[as3][3d] little 3d texturing demo

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I didn´t even botherd to look at their code because:
- to complex to understand at first and bloated with function I dont need
- most of them are universal packages and they try to do anything (phng shading, normal mapping, bump mapping,...) 90% of those features are things I dont want for my project- they are more oriented to the masses who use it and dont know all the math behind it.
- trying to understand it myself instead of depending on a framework/ package. That way I might be able to port knowledge gained here to other projects with perhaps other technologies. This happend already many times in my past
- add special features for wich I need more expierence and be able to understand everything I have so far.

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So if you had advice to tell somebody on building their own 3d engine with Flash, what would you suggest of how to peruse codding?
I agree; I have a Flash book about this stuff that is complicated to the absolute maximum boundary. I have such trouble interpreting it.

I noticed with the Link model (Gut Arbeit) that there were two skins; one for night and for day. I assume that there is not going to be any lighting with this engine, or so far.

I look forward to achieving your level with this one day.

-Evaman

@Evaman: I am someone who learns most stuff by trying and through expierence in close areas. In my case I guess I have the advantage that I know pretty well 3dsmax and have a understanding what it needs for a 3d visulisation- so having knowledge in a 3d software might be usefull imo.

I am no math genius but I know some decent trigonometry (and in case I fail wich happens from time to time I always draw illustrations to better understand the problem environment) and its a fundamental base for how I think and what I can do at least- so some good references on that are very helpfull.

If you want to start a 3d engine: always worth recomending:
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/acti...pt/3dindex.htm
it´s not yet about texturing, lighting, and all the other complex stuff but it gets you already quite far and a very good start.

little update:
no visual progress this time but I made some progress with the scene files (xml file) wich describes the objects, textures and scripts to be used in a level.
This is a example level (my way of working with xml projects) that I am about to read into AS3:

PHP Code:

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<level title="insde the catacombs">
    
    <!-- define the entities-->
    <assets>
        <tex tex="background1.jpg"/>
        <tex tex="background2.jpg"/>
        
        <obj url="obj/player.obj"    tex="uvlayout.jpg"/>
        <obj url="obj/table.obj"    tex="wood.jpg"/>
        <obj url="obj/key.obj"    tex="tools.jpg"/>
        
        <ani url="ani/player_ani.ani"/>
        
        <script id="testScript">
            [player].moveTo(320,116,0);
            [key].visible(1);
            wait(click);
            wait(500);
            [key].say('welcome to the demo room',500);
            setCam(cam1);
        </script>
        <script id="interAction">
            setCam(cam1);
            [key].tween([player],[player_ani],3,500);
        </script>
        
    </assets>
    
    <!-- read only the assets and place them-->
    <scene>
        <cam pos="0,0,0" rot="90,0,0" fov="90" dim="320,240" tex="background1"/>
        <cam pos="110,22,55" rot="90,0,135" fov="90" tex="background2"/>
        
        <obj update="1" id="player" pos="0,0,0" rot="0,0,15"/>
        <obj update="1" id="key" pos="50,25,0" rot="0,0,270"/>
        
        <path>0,0,0/13,75,0/128,75,0/166,800,0/512,800,0</path>
        
        <grid pos="160,32" dim="64,48" click="testScript"/>
        <grid pos="160,32" dim="64,48" over="wait(400);setCam(cam1);[clip1].visible(0);" out="setCam(cam2);"/>
        
        <point pos="240,220,64" dim="32,32,32" click="[player].say('I wonder what this button does')"/>
    </scene>
</level> 


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the most import decission is I guess that I have a assets and scene node. The asset node holds the instances to be loaded (even check if certain files are already adressed and then only load once). In the scene node all placements and assignments are made.
As for scripting I plan to write a custom script engine that lets me write simple enough scripts (not to complex but also not to limited) directly in the xml. The scumn engine is a great inspiration here and I´ll propably borrow some methods from that language.

