NorthStar is my new pathfinder for use with arbitrary, irregular polygons. CHECK IT OUT. Drag around the green and red circles. The green one is used as the start point and the red is the end
A couple months ago I decided I would begin working toward my long time dream of producing a real-time strategy game. I actually finished NorthStar and had this written a few weeks later, but I’m only posting now because I’ve been hard at work with the rest of the game! Now working on unit logic along with a new Sokay project (more on that later) and editing a new film (later still), so I been a little busy. Expect Demos.
I planned on basing the RTS engine on some of my previous work with physics (perhaps that sounds strange, but it makes sense). Step one was coming up with a pathfinder.
Earlier I found this amazing 3d interactive site in a thread on Flashkit. Completely breathtaking. Needless to say, I couldn’t wait to make a post about this one!
The Eco Zoo
This is the best executed 3d Flash site I’ve seen so far. Just check it out. Apparently this isn’t created with any open source 3d engine out there, it’s a custom engine by this guy.
3D on the web is sort of a gimmick right now, as Flash itself was seen as a gimmick in the past (i.e. your site wasn’t cool unless it had a Flash intro). All it really takes is some progressive individuals to define what’s possible with the advances of the medium — beyond spinning cubes and globes. Right now I see opportunities to tell stories in new and exciting ways. I’m hoping to take design elements from motion graphics and create interactive visual masterpieces. Couldn’t you imagine CartoonNetwork.com as a fully interactive playground? Kids would love that stuff. How come we aren’t seeing that yet??
I’ve been dabbling in Papervision stuff lately. It’s an extra layer of complication on top of AS3 but the payoff is worth it. I created a model in Maya, textured it, and loaded it into Flash and made it interactive. Unbelievable…
For animation, I figured I could either setup some complicated character rig by separating the character at the joints and linking the pieces together. Setting all of that up and creating a system to animate the keyframes would be much to time consuming. The second idea I heard on Flashkit from renderhjs. He was creating his own custom system of animating the character in the 3d software and exporting the animation frame by frame and playing through the keyframes. I don’t exactly have time to figure that out either so I found Clint’s post searching Google in distress.
Clint explained to me that his character demo uses .md2 format, from Quake 2. It’s similar to, if not the same as, renderhjs’ method of character animation. He linked to this Papervision md2 parser and recommended that I try loading in some Quake 2 models and seeing how it works.
It’s been a while since I updated on the old Liberty Engine so here it is with a lot more polish than the last demo. You still can’t modify the objects or forces just yet, but I sharpened up everything else. It’s running much more efficiently, with stats, an improved console and new keyboard commands. It also includes a “Help” button that will explain all of its functions on mouse-over.
Here is a swf copy as well as an exe. I haven’t seen much of a performance difference between the two:
The default “memory” setting is 60 seconds, so if you play more than 60 seconds it will begin deleting old data. This is meant to prevent the program from filling your computers memory and lagging or crashing. However, you can set the memory value to Infinity and see how much you can hold without slowdown. I found a loss of about 2 or 3 fps with 1 hour of data. I average about 6 or 7 calculated seconds per actual second (Scalc/S) so you should be able to set the rate of time passage to as high as 6 without playback time ever passing up calculation time. But play around with it and let me know how it runs on your machine. I could use the feedback!
With your time rate set to 6, you can get through an hour of simulation in 10 minutes.
I’ve been seeing a lot of cool 3d Flash stuff here and there, mostly on development blogs or forums. When I tell people that Flash can do 3d stuff, I get an impression which is a mixture of shock and disbelief. After checking out an informative PaperVision 3d video tutorial on gotoandlearn.com, I was less intimidated and ready to jump into it. Been looking for an excuse to brush up on my 3d skillz.
CUBOCC face demo
Anyway, I saw this demo at http://cubo.cc/ today and it kind of shocked me. Apparently it’s a bit viral already, spreading around the net as it should. Some awesome coding, brilliant texturing and a simple design goes a long way, doesn’t it? The future of Google Adsense? Unfortunately, most likely! haha
This is an AS file I put together for some big engine work. When your jamming together a lot of code and a big library of functions, it becomes difficult to keep track of what’s working and what’s breaking. For me, constantly turning traces on and off and having to figure out the meaning of traces that I wrote weeks (or even months) ago gets old fast.
Lately, my physics work has me running more functions than you can shake a stick at; functions within functions within functions, nesting like you wouldn’t believe. This leads to the most hideously complex tracing, almost nullifying the reason you trace data to begin with. So I put together this TraceManager to end such problems once and for all:
-This trace is from the example fla. It runs like so: function1 takes a string (”test1″) and adds a ” 1″ to it, then passes the result to function2; function2 adds a ” 2″ and passes the result to function3; function3 adds a ” 3″ to the string and returns it. Each function returns its own result to its parent function until all functions are complete.
It might not be the first Flash port, but it’s definitely the first that resembles the original in speed and resolution. I could totally imagine playing some deathmatch in this thing. Can’t wait till something like that is available.
It’s also worth nothing that this was not created using Flash. It was developed on Linux using open-source/free Flex tools.
This reminds of back in 2001 or so when I saw a demo for a Quake 3 looking engine in Shockwave running incredibly fluidly. I recall it being a Q3 port of some sort because it was created by the same company that ported Q3 to Dreamcast, Raster Productions. I’m assuming it was some kind of port because they removed the demo after a short while, I believe because of legal matters.
