unity declares war!

will other engines like ours fight back?

i started this post to see what this community thinks gamestudio should do to deal with this new threat , or if you think this move by unity is not a threat and nothing needs to be done at all.

i'll start by saying this is a threat , i love game studio and would hate to switch over , but will if i have to for the features , im sure many like me , who cannot afford to upgrade to com or pro will feel the same way.

even though there are other free engines out there already that support nice features like shaders , irrlicht for example
they are not user friendly like this

this is what i think gamestudio should do , ad some of these nice features , like shaders support to the free lite c , and keep it free.

i feel this would keep most thinking of switching to stay and help bring in new people that might have started somewhere else


so what do you think , threat or not and what should we do about it if you think its a threat

its not war, gstudio was ahead of the game by releasing lite-c free. granted lit-c free isnt qutie as powerful as unity indie, it is more expandable it seems like.

its like when mcdonalds created thier dollar menu , they declared war on burger king , kfc and wendys and bk and the rest had no choice but to make a dollar menu of thier own or
lose costumers.

I am using Leadwerks right now, but in Gamestudio's defence,
Gamestudio has a free version too....

I was curious and downloaded Unity. I must say, it seems really easy,
and I like the shaders that come with it (even the non-reflective water)...

But, all I can keep thinking of is "no realtime reflections, no post-processing,
no Screen Space Ambient Occlusion possibilities, no dynamic shadows"......
so I wouldn't bother with it...

Gamestudio will always be a good choice.

The term threat is kinda though one, but if you think as "will kill all teh other engines" then I can say that no, it won't happen. Why? Because people don't like to use same style program. Granted with unity you can get games done easier than in gs(or in lite-c in my case -.-) but it lacks of that prograamming feeling that gs and sed has.

Also for me the "stone age" feeling is turn on because I have to use several programs in y project to achieve the results I want. (maybe I'm a bit weird?)


totally agree. Maybe merge lite-c free and extra to same and give up from lite-c full and extra (And no, I wouldn't achieve anything with this because I'm buyin my license when my release comes closer)

Let's make our own dollar menu....lol....I don't think it's a threat at all just more of a wake up call to GameStudio for it to update and get rollin with the times or be just a memory...

This will end up in Torque vs A7 anyway

@firo haha... right.

extra edition could go free(without ability to use commercially), that would be enough of a defence, but i dont think this is going to happen

http://forum.rl-team.net/showthread.php?t=1982&page=2

Here is a short list of what that free version lacks in comparison with the pro.



As it stands the free version is much worse than the cracked 2.5 Pro

The situation is pretty interesting now I guess. In my opinion Unity Indie now gives headaches when thinking of lite-C full and the Extra edition as both are inferior and cost you money. Only the Com Edition still gives some nice competition especially with it offering nice shadows and a render-to-texture feature (while having quite some disadvantages too though) but again now costs quite a bunch...

But well let's see if the competition will lead to some advantages for the customer here...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

it's free and it has:
-Ageia PhysX
- a really greate editor (well lightmaps are generated only for terrain but u can still import levels with lightmaps in static levels if u use external lightmapper, could be something like blender or giles etc.)
- shaders (a must have in 2009)
- supports opengl and directx, so its good for both customers area of the big graphics device competitors
- it runs on older hardware as well
- web deployment ( to play the games u only need a 3mb plugin and I already testet it with firefox and IE and everything worked fine, think for the typical indie casualgames it's really a great option)
- with it you can publish for win and mac os ( but for iphone and wii you must purchase other versions...but it gives u this support lol)
- multiplayer options and other www functions
- nice integrated animation editor
- stream audio and textures assets while game runs

I think it's a big option its free this makes the decision really easy, multiplatform is important too for publishers. If someone would make a good game with the free edition ( and u can make a good game, u can code in c# 1.1 javascript and boo and I think c# 1.1 is still good for these things there are even software developer who create their software with it), there would grow up the possibility that a publisher would buy for you or give the money for the pro license too fullfill your game with the features of pro if needed. for a hobbyist developer a good nearly complete package lol

some of the missed features in free version are not even in pro edition of others engine so I become happy with it even without those features. and imho I think it's just a question of time until they make an sdk aviable maybe for purchase or in a similar way like conitec did with open source license until you purchase the sdk license. ( and i mean sdk not the source code of the engine itself)

