've managed to fix the Image Particle System on non-HTML5.

Now most of the bugs are fixed. The MD2 loading doesn't work with animations for Flash
but I give that a low priority.

Since I'm concentrating on the conversion of 2D games to 3D games I'm not going to work on the
remaining examples unless a demo really depends on it.

These are the things on my long-term TODO list:

• Terrain elevation
• Terrain HeightMap
• AWD File Import
• Particle block instead of code-block
• Video Texture
• Custom Shader System
• StereoScopic Camera (Virtual Reality)

This weeks demos:

  PLAY The Color Material Demo

PLAY The Texture Material Demo

I've worked on an intrueging question from Krimm about line drawing and physics that I (with the help of DinciCode) turned into a 3D version as well:

Play the Demo

Next week I'll work on more (Liberado) Demos.

Since I wanted to do some First Person View and a TopDown I figured I could still use the Sokoban game.

I've made a scene behavior that does the camera movement and dispatches coordinates to the existing event that handles the actor movement.

Unfortunately the idea that I had to do a bounding collision box detection was way too heavy on the CPU.
Also I made the actor turn AND rotate it AND rotating the Camera just to find out that turning the actor (2D) and rotating the actor (3D) were conflicting

  PLAY Demo

  PLAY Demo

Oh man!  I didnt even think first person view with this!

And elevation /terrain heightmap!?  As in hills? Not flat ground to walk on?  I can batch geocode elevations!  Maybe even do 3d map tiles?! Will it work on mobile?

Hi Squeeb,

In August of 2017 I already ported an Away3D demo with elevation to Stencyl:
http://htmlstarter.com/Away3D/html5/FirstPersonTerrain/

The way that it works is that you have a bitmap with height indication. The lighter the pixel the higher the point.
It seems to be possible to adjust the height of the actor by getting this elevation data.

As Stencyl is a 2D engine I first want to look at ways to convert a 2D game into a 3D one. Allthough I have made some demonstration scenes using specific 3D things I will now focus on the 2D -> 3D aspects.

Later, once the extension is tested enough, I want to make more stuff. But Since I'm way to easily distracted I need to have tight deadlines/todo/milestones to work with.

But ... I will get back to this heightmap!!

Thanks for your continued interest in this project!

No worries  my friend!  Im excited to try it out!  Alas.. i need to do some 2d stuff before i go 3d anyways   by that time.. im sure this will be amazing!

Cool demos! This is coming along very nicely.

When I look at the first person perspective one all I can think of is a first person 'angry birds' type game That'd be a neat application--2D for firing and 3D for watching the shot. However, CPU usage combined with that level of physics simulation might be too much. Maybe!

first person 'angry birds' type game

Cool! If someone has a little angry birds demo laying around I will be happy to try to convert it into a first person catapult game.

I thought that there was a sample game with Stencyl that had an angry bird style game, but I could only find the 'block-destroy' game.

I think LIBERADO has an 'Angry Bombs' demo. Weren't you converting some of those?

I know I've seen another Angry Birds demo. I might have it on another machine, actually... I might have downloaded it from the forge a long time ago.

Yes I am converting the shared .stencyl files LIBERADO has posted on the forum. His Angry Bombs isn't shared (you can only play it through his profile)

There is another shared .stencyl file that is like a ball that is squashed and jumps to the right. I can mimic the angry bird flight with this ball. But if someone is sharing a simple .stencyl file with the 'real' angry bird mechanic I still am interested!

I've digged a little into the vault since I knew there was a game with Stencyl. It appears that it was a kit that really only worked pre 3.0 . Jon said in a post that it was too much work to port it to latest release.

This weekend I'm going away with family so this time an earlier status report.

LIBERADO conversions:

Actor Rotate Around Point

Ball Jumping with arrow keys

Bouncing Balls

Balance Game (Joints extension)

Basic Match Game