So after I have the file manegement done wich needs some restructuring of my code I can optimize way again to know in the end what I can run at once.

almost finished my first editor tools for 3dsmax:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki..._editor_01.gif
everything works except for file loading- and writing animation files is on my tasklist.
This interface is a collection of bunch of scripts that makes level editing for my future engine easier. For example I can quickly apply camera UV´s on objects, set their material identical to how it looks in flash, set Visibility for rendering and so on.
Aside from that the classic binary writing script wich writes a binary smal file that I can read in AS3 and use as 3d format for my engine.
The last part generates the XML level file wich I currently use (the one I introduced in my previous post). It automaticly detects the object type (mesh, path, camera,...) and even reads out the texture path associated with the object ect. very usefull. Right now I copy/paste alot into existing XML files I can read in AS3.

The AS3 development looks rather boring but I wrote new classes to manage the file loading and to autmaticly recognize ID and their contents- and some cancel mechanics because in the past AS3 sometimes crashed while it was still loading files ect. A preloader for all dynamic objects (textures and meshes so far) in the scene works as well.

the as3 side has now developed a little bit as well:
this is my current demo level. Note: in previous demos I posted here only 1 object could be loaded, wich now is about to change next to beeing able to load other kind objects as well (collision slopes, cages,...)

I made a screenshot collection that better illustrates how everything works together (xml, flash, 3dsmax, maxscript):
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...el_editing.jpg

on the as3 side I fixed error events that occoured with wrong file names, corrupted files ect. and if something like that happens a default bitmap and mesh will be placed instead- that´s nicer as having flash itself puking 2 pages of errors.

new demo:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...screenshot.jpg
online demo
- handles multiple mesh instances and texture instances
- camera switch (5 cameras in the demo, 3 with rendered backgrounds)

for the ones that dont notice it right away- the brown- greenish rendering is static, the blue & red framed object and the character are flash 3d.

for some reason the browsers (firefox & Opera) do not like when errors occour on file loading (e.g wrong url of a texture) for wich I created a fallback mechanism and it works perfectly offline but not in the browser- wich is something I need to find to fix.
Also the camera matching has a little glitch wich you propably wont notice but I do if I compare it each time with the 3dsmax viewport wich needs to be fixed as well- it causes the perspective to shift a little bit on the z-Axis in some cases

Another impressive update. Do have have any IK system for your meshes? And do you have a way to take keyframe data from Max to Flash?

Are you planning to release any of these tools you're developing? I know you've been giving bits and pieces of source here and there, but I imagined that you could release a whole development package if you wanted.

recenly I finished writing the maxscript part for reading back my mesh data so now I can write and read my custom *.3d files (with UV-data) wich are extremely tiny files compared to almost anything else there is available (3ds,obj,dae,ase,...). For simple objects like tables or chairs it takes usually below 1000 bytes.
So I thought about releasing that together with a simple AS3 code on how to read and use the 3d data.

Animation is planned to be solved via vertex animation wich means that I will create another filetype (*.ani perhaps) that will store the relative positions of the vertex points of the mesh that changed (motion wise) so it would be like storing the movements vectors of the vertex´s that moved. With that data I can of course transform the mesh file to that pose (like morphing). And with a tween function blend between them.
So for a walkcylce for example I´d capture perhaps 4 frames of the animation in 3dsmax and tween in Flash between those 4 captured states so it would look smooth. Older games like Quake 2 did it that way.

A bone IK system with Vertex Skinning (technique so that each vertex knows how much it is influenced by wich bones) is not only complicated to program but also veery cpu Intense I dont think that flash will handle it.
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a complete package release is rather unlikely - I am not a fan of others frameworks (in 99% of the cases) of very personal reasons- I´d rather write some tutorials or simplified code snippets so others would understand it and improve it rather than just copying and using it without thinking much about it.