No render to texture -> no postprocessing, no real reflections and no shadowmapping.
There are NO realtimeshadows at all in the free version. The one that offers these features is to be honest quite expensive. Mac and Windows support is nice, but everything else also costs quite some money. And I somehow didn´t yet understand the sence in playing in a browser as it is anyways downloaded, it can only happen that I have to download it again and again instead of only once. But okay, that is probably just me as it is pretty common these days.
I btw didn´t find anything about multiple rendertargets, but I guess that they exist in the pro version?
At least featurewise A7 Comm is still the best choice. However the developement is very interesting at the moment and I am of course also very interested on how it goes on. I think if GameStudio would get new editors and templates, it could get just awsome and again interesting for everyone wanting to develop games.

yes a7 com is still a better choice maybe but if u compare unity free edition with lite-c edition both no cost but unity free has a lot more.
but lite-c is still good you can use plugins win api etc. not bad at all. sure the render to texture feature would be great too, and some other options of a7 com and pro.but unity looks actually more professional and good documentation too. in the next weeks and moth the community will explose in count of member which brings a lot more knwoledge etc. I I'm sure conitec and other competitors (and community members) will react. this reminds me a little bit of the browser war hehe and the result is today we have good browsers so let the engine war begin hehe

It is indeed a tough situation. Unity Indie has some limitations but it also offers access to a lot of platforms. Though you can add the missing features easily through buying Shiva for only 169. That is still cheaper than competition and is almost as good as Unity Pro, works also on all these platforms plus Linux and has good editors.

T3D ist getting hot these days and C4 2.0 is coming in November with absolutely unique technology. It will be hard to follow at the same speed.

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=296206&gonew=1#UNREAD

And here we go
Good news for all Atari Lite-C users.

yeah? really?

that was a pretty fast step...
I just wonder if it changes anything.

hehe yes this are good news, nice decision, I'll be waiting. Basically lite-c will have features of extra edition wow
said in one word of my natural language: bravo

That's why I like competitors...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

JCL wrote in this comment that there are not many users of the extra edition. So it will not affect a lot of customers.
But it also tells us that the extra edition was not very attractive. The users probably switched from free Lite-C directly to the com edition. Remember, it has no shaders, just as an example. Free engines like Ogre, Irrlicht, Unity Indie have shaders.
I believe that this feature is very important for beginners. This is, how they compared game engines in the past, this is, what magazines wrote about.

This step brings a bit more value to the existing Lite-C users, but it probably will not change the business of Conitec.

And it will not affect you, since most of you have higher licenses.

damn... i knew it

you can do simple decal shadows. not much but at least something.

i do some webdesign on the side and a lot of customers are interested in advertising games. a 3d engine with browser plugin is ideal for that. i think for advertising games it's a big advantage if they are embedded directly in the website of the company.

another thing is 3d visualizations which can also make a lot of sense on websites.

shiva still only offers lua scripting, right? does anybody really like lua? i find it a bit weird compared to most other languages.

please, never ever mention shiva and lua again
To be honest, I think that ShiVa is pretty good in terms of speed, browser and iPhone support. But the coding is just a pain in the ass, they should redesign that whole system in my opinion, as it could be a great engine then. And I think it still doesn´t allow custom shaders...

I believe Unity to be a lightweight engine, it can display stuff nicely but is limited in how much simultaneously (correct me if I'm wrong). I am less tempted to go to a lightweight one, whereas OGRE is AFAIK much more solid and heavier and (for me) provides a higher step-over factor than Unity. 3DGS feels medium, but has the ability to rapidly get things working. OGRE's library requires some C++ project setup first in order to get things running. And that's quite a time consumer. But I have yet to try OGRE or Unity anyway, so who am I to judge.

For prototyping, 3DGS is pretty perfect, and for that reason I wont leave it.

no, i don't think there is much difference in "weight" between unity, ogre and gamestudio. i guess you mean scene management? the basic scene management they use probably is quite similar. some hierarchical data structure (octree, abt,...) with front to back sorting for drawing or something like that.



ogre has the advantage that you can extend it with your own more specialized scene managers if you have the skills.

and gamestudio still has the old quake style bsp scene manager around which may have advantages for indoor scenes but is limiting in the kind of geometry you can use and results in annoying workflow.

Why everybody complains about BSP in A7?
Only pro is still supporting it, and with static meshes you can use concave blocks as well as models and light everything together...

