next »

[kamac]

I'd like to know a bit more about technology being used.

a) Do you use both OpenGL and DirectX? What version(s)?
b) Do you support 3D? If yes, can you please provide a snippet on how loading an .obj and displaying it might look like? How about shaders?

Thanks 

[Ivan]

I'd like to know a bit more about technology being used.

a) Do you use both OpenGL and DirectX? What version(s)?
b) Do you support 3D? If yes, can you please provide a snippet on how loading an .obj and displaying it might look like? How about shaders?

Thanks  

The Polycode renderer is abstracted and currently implemented via OpenGL on the three supported platforms. Yes, there is 3D support. You might say that 3D is actually the main focus of Polycode as a larger project. I just started with 2D editors to get the UI stuff solid before writing the 3D editor, but the code itself has full support for materials, shaders, post processing effects, skeletal animations, lights, shadows, 3d physics and all sorts of stuff.

There is a custom import tool that's bundled with Polycode that can import meshes from many different formats. So loading an .obj would mean running it through the import tool to convert it to Polycode's .mesh format and then loading it in. Here's the C++ code for what loading and display a mesh would look like:

Code:

	Scene *scene = new Scene();
	SceneMesh *mesh = new SceneMesh("myobject.mesh");
	scene->addEntity(mesh);

Materials and shaders are defined in a special material file and there is already a visual editor for it in the IDE.

[kamac]

I'd like to know a bit more about technology being used.

a) Do you use both OpenGL and DirectX? What version(s)?
b) Do you support 3D? If yes, can you please provide a snippet on how loading an .obj and displaying it might look like? How about shaders?

Thanks  

The Polycode renderer is abstracted and currently implemented via OpenGL on the three supported platforms. Yes, there is 3D support. You might say that 3D is actually the main focus of Polycode as a larger project. I just started with 2D editors to get the UI stuff solid before writing the 3D editor, but the code itself has full support for materials, shaders, post processing effects, skeletal animations, lights, shadows, 3d physics and all sorts of stuff.

There is a custom import tool that's bundled with Polycode that can import meshes from many different formats. So loading an .obj would mean running it through the import tool to convert it to Polycode's .mesh format and then loading it in. Here's the C++ code for what loading and display a mesh would look like:

Code:

	Scene *scene = new Scene();
	SceneMesh *mesh = new SceneMesh("myobject.mesh");
	scene->addEntity(mesh);

Materials and shaders are defined in a special material file and there is already a visual editor for it in the IDE.

Wow! Impressive
Is polycode available for download? The earlier version perhaps? (if it ever existed, and I think it did?)

Few more questions:

a) Did you write all those format loaders yourself, or used things like lib3ds?
b) Which OpenGL version(s) do you support? (From what range, perhaps?)

That simplicity is looking great!

[Ivan]

Hey thanks!

It's not available for download right now. The github code, is of course accessible, but under heavy development and things are going to be broken up until release.

a) Did you write all those format loaders yourself, or used things like lib3ds?

No, I used Assimp: http://assimp.sourceforge.net/

b) Which OpenGL version(s) do you support? (From what range, perhaps?)

Eh, this is a tricky question. It's implemented kind of adhoc across the platforms, so there is not a definitive minimum version. I believe it uses at least one 2.0 extension, but it's in the shader code and is not required if you don't use shaders.

[kamac]

Hey thanks!

It's not available for download right now. The github code, is of course accessible, but under heavy development and things are going to be broken up until release.

a) Did you write all those format loaders yourself, or used things like lib3ds?

No, I used Assimp: http://assimp.sourceforge.net/

b) Which OpenGL version(s) do you support? (From what range, perhaps?)

Eh, this is a tricky question. It's implemented kind of adhoc across the platforms, so there is not a definitive minimum version. I believe it uses at least one 2.0 extension, but it's in the shader code and is not required if you don't use shaders.

Thanks for those answers

I hope you are going to release a BETA soon 
I'll be waiting.

[giantrobotbee]

Are there plans to build Polycode so that projects could be built using both in C++ (for "engine" stuff) and in Lua (for "game code" stuff)? I know there's the Polyconsole tool mcc built that sort of lets you do this, but I was wondering if that's in the pipeline for the main project itself.

[Ivan]

The Lua stuff is being mainly developed as a standalone thing, though it's quite easy to just load Lua into your project and use the same bindings as the Polycode player to wrap your C++ stuff in.

Another option is to make C++ modules for the Lua IDE and then script it from there.

[alessandroLino]

Wheres that neat 3d rpg thing with oryx sprites i've seen on the old site? It was so pretty 

[Ivan]

There's still a thread for it here on tigs:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=9701.0

[eigenbom]

Hey ivan, this looks cool. It also reminded me of some software, FUGU, I wrote a while back that has a 3D view and an editor for Lua code. It's for making procedural animated geometry for animations, and some time in the future I want to do it again, but this time for procedural geometry for games. Anyways, if polycode takes off I might look at writing a procedural geometry module for it. GL!

[Ivan]

Hey that looks great! Would love to see this implemented in Polycode

[eigenbom]

Thx, yeah hopefully my project after moonman will involve generative 3D geometry in some way, so probably in 6 months or so I'll be taking a closer look.

[Ivan]

A shot of placing and editing particle systems in the 2d editor.

[kamac]

Looking good 
How's the performance in general? (By the way, are you simply batching particles in one draw call?)

[Ivan]

My old system just instantiated particles as entities (the Polycode base class for all drawable objects), but it was too slow, so I just recently rewrote it to batch the same particle VBOs. At some point I wanna make it so they're all one vertex array and positioning is done on the GPU via a shader, but I'll hold off on that for now.

[Ivan]

Rewrote the font rendering last night to be faster and more importantly correctly manage weird fonts. Before, things got clipped to a texture that wasn't calculated quite correctly, but now things render as they should:

[Quarry]

Is it supposed to be blurry, that worries me

[Ivan]

This particular font renders a little fuzzy and you have some options as far as font rendering strength options, but normally things look very good.

[kinifi]

Seriously, this has gotten me so excited. I have been looking for something like this. Most of the time I just make platformers and give it mod support so I never have to touch the original engine. I love Unity but my biggest problem with it is wanting something new or needing something fixed and not being able to do anything because they are such a big company now you have to jump through shit to get it done.

[Quarry]

This is getting crazy!