Great work on all this stuff render...been watching you run with this for a few weeks and it all looks great! :D

RipX

while I still want to keep design and coding matters thread related here is something that is again a rather technical related progress.
As pointed out before in the other design related thread
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/polycou...h_tricks_1.jpg
I managed to find a way to block out overlapping geometry and use it as texture with camera mapping on simplified geometry to overlap in the engine complex parts of the rendering over the character.
Now the earlier image was rather a concept,- I hadn´t tested it yet- but I did now.
So for this test I rendered 2 images:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...ta_tech_ps.jpg
one with a alpha channel (PNG) and the other one without- booth will be loaded in the engine but only the one with alpha channel used as texture on objects,- the other one is the general background image for that particular camera.

here are some shots from 3dsmax to perhaps better show the camera mapping model:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...a_tech_max.jpg
as you can see on the last 2 pics it gets distorted on the texture because the UV- texture coordinates dont match the new view from where it´s been watched. I´d have to render in that case another Image of the view and build propably different lowPoly clipping objects.

this last part are current shots from the flash player:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...tech_flash.jpg
it doesn´t look that different,- other than perhaps some tiny issues with depth sorting yet. I need to rewrite some loop stuff so that it propper sorts such things in particular so that all triangles are ditched into 1 array and not by objects seperately.


I made also some progress with the animations for the engine,- the fileformat is already somewhat stable and soon I´ll try to read it into flash and first do some simple stuff like gotoAndStop to a particular animation state.

The animations are vertex animations meaning that defined frames are stored for a object by storing all vertex positions of the model at the given time. For now those files are luckily very smal. I expect that a character with 300 triangles and lets say 16 frame states that can be tweened into stores below 15 KB. Within those 16 frames I could add states such as for the walk cycle, idle movements or actions such as picking something up.


I plan on releasing sometime soon a code and explaination (with some illustrations) on how to use 3d package (max,maya,blender,...) camera into flash projects. So that a point in 3d[x,y,z] space matches the excact 2d[x,y] position on screen on booth sides: the 3d software and flash.
That would include angle based FOV (not as in most tutorials with just a length value), the rotation axis and some principles about camera models in engines and applications (target camera, free camera, z-axis engine,..).

I've been reading this thread since you opened it and you never cease to impress me.
Both your artistic and coding skills are very impressive, and you seem to work very fast too.

Keep up the good work (and the eye candy !).

thx guys,
another shot from the engine:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...engine_001.jpg
been fixing the texture manager that displays either a default bitmapData fill or a generic undefined texture if I mess up the url in the XML or the ID in it. AS3 is extremely strict,- so now Flash displays less errors in the console if I make mistakes in the XML file.
just so that you guys know a little bit what I am loading in the screenshot:

PHP Code:

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<level title="Rheta">
    <assets>
        <tex tex="tex/_null.png"/>
        <obj url="3d/3d_test_girl.3d" tex="tex/girl.png"/>
        <obj url="3d/3d_test_rheta_house.3d" tex="tex/3d_test/3d_test_alpha.png"/>
        <obj url="3d/table2.3d" tex="tex/__.png"/>
        <tex tex="tex/3d_test/3d_test_bkg.jpg"/>
        <tex tex="tex/3d_test/3d_test_bkg_viewport.jpg"/>
        <tex tex="tex/3d_test/3d_test_bkg_viewport2.jpg"/>
    </assets>
    <scene>
        <obj id="table2" pos="850,336,0" rot="0,0,79"/>
        <obj id="3d_test_rheta_house" pos="810,367,272" rot="0,0,0"/>
        <cam pos="1291.69,57.6776,876.85" rot="42.7322,0.0,51.1842" fov="79.3" dim="500,300" tex="_3d_test_bkg_viewport"/>
        <cam pos="1291.69,57.6776,876.85" rot="42.7322,0.0,51.1842" fov="79.3" dim="700,420" tex="3d_test_bkg"/>    
    </scene>
</level> 


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this is important for me at least because usually I copy paste the xml code from my maxscript tool without thinking,- often resulting into wrong texture urls or folder names.

I have a question for you Render; does the mesh of the fire allow it to move lively in a smooth animation through AS3? So far from what you are showing if I am not mistaking, that the AS3 scripting is rendering nice results. The character models that you have shared previously were nicely skinned, but seemed a little choppy, but I am also aware that you are not finished yet.