Ok, there most likely are engines with better workflow, but I don't see A7 being stuck with BSP?

Didn't believe it myself at first, but yep it's true:

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=296237&#Post296237



To be honest, I don't know of many engines with a truly better work flow. Most engines require work-arounds, double imports/exports of models, expensive additional tools to work optimal and so on.

I think 3dgs, although probably objectively scoring a healthy mid-range score when it comes to its work flow, really isn't that bad.

i didn't say gamestudio is stuck with bsp. by default gamestudio uses an abt now which is similar to the scene management of most other engines.

i just never liked to work with bsp. it's not fun. the geometry limitations and the need for compiling and everything...

Yeah, compiling medium to big levels is a pain with the old BSP system for sure.

BSP is acutally just another scene management. It just sorts things out for rendering. The way it is done in GS with automatic portal generation is easy for the user but generates way too much portals and thus it calculates very very long for bigger levels.

The lighting of blocks in GS is another quite old and weak point. Light-mapping is not always the best way to go. It is perfect for flat surfaces, simple walls and floors. But the more polygons you get the worse it becomes. You will have lots of artefacts and you need high resolution maps.

If you use models with more polygons (and this is the norm with todays hardware), then it is quite useless. Then it is better to use vertex lighting since you have enough vertices in such a model. It still is static lighting, but ist not limited to texture space, so it makes less trouble and uses less memory.

Many commercial engines and some indie engines (like Torque and C4) can support both and render your world with a mixture of lightmaps, vertex lighting and real-time lighting. Because each of them have advantages and disadvantages.

You cannot beat such a mixture of technologies with the old-school block level lighting.

I gotta agree, Unity has a better workflow, but I found Gamestudio easier to use, and to be honest, I'm in love with Lite-C.

Well guys...Its not usual for me to post, but since I own Gamestudio commercial for quite a while, and been messing around with unity for quite some time I have to say this :

Gamestudio is (in my opinion) by far superior to unity in terms of flexibility as an engine and is extremly inferior in terms of workflow.

Having said this means that you can produce better products with Gamestudio, but that also means that they will take way longer to complete.

If you are aiming to do something simple...unity indie version may be the way...but after you learn unity and you want to make something bigger you will realize that's when the problems start...then you need something better..maybe Gamestudio ?

I must say that working with gamestudio tools is a pain..It took me almost 4 months to understand and create an acceptable workflow..and I say acceptable as I still face ocasional problems in this area.

On the other side, working with Lite C...is a dream when compared with most other engines.

Unity is a dream in terms of workflow...Everything works ok, at least for me...but sudenly when you need to tweak something to work the way you intented to...puf...it either cant do it or the amount of work involved is so high that you quit...plain & simple...unity free version simply cant do it

So what I would like ?

Unity quality tools in the Gamestudio Engine. Thats all I ask....and I strongly believe that the next 12 months of conitec should go into this area..Improve the tools first...improve the engine later..

A7 with quality tools..would be by far the best option for indies...cause if you give us A8 with the same tools....things wont change much.

If you guys can do an engine as A7..you surely can do better tools in a breeze, and what can take 2 or 3 years to create could be done in 1 year....

Thats my thoughts on this matter..I will keep using Gamestudio...Although I may do some test scenes with unity as I can do them in a couple of hours instead of days.

If at the end I will change....time will tell

I like scripting in lite-C too but I don't see why Unity is supposed to be much less flexible in this regard? Can you give any details?


lite-C has the disadvantage that its chinese programmer doesn't seem to be around anymore and JCL doesn't understand the chinese comments in the code like he said in some recent thread. Using Mono for Unity really was a wise decision. It has tons of developers and it's more modern than C.


In my experience, if you do something bigger then you will get problems with any engine since bigger projects are a lot more tricky to do.


I agree about the tools. Gamestudio with an editor like Unity has would be nice. I don't see this happening though. Over the last years they only seem to have changed some buttons here and there in WED and MED. It's unlikely that they will be able to come up with a user friendly competitive editor anytime soon. GED isn't competitive by far.

let me say it:
who needs multiplatform?
you cant afford nice looking models, how couls you afford a license to develop for consoles? get real...

the only other plattform besides windows 3dgs should support is mac. out of the box. from comercial upwards and go with it. just add openGL and be good with it. that way, it can easily be ported over to Wii aswell, if you know how. the wiimote plugin is already here...

anyway, i dont care who declaeres war on who. in the end, WE win. because either we get a better engine or 3dgs loses the battle. in that case we just need to switch.
and since this is a no-go for most, idoubt conitec just says: nah, screw it, lets letthis thing die and instead buy a parcel of land on the mars... or kansas...

