Current developments
First off all I’d like to thank everybody ( yet again ) that has showed appreciation for this project. Here’s a brief status report:
There are a couple of key features I haven’t finished yet, and this is why I’m not putting the source on google code (many people has asked for this) or sourceforge yet: I have a very clear idea of how they should be done and I prefer to wait until I finish these key features. Then I’ll setup a svn repository for the engine.
One of these features is an abstract controller interface that assigns a controller class to any element on the scene: controlllers can be anything: AI controllers, keyboard controlled or network-controlled for example, allowing easy multiplayer applications. This should make integration with any server-side technology reasonabily easy. This is already done.
Another recent obsession I have is procedural scene generation: I was creating some test scenes to evaluate how the engine performed with big scenarios and found out that creating even the most pathetic and unnatural forest took me hours of copy-pasting XML lines. And I though that anyone that doesn’t have an army of level designers behind would drop its project simply because creating all the gfx and scenarios would take way too much time.
So I have added a procedural terrain generator that uses perlin noise to simulate natural textures and uses similar noise functions to place trees along the surface, or objects in the scenario. This allowed me to gererate realistic-looking forests of any size withous any effort. Adjusting the parameters of the perlin noise you can create very diffeerent scenarios. I’ll update the site with an example soon.
Also these big scenes have shown several performance bottlenecks that I didn’t notice with the smaller examples. These have already been solved so the next release will perform way better, specially with bigger scenes.
My next step will be a xml-based procedural “dungeon” generator (something like http://www.aarg.net/~minam/dungeon.cgi). Once both parametric exterior and interior generators are done I think the engine will cover a wide range of games/applications.
Stay tuned. If real life is kind to me all these will happen soon.
Very interesting!!! I can’t wait to use new features. You are making a whole new world for me, Jordi :).
Vu said this on April 16th, 2008 at 4:48 am
Jordi,
Your engine has great performance. We’re prerendering detailed ISO 3D environments & objects, and the framerate (and pseudo 3D) FFilmation is allowing is quite impressive for Flash.
While the technical drawing performance of FFilmation is outstanding, we’re finding that level creation is extremely tedious. The dungeon generator sounds like a nice step, but a full graphical editor (for walls, floors, objects, collisions) is pretty much essential in my opinion. That’s even the sort of thing a company would pay for.
J said this on April 24th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Hi John,
I’m glad to hear someone is using the engine. As for the level creation being tedious, I know. All the genertor stuff comes from my own frustration when trying to build an scene.
The graphic editor is something I have in mind, but first things first there are a few features I’d like to finish. Then my idea is settting up SVN for the main engine, allowing other people to contribute new features, and see what I can do about level creation. I’d like to research a bit and see If I can come up with some sort of importing process that allows to build your scenes in a 3d package such as 3dmax or Google sketchup.
I still have hope someone will volunteer on doing an editor but if it doesn’t happen, I’ll do it myself as I’m the first one to need it.
Needless to say, If someone wants to pay me to do it, everything will develop faster, as I’d rather be doing this than the usual websites I do for a living….
admin said this on April 25th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Jordi,
If people start using FFilmation for commerical projects then you should be able to charge for custom work.
What do you mean specifically by 3D import?
What we would actually love to do is to be able to render out entire rooms at once, then simply “draw in” the collision areas, transport locations, etc. That’s kind of where we’re headed now, though the “drawing in” is a manual process.
J said this on April 25th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Rendering an entire room at once, obviously requires rendering out things in layers so the depth info is there. Though actually, rendering a single image with a depth map attached would allow a character (and objects) to be obscured with foreground objects in a very elegant way.
An zbuffer addition could be really cool. Just an idea.
J said this on April 25th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
My idea is that instead of building a new application where you can draw your floors and walls, with all the needed functionalities ( change views, zooms, select this, deselect that, apply material, etc…) maybe I could write a 3ds importer that extracts this info (geometry + materials) from a 3dmax scene and builds the scene xml for you. Of course the 3ds file should follow specific rules, orthogonal planes, etc etc.
For me, walls and geometry is the tricky part. Once this was solved, the section of the editor where you place and move objects and lights shouldn’t take long to program.
Honestly I’ve never thought of the approach you propose, but It sounds interesting. I’ll see if i can fit it in.
admin said this on April 25th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Hey your work is amazing and words become useless =)
We are working for a online 3D rts game.Is your engine is public open source ? If thats ok you will be our biggest credit
Cool works best flash stuff maybe i ever seen.Keep it up.
Furkan Tunal? said this on April 26th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Great engine and thanks for making it open source! When will you be able to drag rotate the camera? Like this: http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/ru/files/2008/04/factory.swf
fizz said this on April 27th, 2008 at 1:20 am