@Evaman: no realtime fire effects in flash,- I could render an animation from 3dsmax load it as SWF into the engine (most likely as little cropped sprite instead of the full resolution screen- After Effects will help there). But I am not sure if I like the idea of hammering on each Frame per second changing the Video of texture surfaces - because I worked all the way with sprites and as such in AS3 they are static,- instead I´d have to go for movieClip or something like that.
What right now is far more important are vertex animations or scriptable textures, pathfinding and some other stuff.

new demo
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...11/demo_11.jpg
online demo
what changed (mostly intern):
- new rendering model,- loops through 1 loop now,- no hierarchical array loops anymore (should make it faster)
- camera filter can enable/ disable meshes per camera
- new transform class for basic move & rotate transformations as well as vertex animations or morphing - so animations are on their way

what this demo basicly shows is how the camera mapping technique works,- you can stand behind the door or infront of it and likewise the other spots.

cool, I made a movie :)

you are nasty :)

You're just lucky your character only rotates around the one axis. Otherwise there's no telling what depths of depravity he could have sunk to.

update with 2 major breakthroughs:

http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...screenshot.jpg

- animation system: Its pretty basic yet but it can already blend between 2 frame states of the 3d mesh. I´ll add scripting ability soon so that animations can be triggered from certain events like the walk loop or perhaps a run loop,- pick up animations ect.
- Screen:2d to world:3d conversion: As you can see in the demo the Character gets placed in the 3d space based on the Screen X/Y Mouse coordinates- and this resolution independent and from any camera angle.

online demo

about the animations:
As I mentioned earlier I save the animations from 3dsmax as vertex animations in a custom binary file. This is done using maxscript,- here is a screenshot of the usuage:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki..._animation.gif
I can animate whatever style I want (rig, modifiers, plugins, scripts,...)- what gets exported at the end are the vertex positions of the mesh at each defined frame.
In flash then I can morph between 2 of those key-frames like this code in my frame loop:

PHP Code:

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var p:Number = (getTimer()%1000)/1000;
render.morph("mother",1,2,p); 


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wich will tween between frame 1 and 2 of the file where p is the percentage e.g 0.5 is just between them. In this case the precentage repeats each second from 0 till 1.

Just on a sidenote:
the filesize of this demo is 285 KB of wich 205 KB are already the texture of the mother (PNG with alpha channel) meaning that just the engine and the 3d + animation files are together just 43 KB wich is already quite smal.

excellent work

I am truly amazed at how well it runs on my old test box (533mhz 98SE with no graphics card and only 95mb ram) !!!

And on my other machines, it's a dream :)

thx guys
changed her textures now without alpha channel but smaler filesize (53 KB for the texture

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I am truly amazed at how well it runs on my old test box (533mhz 98SE with no graphics card and only 95mb ram)

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what framerate do you have with that machine? above 15 fps?

The old box gets between 14-18 at low quality, 12-14 at medium, and 9-12 at high. Most other 3d demos I've tried on it struggle to get above 6-8, so your demo seems to be optimized beyond just about anything I've seen.

update
with a refined animation system :)
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...13/demo_13.jpg
- independent vertex animations per character
- animation independent camera switching (no resets or delays)
- queue manager with frame independent animations = doesn´t stress the CPU so much + smooth results on low specs
this demo offers:
- 4 cams
- 3 animations for the mother, 2 for the animal. You can playback them simultaneous it should´t have a major impact on the performance

the online demo

on this AMD Athlon 3500+ (2.21 GHz single core) I get about 35 fps in Opera

some stats about this demo:
overall filesize: ~ 246 KB
textures: 181 KB
3d meshes: 12 KB
animations: 15 KB
engine + xml 38 KB

so the biggest files are still the textures (PNG for the 2 characters because of some opaque parts), my custom file types are still damn smal wich should give the loading in general a good speed boost, also because there is hardly any parsing operating like in many other engines.

As for the animations
,- since I want to trigger alot animations from within the XML via trigger events I decided to go with a script alike system to define the animations in Flash. THose scripts are defined as strings either in AS or in the xml (like a general syntax) and will behave the same.