"just add openGL"... easily said. The core of Acknex is built on d3d since A5 or A6...

I had an problem with my browser ( damn plugins updates -.- ) and posted an answer for this topic into another one so here it is:

http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=296419#Post296419

of course only answer here lol

then its time to update. how come some freeware programs that are coded by a few people manage to get both directx and openGL with max and even linux ports right, while conitec doesnt?

Well they of course could make Acknex multi-platform but it'd have nearly just disadvantages (except for ports to the consoles). Introducing OpenGL as an alternative wouldn't just eat a lot of time to do (months of no engine improvement that Acknex imo cannot afford) but also would slow down the development from that point on (which they also cannot really afford imo). Then even if it were done there's next to no real advantage. The amount of Mac / Linux gamers is extremely small so there's no real gain at all...

Only for multiplayer hosts a Linux compatible client might be interesting but you could do that as sort of a standalone programm instead of porting the entire engine over to something that runs on Linux too...

Ports to the consoles of course might be interesting but I guess the question is if it's worth the effort / worth the costs. At least I see next to no games here that really would be worth porting to like the Xbox360 and with the main focus on newcomers in the game making business I don't see any real change in the near future. Plus this again would slow down the overall engine development which without additional manpower imo isn't really affordable...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

This is not true. I have read lots of sales reports of indie devs and they often make much more money on Mac. The mac demos have a better converion rate (trial to sales conversion). And there is almost no competition on the Mac platform.

The Mac games-market is too small for the big developers, but it is a very good market for small developers. That is the reason why many devs at GarageGames fought for Mac support.

But this is only important to business developers. If you want to have fun as a hobby user, then this is not an issue.

Supporting multi platform from beginning on makes sense for sure and linux/mac/iphone are great markets for indies, but it is difficult to port an engine which has been direct3d only for approx. 7 years.

As toast pointed out it will mean quite a while no new features as time will be needed for porting the core.

I guess a port for A7 will only happen if there's someone who funds this port so they can hire additional developers just for this task.
Due to amount of possible customers this will most likely happen for one of the consoles. Then again most of the consol developers have different (more expensive) tools.

Interesting. I heard that since Bootcamp is around there's sort of a Mac=Windows mentality - especially as most Indie games aren't performance demanding monsters so they'll run fine in Bootcamp...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

how bout asking a few of the millions of talented coders that do those things for free if they would do it? give them some money and they gladly do it.
ive seen things like quke run on wii. ive seen things like N64 games run on MAC. ive even seen sega saturn games run on linux. and those programs are free. coded by maybe two or three people over the course of a year or two with permanent updates to the core.
those people do that in their free time, you cant just tell me that it would be impossible for a group of say, ten coders that work only on opeGL support.
as said, forget the console gaming thing. you just cant afford it. sure, you can develop for XBLA for free, but then you may not sell the game. way to go. if you want to sell it, shell out 30k in cash first.
and if you dont have your own office not located at home, you arent even going to develop for anything else, because thats one of the main things for consle develoment.
and as ive said, as long as you cant even efford nice models...

Now that OGRE switches to the MIT license they simply could use OGRE for A8 and build a state of the art editor around it. It would save them a lot of work.

lite-C + OGRE + Bullet would be quite an awesome combination.

Since you mentioned Ogre: Did you see a new game called Torchlight, made with Ogre?
http://store.steampowered.com/app/41500/

Did you see the Torchlight thread?

To be honest: No I missed it.

Wow, this is quite awesome.
I love unity (I used it for a school project, was quite fun to work with).. I just never had to urge to buy it as when I bought A5, then 6 back int he day I felt like I wasted my money... Not because the engine/tools were bad, but because I didnt have time to use them.

But now that Unity AND 3dgs are free, this is great! Especially for students and schools! Yeah there is a competition between 3DGS and Unity, but they both have their advantages and disadvantages so I can see indie developers and students choose each tool based on their needs with out having to feel the pain in their wallets.

It really opens the doors for more people!

They're not free, Unity Indie and A7 Extra is free only.

