[papervision] SPACE CUBES!

[chriserrorplain]

ok....so not a massive game, but more of a proof of concept demo for myself.

I wanted to see how well Flash / PV performed using a 2D game engine, but rendering it all with 3D sprites, and it has worked swimmingly.

So with out further a-do I present Space Cubes!

http://www.errorware.co.uk/games/spaceCubes/

All feedback welcome, and do remember I have spent...oooh whole hours on this , so be kind


Chris Error x

[VENGEANCE MX]

Can't load it. Are you using a key code of '1' for the mouse-click? Only works in the Windows Flash Player.

[chriserrorplain]

that's odd, there is no preloader or anyhting I know, but it has loaded and run fine on windows, mac and linux across all browsers tested.

What setup do you have vengence?

Chris error

[tonypa]

Worked for me. Was not much impressed as a game but as experiment it looked ok. It did slow down once there was lots of small pieces around.

[Incrue]

Slow with many cubes...
So, thats the limit of a 3d engine+game engine...to me the conclusion is still the same, not doable.

[BlinkOk]

looks good. i think i had the same problem as vengeance. i reloaded the page and it worked.
is that the box2d engine you're talkin about?

[lesli_felix]

Interesting, and given how quickly it was put together, pretty impressive.

Incrue, I don't think this is exactly the most optimised engine, though it's interesting to note how limited PV is in terms of objects on screen.

There are ways to speed it up. The limited focal length means you could make an isometric version that would look almost the same and play much faster. Another way would be to cache asteroid animation and replay it from a bitmap data sequence.

[Incrue]

If you were to make it pre calculated you can make it even with AS2 and copyPixels
Inst the goal just to see how many 3d polygons AS3 can handle together with a game engine?

[chriserrorplain]

I just wanterd to see if a 2D game could easiyl and quickly be written to use 3D models as sprites. I think I could get it runner lots faster if I just optimised the textures and such like, as the overall poly count is count low. Will try it out today and see what happens,

Chris

[lesli_felix]

The goal is to make a visually rich 2D game.

Caching 3d animation can be done in may ways, but mixing a live 3d engine with a caching engine can produce some amazing results that don't kill the processor or use heavy file sizes.

[chriserrorplain]

ok, in response to your feedback I have been slaving away over Space Cubes for a whole 20 minutes...I hoep you all appreciate this hard work.

http://errorware.co.uk/games/spaceCubes/

see if that's any faster, I have optimised all the textures and it seems faster to me,

Chris Error x

[BlinkOk]

nice work
if your interested, here's a texture that might define the shape of the blocks a little better.
if you want i could do a little spaceship model and export it in collada format.

[lesli_felix]

20 goddamn minutes, you're too kind to us.

It seems much faster, care to share what you did so we don't have to go through the same hellish 20 minutes of development pain?

[chriserrorplain]

Blink, you are too kind, I would love a little spaceship exported as collada, and as soon as I am back in the studio later this morning I will try my nice new Asteroid texture. (then me and you sell the game to kongregate for $1 million yeah?)

Lesli, I was going to break out the text editor and start a bit of pure byte code editing to see if I could optimise the PV engine anywhere, then I remembered I am a deeply lazy man, who also can't understand bytecode, so I just shrank all the textures in Photoshop and re-imported them.

chris Error x

[renderhjs]

something like this would be awesome
http://boards.polycount.net/showpost...&postcount=835

[MikeMD]

Now I've realized why they call it papervision.

All these low poly models look like paper.

[chriserrorplain]

render I get most nervous when you look at any of my 3D work Yeah I agree a little ship like that would be most awesome.Blink..I have my biggest puppy dog eyes at the moment, and am looking longingly at such ships

I've been chatting to clients about this stuff (which was the main reason for doing the feasibility study) and there really seems to be some enthusiasm for some light weight 3D flash games. Just hope some of that enthusiasm turns into a real world project.

Thanks for the nice feedback and textures y'all, FK Games CAN be a good community when it deems fit

Chris Error x

[BlinkOk]

yeah they would look great too.
i would worry that those spindly bits would get lost at very low resolution though.
i thought a wipeout style might be nice;
(67 polys, could prolly be a lot less though)
the green glow would pulse every time you shot.

[WesIsGood]

It takes a lot more thrust to turn left.

BlinkOK how did you do that? What program does one use to make something like that?

[BlinkOk]

i made it with swift3d but you could use any 3d proggy for somethin like that