PHP Code:

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[mother]loop(1:200,2:200,3:200,4:200,5:200) 


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for example will animate the object 'mother' in a loop with the frame order: 1,2,3,4,5,- since it is a loop it will continue with 1,2,3,.. The number after the ':' defines the delay till the next frame in miliseconds- if it isn´t defined it takes the defined values for that frame from the animation file.

PHP Code:

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[mother]set(6:600,7:600,8:400) 


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this code will just animate once the sequence of frames 6,7,8. With this system its quite easy to animate specific stuff. What misses right now is a blend system that will blend between different sequences like between a walk cycle and a picking up animation so that it generally feels even more smooth.


the xml I used for the demo: (so you can see some of my structure)

PHP Code:

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<level title="animation test">
    <assets>
        <tex tex="tex/checker2.jpg"/>
        <obj id="mother" url="3d/3d_test_mother.3d" tex="tex/3d_test/3d_test_mother_tiny.png" ani="ani/mother.ani"/>
        
        <obj url="3d/table2.3d" tex="tex/crate_1.jpg"/>
        <obj url="ani/animal.3d" tex="ani/animal.png" ani="ani/animal.ani" />
    </assets>
    <scene>
        <obj id="mother" pos="0,0,0" rot="0,0,0"/>
        <obj id="animal" pos="0,0,0" rot="0,0,0"/>
        <obj id="table2" pos="0,54,0" rot="0,0,0"/>

        <cam pos="-161.407,-238.335,252.669" rot="57.5,0.0,-34.5001" fov="45.0" dim="700,420" tex="checker2" filter="*"/>
        <cam pos="41.8764,-158.188,216.902" rot="46.9986,-0.0019,18.0001" fov="45.0" dim="700,420" tex="checker2" filter="*"/>
        <cam pos="-32.1218,-123.423,324.713" rot="25.9986,-0.0019,-7.9999" fov="45.0" dim="500,320" tex="checker2" filter="*"/>
        <cam pos="52.5253,-120.152,161.507" rot="40.999,0.0,34.0" fov="45.0" dim="700,420" tex="checker2" filter="*"/>
    </scene>
</level> 


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like I mentioned earlier,- the assets part defines the elements to be loaded and instanced later,- while the 2nd part 'scene' defines the objects in the scene space.
A filter variable on the cameras can define wich objects to include or exclude '*' as wildcard includes everything.


here is another screenshot how I saved the frames of the mother character:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...imations_3.jpg
she has 11 frames out of the timeline that are saved each frame as a vertex object snapshot. The numbers 0,10,20,30,40,50,60,65,... are the frame numbers of the max timeline.

I am looking forward for some walking and pathfinding stuff to be done next

Hey man, are you going to rewrite your engine once flashplayer 10 comes out? I'm actually almost disappointed, because you have all of this brilliant, excellent work, but now it just got a whole lot easier with z-rotation and graphics support for bitmapdata.

the z-rotation is just for designers - but they included a polygon drawing method (with texture coordinates) wich will be most likely hardware accelerated with the full release of FP 10 or 10.5- it shouldn´t be hard to switch to that method.
In general I am however not so hyped about Flash player 10 (hated AS3 in the beginning as well), this already runs almost close to what I wanted from the beginning.

Just want you to know the only reason I haven't commented on how admirable this current project of yours is simply because I don't want to brown tongue you too much. I'm pretty sure you're aware of how awesome your work is and as such it doesn't really need to be said. Great stuff though, I love the creepy little gremlin, really feeling the Alone in The Dark vibe from it all.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by EvilKris

Just want you to know the only reason I haven't commented on how admirable this current project of yours is simply because I don't want to brown tongue you too much.

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Seconded. I've checked the thread every day since it was made, so any updates are appreciated. :)

thx guys,- will update more & more, if i´d have the time even with some sample code

little progress with the pathfinding- or to say I am in the middle of writing the core stuff for it. No demo for now instead hopefully a little bit of insight:

http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...e_pfind_01.jpg
My approach basicly follows what I discovered back in this older project of mine . It´s about finding automaticly the perimetric points (corner turning points) of the vector slopes so that later on those points are used in my actual pathfinding algorithm as node points to connect possible path´s.
My orthographic engine used an xtra editor for placing those points semi- automatic but in the end still by hand.
This time I want to automate everything so that I dont need any Xtra setup beforehead for the pathfinding- just a spline-path from within 3dsmax exported.

http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...e_pfind_02.jpg
because the vector slopes also define my screen hit area of where i can possibly walk to I use them as somewhat buttons as well (maybe that will be my first time using actually hitTest).
The red areas are of course not accessable and because of that in another layer and prompted by click as not accessable.
Anyway I have my click area with this but in fact it looks odd if the character moves to close around the corners (the character has some volume or radius) wich is the reason why I need to offset them from their tangent direction.

Just took a look at that animation demo, it's super man! I think you did a great job on the texturing.

added 3 display modes to better debug and check my invisible level elements:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...gine_modes.gif
pathfiding programming is going fine just need the time to finish. The pink squares are the node points for the pathfinding network. White squares are markers for the edges that are visible for the camera and thus should be included in the calculation.

Wow man! I'm really impressed by all the work I've seen in this thread. Really awesome!!! Keep it up man, this is something great! :thumbsup:

Great work as always Render;) I hope this project will be finished, as I cant wait to play it:)

(Flash is so much funnier than accounting! Oh.. maybe I can combine the two.. Note to self: next flash project could be a flash accounting program..)

a new update with a demo
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...nshot_r112.jpg
online demo

I disabled the pathfinding because it still causes some errors in my code (seems to be connected with certain camera objects and their number values). But I´ll include that in the next demo for sure.
What I wanted to show however in this demo is the walk path and the automatic switch of animations (2 for now).
Keys:
- [d] = debug mode
- [1]...[3] = switch between camera A,B and C

additional nodes:
If you loose focus of the flash movie,- it will switch to a idle mode,- to undo this click on the flash movie once to enable it again.

If the character should seem to slide rather than walk it means that your Computer or Browser (Firefox RC 3 [no 30 FPS limit] or Opera 9.5 recomended) doesn´t reach the optimal framerate of 37-40 fps. This is because the movement is not yet timed but rather framerate depending wich will be fixed of course.

I reduced the texture of the mother character in the demo simply because her texture was way to big (170 KB before, 36 KB now). All in all the whole demo takes about 353 KB alltogether (14 files: htm, xml, mesh, animation, textures)- wich is pretty much for what I targeted for a demo like this.

Pathfinding:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...athfinding.jpg
Like mentioned before if you hit the [d] key you can switch between the 3 display modes and see some of the debugging functionality,- like the path nodes.
The node network is calculated each time you switch the camera. Nodes are only taken into account if they are visible on screen mainly for performance reasons.
More updates with demos specificly regarding pathfinding are up next

//edit: stupid me forgot to include the url of the demo X)

Very nice :) I was wondering, how does the model self-occlude? I'm guessing a z-sort by face centroid?

yes face center,- anything else would be way over my head for now and to complex to archive anytime soon.

very nice indeed!

heh, its been a while since ive been on the flash scene, but i am way impressed by what ive been reading and looking at by everyone.

some very nice work, just be sure to keep it up.

ah.. minds me of the old days of 'alone in the dark' :)

the pathfinding is now as good as done :)
same url:
online demo
updates:
- propper pause mode: hover outside the flash container to pause,- hover back to gain focus and un-pause the game (no keys needed).
- pathfinding cursor: if you see a yellow crosshair it means you can click on that area to walk to it- any other area will be ignored.
- more detailed floor area (46 spline vertecies ), if you hit [d] you can see the details esspecially in camera A

some xtra info about the pathfinding,
even though I roughly explained it before, here is another attempt:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki..._xtra_info.gif
Nodes are calculated automaticly on each camera switch. If you click somewhere on the clickable area,
it tries to do the following:
1.) check if a direct path is possible (e.g no border crosses the direct path)
2.) if not find the closest entry and exit node
3.) if not, no path. If so find the closest path between entry node and exit node
4.) if pathes are found (returns multple soloutions, sort them by pixeldistance to be moved,- take the shortest one
5.) if that shortest one is found try to reduce nodes in the path at the end while still not crossing with any of the border vectors
6.) do the same for the beginning,- remove those nodes in the path result that can be skipped from the start
7.) return the path and unshift the start position at the beginning of the path array and push the target position at the end of the path array.