Well what used to cost money is now free

Saving me over 300 dollars is quite nice (adding both engines together)

A7 Extra will not be free they said that lite-c gets basically the features of 3dgs extra (and not all) lite-c and 3dgs are different products, hope that they not only add features but also the wed maybe not in full functional state, but its better for the beginners for asigning behaviour etc. right now only info is no shader and basically lite-c becomes 3dgs extra features. and 3dgs extra will be discontinued but it takes time, so wait and enjoy when it comes lol

@V_Software,

i guess that will be all extra features because, people who bought extra in past couple of months are offered $50 off for comm edition upgrade. that would make comm edition $150 at total for them. And that probably means a $99 version wont be offered anymore.

Another victim of Unity:
Darkbasic Pro is now free for home use.

Taken from the other thread. Why do we have three threads for the same topic btw?

yes it's logical but now they are still different products, we don't know how the situation is with license between atari and conitec so we can only wait. but it makes sense that it would become with most of extra feutures, u're right

JCL wrote something about this. It was only a single deal for a free tool and an Atari community project. Atari is not some kind of an investor.

For our last model pack at Dexsoft I did a lot of renderings in different engines. The shaders in Unity are similar to the ones from Gamestudio, but the material editor is much more easy to use.
The possibilities in Torque3D are better, I could create some quite realistic materials and the new material editor is easy to use.
But the best results are made in C4. I have additional features like microfacet shading, spec bloom and good control over lighting and shadows. So this brings a bit more reality into play.

But if you are concerned about scripting, then Unity and A7 are more easy to get into.

Martins

What you said, it is quite interesting
At a first glance everybody is on Unity side...me too

Actually I have had some problems in importing FBX files but I am the only one in the world complaining about this issue...I was told by unity's moderator

Getting back to your post I must say that I have got the same impression

After falling in love with Unity I wonder whether it is really that easy to develop relatively complex games


May you make some pratical examples of what you mean for " Flexibility" ?
Thanks in advance

Please note that I am refering in my post to Unity Indie version (the free one)..

Without going to much in technical details, I must say that with unity if you want custom shaders or some special effects you will need the pro version...and that means more than 1000 USD spent...while with 199 USD (I use Euros, but I think in USD is somewhere near this), you can have A7 commercial that already include all this features.

If we go a litle deeper just take a look at Unity API and A7 API and the way to use it, lets say in vector calculation..Its much easier to work with A7 and Lite C that with Unity and C#.

Now try to explore unity in vector operations....code a little and put some pressure in the engine...do some experiments and compare the speed of execution...you may find something interesting.

Yes..you can create your own stuff in C#, and improve the speed...but if we use an engine, is precisely to avoid having to code from scratch a bunch of things that (otherwise we could write our own engine).

I like to have an idea...implementing it and follow ahead to the next one...with A7 commercial I can do that...With Unity free...I have to stop..and say..OK I will add this little feature when I buy the pro version..so my final product will be inferior unless I spent the full amount.

Last but not least...you really need to learn C# if you want to use Unity...While C# is not a nightmare, it has a higher learning curve to become confortable with than Lite C, so a beginner can start to produce some interesting results sooner with A7 that with Unity.

Unity is very good...but with the indie version you will get a good learning tool for your complex projects (nothing wrong with that)...but you will have to move to pro version when you start to go deep into those projects..or they will lack the quality you have in your head.

I dont know if anyone has understood what I said (I am doing 3 things at the same time !!).

Best

Martins

you are wrong. unity free does support custom shaders.

and i find some of your points a bit vague.

why? i find the vec_* commands a lot clumsier than being able to use operators for example. with operators you get shorter and more readable code for vector calculations.

what may i find?

hm... why would doing it yourself in C# be faster than native methods?

As far as vectors are concerned I agree with Ventilator however up to a certain extent I have also got the impression that, generally speaking, 3dgs is more flexible
By the way I mean flexibility in term of gameplay
Ok graphics is important but games are not virtual reality
Interactivity is the key point

I planned to make my first Unity game : An hovercraft race

A Unity member asked how to change the friction factor in the run time

As you realize it would be quite inportant also for me since an hovercraft can move over any type of terrain

Well apparentely in Unity it is not possible

3DGS supplies new commands in any new releases

Well, if demo to sale conversion rates are higher than on the PC platform, this certainly doesn't mean they will make more money on the Mac platform.

