3D Library Adventure

I'm really impressed! It'd be great to be able to do some motion capture for sprite creation... although I don't have a Kinect to use it with.

wow simply :OOO, do you plan to make the extension available one day?

Thanks for the positive feedback.

In the back of my mind I'm creating the extension for general use.  There are so much settings and ways to do things that I fear that the extension will be quite difficult to use. So I hope that by creating a lot of little example scenes will help those who will want to try to do 3D stuff.

What really would help if the engine extension abilities would include tabs to combine blocks like stencyl palette does.
And a way to have dependent dropdown boxes mentioned in this journal before.

There are still a few things to work on before attempting to create more example games with this library.

And the main thing: the extension relies on Stencyl 3.5 so I will not put it out there as long as we don't have a public available 3.5 release.

thanks mdotedot, there's no rush, I just hope stencyl guys gave the support to make this happen as you think is best and be the definite argument to choose Stencyl over other engines

                                                                                                                                                                                       

I    AM   STARTING   OVER

                                                                                                                                                                                       

The single extension file is almost 6000 lines of MESSY code.
I really need to redesign the extension.

The current version has evolved from a lot of blocks to helperblocks to exotic & special blocks to fewer blocks and even more cryptic blocks.

What is worse is that there are three different techniques used in the block&extension-code which doesn't help in debugging and further development.

The last thing I worked on is a kind of Resource Manager where previous work on the different file loaders are combined and it produced about 1000 lines of code that probably can be refactored.

I hate starting over because that has a tendency of being done so many times that it effectively never gets to a completion.
What I do know is that I have learned a lot more about this stuff while creating the current thing, so I hope that it helps me creating a bit better code.
We will see.

I leave you with the state of the current extension and will work on redesigning everything!

Resource Loader / Manager  : OBJ static objects, Quake 2 and  Doom 3 animations

Do what you gotta do!!! No matter how long it takes to be finished I'm still excited to see if I can work it into my games. Tbh, personally I'd probably like it the most if it's really barebones.    (I only want to do super lo-fi  simple 3d to supplement 2d games)

Thank you for your encouragement.

Really barebone? Can you give me an example? Something that is used in other games?!

There are a couple of example games I want to make with this. I've already made a snake game and a first person maze game with it. So exploring and puzzle games are on my mind.
On my list as well are a very raw RPG and a platformer.

No prob! What you're doing is super cool.

Yeah I'll share what I have in mind for myself if you want, for sure! No promises I'd actually be smart enough to successfully tackle doing these but they are things I do think about often-ish.
First off I'd like to not use any light sources whatsoever. There are two separate ways of using 3d that I think about doing if I could and I attached a bunch of animated gifs also.

#1
is to insert the occasional 3d model for different visual effects while the vast majority is 2d. An example is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
https://gfycat.com/TiredInfantileIberianchiffchaff
Also maybe doing 3d backgrounds when the rest is all 2d, like Touhou.
https://gfycat.com/FavorableRaggedCowrie
or Sonic Mania
https://gfycat.com/MenacingCooperativeChipmunk

#2
is I'd like to make basic 3d "walking simulator" sections to games.
Examples of what I'm thinking are a couple games by this guy (https://gamejolt.com/@dustmyte)
seizure warning maybe for the next 2 gifs
https://gfycat.com/SlipperyElderlyHoneycreeper
https://gfycat.com/AgreeablePitifulFanworms

https://gfycat.com/MelodicGlassHumpbackwhale

and the indie game Proteus.
https://gfycat.com/WeepyDentalAnole

(and as an extra thing that's way too nice looking to attempt, here's BlazBlue which shows how light sources aren't needed for great looking things, the lighting is all pre-baked https://gfycat.com/WebbedSilkyDevilfish & https://gfycat.com/GenuineRedDairycow)

I hate starting over because that has a tendency of being done so many times that it effectively never gets to a completion.
What I do know is that I have learned a lot more about this stuff while creating the current thing, so I hope that it helps me creating a bit better code.
We will see.

I've done two major code refactors on my isometric engine. Despite the initial setback, I think the final results were well worth it. Last year I felt like I was in the same position you're describing--I had learned a lot more than I did from the previous generation. The end result was cleaner code that enabled me to do a whole lot more than what I started with.

If you have three different techniques and strategies then you're probably hitting the same problems I did last year trying to push forward with outdated code. Starting fresh with new knowledge in hand sounds reasonable to me.

@NobodyX:
I will see if I can incorporate some of those into one or two examples.

Animating GIFs was already an attempt I did but haven't been successful for now.


@Merrak:
Ah so you refactored twice !!
We will see if the redesign is worth it or not. I fear that I have not covered enough of the library. So it might bite me in the ...  later.

Awesome, having things like those in example games would be lovely.

Animating GIFs was already an attempt I did but haven't been successful for now.

I don't know what you mean, sorry. I just meant I put gifs in the post, maybe you thought I meant something else? I'm confused. If you mean inserting animated gifs into games as flat objects to be used in 3d space, then I hadn't thought of that but that would be cool lol.

Also funnily enough this evening I randomly played an indie game I almost never think of, and I totally forgot it's another game that has a few 3d objects while most things are 2d, this time it's the bosses. Titan Souls https://gfycat.com/KeyBriskIndusriverdolphin

What you mentioned in your post was:  "a bunch of animated gifs also"

Flash based code (Would be nice if this was ported to HaXe)
  http://blog.peteshand.net/animated-gif-away3d-4-x-material/
What I was looking at: 
  http://away3d.com/tutorials/Using_sprite_sheets_in_your_project

So apparently it is possible.

Sorry to be confusing, I said "and I attached a bunch of animated gifs also." I just meant about my post having links to gifs.
But yeah I 100% get what you're talking about, yeah it would be cool to have 2d animations in 3d space! Funny miscommunication because all the walking simulator examples from my post actually do have objects like that.

I've been following this thread with interest. Great job!

Thank you all for your reactions. It gives me energy to know that a lot of people are interested in this!

So, I started again.

Done:

• Created a few separate HaXe Class files to get better grip on the source code
• Combined a few blocks.

Since I'm starting over I can't really say yet how much I gained. But my estimation regarding the code of two blocks is that I reduced code from about 600 lines of code to 200 lines. It feels good.

In the previous version I needed to create all the scene objects, but the new one I do it for you.

Old way to create a single Cube: Initialization

Creation of block



NEW WAY


Pre-Init and creation of block: