Engine

[FrostyCoolSlug]

I've made a 'phisics library' thread, it made sence :p

[DrEvil]

Been a while since I posted but I took the time to read through most of the posts in this thread. I still stand by my recommendation of using Ogre. I've been using Ogre since about January making an multiplayer RPG for my bachelors. It's a very well designed 3d engine that is very modern in terms of its graphics capabilities.

The material system supports vertex and pixel shaders so all those pretty effects like the displacement bump mapping shown in the unreal 3 movie have been do-able by Ogre for several months now. Skeletal animation is obviously needed for a shooter, which it supports the use of, and blending between animations. Just recently shadow support has been added, with modulative stencil shadows, additive stencil shadows, texture shadows, and possibly one or 2 more types for the next Ogre release, which should be very soon. From a graphical standpoint, Ogre can do about everything any other 3d engine can do, the difference being they have better content, better shaders, and are getting into alot higher poly models.

It is cross platform, supports DX7, DX9, & OpenGL.

I also noticed ODE has been mentioned as you guys seem to definately want to use a physics system as well. The BSP collision demo that comes with Ogre uses ODE for physics. There is also a community project called OgreTok(uses Tokamak physics) you can get from ogreaddons on sourceforge that is a very well developed. It can do ragdolls on character meshes and such. For our RPG, I've opted to use just Opcode for our collision, and it is working nicely. You would probably use Opcode for the non-physics related functionality like tracelines and possibly ground clamping for the character.

Something I should re-iterate, is that its a 3d engine only, and that is why it can be so good at the graphics side of things, because the whole project is focused on graphics related stuff. This means that out of the box it is not a game engine. It has alot of plugins for various scene managers, like a BSP scene manager, and several flavors of terrain scene managers, but Ogre doesn't do collision detection and such for you. Thankfully though these issues have already been solved by the community and are available for everyone to use. The BSP scene manager can even load quake 3(non team arena) maps.

Anyways, if anyone has any questions let me know. I've been learning Ogre for a while now. It's got a very active community and is top notch with its graphics capabilities.

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Here's a reply in the way I like !

Let's start by clarifying some stuff then

There is also a community project called OgreTok(uses Tokamak physics) you can get from ogreaddons on sourceforge that is a very well developed. It can do ragdolls on character meshes and such. For our RPG, I've opted to use just Opcode for our collision, and it is working nicely. You would probably use Opcode for the non-physics related functionality like tracelines and possibly ground clamping for the character.

Tokamak physics ? Excuse my n00biness but is it a theory ? a product else ? URL somewhere ?
I only know tokamaks as these experimental tore-like fusion reactors, I guess it has little to do here.

Opcode-based collision ? Could you explain a bit how it works ?

Have you got an URL with technical info for your RPG game ?

It's nice to know that you're experienced with this rendering engine. May I ask where and how did you get started with it and 3D engines in general ?

Thanks a lot for your time

[DrEvil]

Tokamak is a physics SDK similar to ODE.
http://www.tokamakphysics.com/ <-OgreTok uses this

Opcode is strictly a collision library, can build collision trees and do collision vs mesh very fast. ODE and Togretok use it for collision.
http://www.codercorner.com/Opcode.htm <-I'm using this for our game, cuz an RPG doesn't need physics

We should be launching a website soon for our game since we're starting to get some content to show off. I've opted not to launch a website until we have more to show.

I can link you to some works in progress though.
http://www.bsproductions.net/foxbot/dl.php?25230
http://www.bsproductions.net/foxbot/dl.php?3

The game screen shots arent much to look at yet because most of the work has been "under the hood" so to speak.

I'm about 4 months away from graduating with a bachelors in game design, which is strictly programming, so my experience comes mainly from that. I'm in final project now. My class has 3 groups of programmers that have to make a full blown game in 5 months. First month is the design document, second month is technical design document, and last 3 is full time coding. Since we did alot of our design and technical planning before this class I've got a nice head start in the actual coding. Instead of writing our own tech(engine, rendering...) my group has opted to use Ogre and a networking middleware(http://www.replicanet.com) so that we can concentrate on making a game.

So far I have functioning collision detection(ray vs world, sphere vs world, ray vs box) implemented in a custom scene manager. The scene manager is mesh based so it isn't limited by the "2d"ness of heightmap based techniques so we can do overhangs, overlapping geometry etc. We will support caves and other indoor areas within the same scene manager, though we havent got to that point yet. I've developing the dedicated server and the client together, and they are at the point where a client can connect and see replicated objects that are hosted and moved by the server. Pretty much everything will be server side, as I don't trust the clients to be in control of much.

We hope to launch the website very soon, so I'll pimp it out when the time comes.

[SoUlFaThEr]

All i can say is THAT RULES.........
thats awesome!

[sfx1999]

http://cal3d.sourceforge.net/ <--skeletal animation library

Anyway, what kind of textures should we use? I was thinking PNG. JPEGs might have tiling prolems.

Also, have you decided on a renderer yet? BSP? Portal? Terrain? A combination?

One last thing, don't you have to organize the parts of a terrain renderer? Like maybe into a BSP when you load it?

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

PNG is a good choice because it's an open standard, and it's lossless compression. It ensures the tiling will be perfect if we use this compression standard.
We can also use no compression standard at all...

I have not read enough documentation about 3d engines and renderers yet, so I can't help people yet on deciding about a renderer.

[SoUlFaThEr]

if it could combine terrain and LOD(through .map stuff) it would be a lot prettier and would be more open......since the r_speeds are actually only within the LOD parts
so far that i know......(i did some work with Torque engine and it was like this........the terrains possible were truely greatness. i still have a few pics of the things i did there.

any interest?

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

Yea, sure Post, post the pics man, right away

[sfx1999]

What about netcode?