When it comes to performance, don't forget the newer Macs are actually packed with good hardware. These are not low-end machines compared to the PC market. I think many games that run through Bootcamp could run a thousand times better if they had natively supported the platform.

It's probably why demo to sale conversions are so much higher. Mac users tend to play more and more games.

So truth be told, Mac is really starting to take off and has become a very interesting fast growing market for Indie devs.

why is bootcamp supposed to be slow? hardware-wise macs just are normal intel pcs now and i thought that bootcamp isn't an emulator or virtualization solution but just helps booting windows?

you mean different physics engine friction values for certain level geometry or terrain parts? i am not sure about unity but gamestudio's physics engine doesn't support this either and it's buggy, outdated and didn't have an update in years. newton does support it though.

Unity can do any kind of game and the flexibility is just => than 3dgs flexibility. I use Unity for a year now and i used 3dgs for many years and believe me, the workflow and flexibility are awesome and i never reached any "limit" when i wanted to realize something.

And about the friction. Do you know about Physic Materials? You can create your own physic material with different friction and apply it to different kind of textures or whatever. That could solve your problem

Regarding math and vector / matrix calculation. Actually sometimes it is even better and faster to setup your own routines. I tell you why:

If you want to do translation, rotation and scaling within the same frame then you have to use 3 operations. If you do that on a mesh with 100 thousand vertices, then you get 3 times the amount of operations.
But if you create a combo matrix / vector first, that combines translation, scaling and rotation in one matrix / vector, then you have only 1/3 the amount of operations, resulting in higher speed.

But you dont need to write your own engine only because of this. It is just some kind of optimization.

why would that need my own routines? it's just a normal matrix concatenation.

matrix = tm * rm * sm
for v in vertices: v = v * matrix

...and transforming 100 thousand vertices isn't something you usually have to do in gameplay code.

Why writing an own class?
Newton comes with a very nice dMatrix class

And I agree with Ventilator that Newton is the better physics engine. At least compared to what is possible in A7. The ODE integration in ODE is insufficient. Fast turning objects can cause colission problems because a higher fps is needed for calculating the physics. A7 does not allow to e.g. double the physics engine framerate. It's always tied to the engine fps (unless I missed something).
I know that ODE can do more than what is possible with the current A7 integration, but that doesn't help as long as the internal interface stays the same in A7.

For my test project I saw no way to do this properly with the integrated ODE. With Newton it works a lot better (but still needs tweaking).
And thanks to Ventilator and VeT there is a really easy to use wrapper available.

Yep, it's help you to create a new partition for windows and makes it able to boot the new partition. It has also drivers for mac hardware like the mouse or iSight camera. It is a native windows installation.

Yes but you can assign one friction factor only to each texture i.e either grass or sand, for example
In 3dgs you can even read and manipulate each pixel of the texture
You can for example paint an irregularly shaped sand road on a grass terrain
In the gameplay you can detect if your hovercraft is on the road or on the grass
I dont think that this extreme flexibility is allowed to Unity users

Once again , ok for shaders and all the graphic stuff but a game must be first all:

Interactivity

Apart from that, generally speaking ,I agree that Unity workflow and programming language is better than 3dgs
However it seems to me that it is the direct opposite as far as the set of commands are concerned
Every new release 3dgs supplies some new commands
From this point of view I agree that 3dgs is more programming oriented than Unity

On the other hand I can not really understand how someone can claim that the Lite_c / action / entity based 3dgs architecture is better than the C# / JavaScript components Unity based architecture



Maybe these people are simply more familiar with 3dgs than with Unity

You got it. This is exactly what I mean. I just wanted to point out that it might be better to do it that way instead of using roate(), move() and scale() after each other for such a big mesh.

I am not sure about your example since in most books and in the OpenGL examples it would be matrix*v, but maybe you are talking about an DirectX notation.

And yes, a standard mesh will probably not have 100 thousand vertices. This was just an example to exaggerate the performance problem a bit. You will rather do something like that for smaller meshes but maybe several ones.

Frank, you usually don´t have to transform vertices at all

Slin: Yes, you are right, but if you for instance rotate a model then the engine will do this internally. Somewhere has to move the vertices in the world.

This was just an example for optimizations.

