Hi
Im doing a 3d-naval wargame in c++ using irrlicht engine, but there is to much hassle so im investigating panda 3d. My q is weater it might handle my game…
Large world with lots of planes, ships, sea (preferably with real waves), skies, islands, projectiles flying around causeing collision, effects.
I dont need advanced shaders or shadows but need good fps and most things here seem to have bad fps even if they include nearly nothing.
I use only c++, that should make it a little bit faster right?
Is there complete and working 3d-function like
: get terrainlocation “under/at” mousecursor
: get terrainheight at a certain location
: get 3d-angle between some given point and the point x units in front of mouse-aim (some kind of ray-projection i think its called)
How were you planning to handle waves in irrlicht? I don’t think Panda has anything designed to do waves (and I’m not aware of a game engine that has waves) so it all comes down to how you plan to implement it. The big problem might be in the massive draw distances you’ll be expecting in a naval game, not sure how well Panda can handle that.
Not so sure about FPS, it isn’t bad for me.
Those algorithms/functions seem pretty easy to me, most of those can be done with collision rays, you just have to figure out how to connect them together in the code. Panda has a pretty complete vector math thingymummy library.
I can live without some animated waves mesh (there is one in irrlicht, but its very buggy and cpu heavy).
Is there any LOD i can use so things at a distance are less detailed? Ive seen the example of fog, but thats a cosmetic fix that rather adds cpu-load right?
So you think it can handle a lot of stuff and a large world with decent fps in directx 9? I planned on used that anyway.
What i really need is bug-free and easy to use collision, collision rays, camera and object movement etc. You know the good stuff:)
Doh, LOD why didn’t I think of that. Yeah, looks like Panda can do LOD although I’m not quite sure how to do it since it doesn’t seem to be in the manual. Maybe in the forums, do a search.
The good stuff that you need work pretty well in Panda and are relatively easy, although I can only comment on it from the Python side of things. Not sure how to do them in C++ but I guess they would be about the same.
Mesh based waves are in the realm of Panda’s abilities, although this would mean digging into mesh manipulation in Panda. Sounds like an interesting problem though.
Ugly is a rather harsh word to describe a game I think does quite well to achieve a decent balance on all computers yet still remain pleasant to look it, inlcuding battling on the high seas …its all done rather convincingly I thought
At the end of the day its about gameplay, and IMO ( as the Wii demonstrates as well with certain games ) graphics dont have to push the upper limits to make a game completely and utterly worthy
There are several examples of doing things in c++ in the docs and while Im also doing python, I suspect the examples contain even further help on that topic.
to clear any doubts about pandas visual results and capabilities you might wanna have a look at this one http://aff2aw.com
ask treeform if you wanna see some ingame-screenshots. he also can point you to some youtube vids showing in-game tests. it’s quite amazing
about LOD … panda has it buildin. its able to smoothly blend between the LOD levels of models. saw it in action once in a terrain-generator demo.
about wavy sea you might wanna concidder using vertex-shaders.
uh? looks really cool but all i can find is prerendered posters.
And there is nothing on youtube with that game’s name. That page hosts several mods to existing games (ut3, homeworld) but i see no panda3d project, at least they dont mension it.
It would be awesome if panda3d could render that with descent fps. But that would make it stronger that most commercial engines… And seing the included tutorials doesnt even run very smoothly one must be sceptical.
the tutorials migh seems simple but they are not optimized that well or anything close to it. those are examples after all. something thats easy to understand. and btw. some of those sample modles are quite high-poly even if they dont look like it
about the screens of aff look here
thought i just picked this one up from the performance-improvment thread
and since we are talking about panda beeing amazing^^ it shouldnt take much longer and you can enjoy quite awsome terrains new algorithm which was integrated into panda by pro-rsoft is nearing its completion. performance is quite nice already
well about your naval game… how about doing some simple tests? load a few dozen ship models , some planes.create a bunch of partikles or so. and see how well panda can handle it?
suliman,
development aff2aw.com/affdata/ds/
resent in game screens aff2aw.com/affdata/nice/
it started out as collection for short stories now the aff univerce turned into modes for homeworl and nexus but now i am making a full mmorts game out of resources. The other part of the team is working for on a UT3 mod palanet storm. We did a small one week project a while back Iron Angles … you can also find it on the forms.
A lot of people here are beginning game developers who make newbie mistakes. And, several of the sample programs are designed for simplicity, not performance.
When I run the “Carousel” sample program on my cheapie video card, I get 300 FPS. When I run “Roaming Ralph,” I get 150 FPS. And my video card is just a radeon x600 or something.
i add 15 new pandas to the shadows tutorial. FPS drops from 175 to 115. I need to experiment some more… Still having problem setting this up in c++ compiler though. The setup presented in the manual doesnt work for me.
I cannot do a complex game in python scripts (besides i got loads of function in c++ already that i just need to convert). It seem most support and forum activity regards only python. And the manual has all function not described yet. Will it be hard to learn this for c++?
Sorry for asking so many sceptical questions, ive been through a couple of engines and its best to be open with your demands:)
new algorithm which was integrated into panda by pro-rsoft is nearing its completion. performance is quite nice already