3D Library Adventure

This week I've worked on some Liberado Examples.

Flying Bat turned into Elf

Brick Ball Endless

I've taken the opportunity to do some Procedural Generation by joining the Summer ProcJam 2018: http://www.procjam.com/

This is the current state of things where spawning flowers near the player on an endless world/plane took most of the time.

The past weeks I've worked on the procjam entry. I had not as much development time as I would have liked.
Also I had to work on different approaches and still do need to do some work on it.

In the process it produced:

• Endless world (all directions) Scene Behavior
• Possible new block to convert an Array to openfl.Vector
• Extrusion examples

Development of new Extension stuff clashes with my goal to make examples. So  I also spend some time
on the LIBERADO examples.


Follow Camera

Mix 2D with 3D

Drag Drop 1 Actor

The past two weeks I've worked on :

• VideoTexture : unfortunately at this time it works only on HTML5 and Flash
• KeyDown Controller selection Extension: Using keys as controllers at runtime

And on some LIBERADO conversions:

Drawing Lines (2 versions: combined meshes and single lines)

Particle Effect:

Particle Effect:

Oh man!  Youre killing my rain effects!  Hahaha. Jk.  I cant wait to convert over to some 3d particles!  It looking great!

New results looking great! I know particle effects has been on a lot of wishlists for a while now.

Possible new block to convert an Array to openfl.Vector

I would like to see more vector algebra blocks in Stencyl. It may not be the first thing most people think of for new functionality, but there are a lot of demos and tutorials that use vectors. Vector blocks would make it easier to follow them.

Thanks guys for the interest!

Currently the particle effect system requires some Stencyl/HaXe code blocks. Since this system is so different from most of the other 3D stuff I am a bit hesitant to include some special particle extension blocks in the current Extension.
I am still thinking of creating a seperate Extension for this.

Another area that is different is the shader system.

Both of them need more investigations. I propably postpone work on them after the release of the 'core' Extension.

The reason that I'm converting some 2D games to 3D is to have a good understanding of what blocks work and which don't work or are not used that much.  Or which blocks can be combined into one block. Previously I had about 26 blocks and I wasn't even half way of where I'm today, so the current 14 blocks are way better to 'handle' stuff.

I do however fear that the lack of dependent dropdown listboxes prevent easy use of the Extension. Documentation requires a lot of work and it is not one of my strongest points.  I like to program and investigate stuff. Propably I do things badly and why bother making documentation on bad implementation?!

I hope the resulting 3D examples will give people a way to use it as documentation of how you COULD use 3D in Stencyl...

Thanks a lot for sharing!
Great stuff

Maybe a stupid question i have: How do you guys define “particles”? What is a particle in your sense?

In games I associate particles with particle-effects. A graphical representation of non-solid / non-colliding materials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_system

I found a few third party OpenFL particle systems. Have you experimented with any of them?

(Zame Particles: https://github.com/restorer/zame-haxe-particles)
(Simple Particles: https://github.com/underscorediscovery/openfl-simple-particles)

Wow those Zame examples look awesome. At first glance this system looks more interesting than the underscore one.
I might give this a go.

Thanks a lot for sharing. I don't know if I can manage to turn it into an extension but we will see !

Finally all that hard work on debugging the 3D stuff paid off.

I made a Zame extension in 4 hours after work!!! And most of the time was spend on loading assets from the right path and debug-trace-calls to check what the thing did.

Flash and HTML5 are working. I have to investigate native and mobile.

HTML Demo




Run it yourself:
Zame Extension Demo (1)

Wow, that's very impressive! More so that it was put together in only four hours. Performance seems very good, too. Doing something like that in software would be quite a bit more taxing. I like it when I have those "pay off" moments myself--justifies all that time spent working on the back-end

I'm curious how much of the Zame extension relies on your 3D implementation? When I read about it I was thinking about implementing it myself, albeit not in the near future (I don't think the particles would mesh well with the pixelated look of Idosra.. but would go well with farther-future plans). Based on what I read, it seemed like these tools should work on 2D alone. I didn't read very far in-depth, though.

Like the 3D stuff the drawing takes place ' behind ' Stencyl.
That discovery initially took me about a month to find. This time I was prepared and when I was convinced that the drawing-calls did run it had to be the same thing.
So I had that code already to turn the 'Color Layer'  off and BAM there where the particles.

When the 2D game doesn't need to interact and/or can use the background particles it should be fine.

But it is all very fresh and much more tests are need to be performed. At this time I have verified that it works on Native Mac and now I'm running to ios simulator.

There is an editor with which you can create the file that can be loaded.

There are some properties I can change. Currently the position.

Two created particles with a mouse movent:

Confirmed that the extension runs on all platforms:

• HTML5
• Flash
• Mac
• Windows
• Linux
• iOS
• Android

 

Performance differs from system to system. iOS and Android aren't that fast but I didn't test on high-end devices.

It appears to be mixing with Stencyl quite nicely (allthough I didn't do extensive testing!)

Play it yourself (there are currently 3 demos)
HTML5 Demo