I think vec_ commands are quite nice.
I hate matrices. They are a bunch of numbers which mean nothing to me when I look at them.
I feel more comfortable when working with angles and vectors since I see directly what I'm doing.
It is true that for 3d calculations matrices are the best way, but I'm happy when I don't have to use them outside that area

While this is very rarely useful, it still does have its circumstances where it is, and if you don't mind I thought I'd bring up a relatively recent example:

A while ago in the future forums I requested bones animation to be performed on the GPU instead of the CPU. I demonstrated, with models of ~50 000 polys each, each rigged and animated for bones animation, that while no animation let me have about 110 of these entities on-screen at once before going below 60fps, if they were animated I'd drop to about 30fps as soon as the 4th entity was created. I threw together a (fairly rough) bunch of functions and a shader that let me perform the animation on the GPU (this required calculating matrices for each of the bones, hence the relevance of this example), and I had around 96 on-screen before dropping below 60 fps.

That's 4.8 million bones-animated polygons at once.

Now, we'll probably have features that will let us do this in a much less "hacky" way soon (jcl expressed in that thread that a flag for GPU animation could be useful, and then if you look at the files in the latest MMO test there's an example using a shader to do bones animation, and it appears to use some new built-in variables and matrices that aren't available in the latest public beta ), but for a short while my plan was to bust out a 1v1 fighting game, bones animated, with each character having up to 100 000 polys (it seems we could handle even more than that, considering there'll only be two characters on screen and the environment won't need a significant amount, but 100 000 in combination with a normal map should be plenty to ensure there are no jagged edges on the whole thing).

As another example, for a while I planned to skip Quaternion->Euler angle conversion altogether by building a Quaternion matrix and doing the rotation in a shader (collision detection wouldn't be an issue because it was intended for situations with very round objects [or at least entities that can get away with a spherical hull], and then later on to be handled by my own physics). Now A7 has a nice function for converting a Quaternion to an Euler angle anyway.

I know I re-invent the wheel a lot, but one thing I like about A7 is how easy it is to re-invent little bits at a time

That's not to say I wouldn't prefer a more OO-approach to vector and matrix calculations, a la Unity.

Jibb

wouldn't you like to have the possibility to write vector calculations in a similar notation to what you have learned in school instead of writing many lines of vec_ commands?


i know how to work with transformation matrices and i also know how to interpret the content of a transformation matrix but i think what really happens during a matrix*matrix multiplication is very hard to imagine/visualize for (most) human brains. matrices probably are better suited for computers.

Transformations with matrices are indeed very unintuitive and super fast. I am currently attending an introductory course about autonomous robotics and to keep the matter short in the end we "should" know all basics how to move a robot arm around involving forward and inverse kinematics.

I already learned a lot about transformations and it is actually for a computer super easy to calculate things and vector stuff when you do it right. I can especially recommend chapter 1 of the book "Introduction to Robotics, Mechanics and Control". Although it is focused on applying all the math on robotics but essentially it is all the same for the day to day vector calculations you need in a game. Seriously. Read and understand it - then you become a matrix guru in a vec_set-World ^^

Just to throw that in... it seems we are going off-topic.

I don't think anybody cares, its Morbius, and - most important, it is very interesting: more, please!

Offtopic doesn't matter. I think we have two more Unity threads left...

I'm quite comfortable with the vec commands. Really.
I hate the notation for maths we had in school. It always confused me when looking at it.

Also matrices seem to be a thing which just does not fit into my head. After some time I always have to start from 0 and learn everything again because I just can't get used to it.
That's really disappointing when seeing other people handling this stuff as if it was super easy. And I end up doing trial and error until it works

I don't know if it's important but the channel of the stanford university in youtube has a good collection of robotics course
I've seen Course | Introduction to Robotics with 16 full lecture videos (but I did only see the first 3) and there are videos of other courses as well (example: modern physics, and interesting for games the course of machine learning, and some programming courses)

to matrices, I have to admit that I didn't understand for so long time matrices until I've red a chapter of an directx8 book of gallileo press(only german) It's a really bad and to simple book ( you don't learn much you do what he want lol) but I found the matrices explenation there really good. maybe sometimes the simple things are better than the professional super infos hehe
but I admit too that I still forget sometimes the order of which matrices comes first in an computation. so I end up to cursing with my pc and finally google and then tell myself you idiot It's so simple hahaha

this said, have a good start into the new week guys byeee

ps: Inverse Kinematics is a big topic there at the videos

i have a soft matrace. i like sleeping comfortable...