8.) execute the path : move the character from path point to path point till it reached the last point.

with about 92 path vectors it takes at maximum here (39 fps) about 190 miliseconds to find the quickest path (usually it then already found ~500 possible paths to be sorted) - but the average search time is about 30-80 miliseconds.
To reach these fast results I had to cheat a little bit by excluding on each new possible search those who would return a longer path (in terms of nodes stops) as what the shortest result used so far.

Wich means:
Once a possible path is found,- the next possible result can´t have more than the previous amount of node stops.
The advantage:
- really fast and quick on close distances
the con:
- can be a little bit slow with a hell lot nodes and a very long distance
- in some very rare cases not always resulting in the real shortest path,- but even then it´s not that much noticeable

Looks good Render! She did turn the "long way" at one point, when she should change, so if she had turned clockwise it would have been 30 degrees but she turned ccw and it was like 330 degrees. Of course this happened just when I switched camera, so that might have interfered too! Besides from that it looks pretty smooth, and when the masks get into work, it's gonna be fun to poke around :D

In the final version there will be just 3 cameras?I was thinking it would rotate like your portfolio
If its just 3, you could also do this with a lot of pre rendered images, inst it?I mean, it would be a hell of a big file but you could use copyPixels, it would be faster to get done,you should not worry about the 3d speed and other things...but i see that as you are doing that to learn 3d things that can be used in other things...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by renderhjs

4.) if pathes are found (returns multple soloutions, sort them by pixeldistance to be moved,- take the shortest one

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I think this should be path distance, as phreax pointed out, sometimes she walks in the wrong direction to get to the first node.

you could also maybe abstract your map, so you only check nodes in the same quadrant that you're in.

it might be possible to automate it, just thinking outloud a quadrant should contain at least 4 nodes, on each "edge" nodes, link to the adjacent quadrants edge nodes. I did this in my RTS pathfinder and it worked very well. Only nodes within the start and end quadrant need to be checked.

I also dont know why you need to recalculate the paths on every camera switch? aren't the nodes in 3D space? you should only have to calculate once.

anyway, top stuff as usual, keep it going :D

@phreax: regarding the rotation,- I know its because it was dirty implemented, like

PHP Code:

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rotation+= (targetRotation - rotation)/smoothness; 


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that way it gets interpolated quickly in a decimal system,- but that doesn´t work for the 360° shortest distance. Will be taken care of soon.

@Incrue: these are technology demo shots,- dont take anything you see here as final. Lots of cameras will be used in the end,- so lots of automatic switching.
The whole idea of this engine was to use static cameras,- and I dont intend to do otherwise.

@mr_malee: yes I rethought it might change that,- its just the way my code now is written comparing by array length was way easier- might fix that.

regarding quadrant,- dont think that will work for me,- what if the possible path exceeds the quadrant?,- this gets even more difficult with perspective absolutely varying cameras - each time you´ll get a different frustrum.

about recalculating: for now I implemented it like that,- thought in the beginning that there might be some dynamic stuff like door switching or some changes in the environment so that I need to recalulate it on demand. It´s not really slowing down right now - if it gets I´l might store them in a array.

updates
been fixing some of the pathfinding, there was a nasty spot (a friend spotted it for me) in the demo where the flash player would freeze for 15 seconds (infinity loop).
Today I have been trying to find a way to smooth my path´s to be taken so that it looks more natural.
So I made a concept of how it would be ideally:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...ed_path_03.gifthe idea is to make a curve in every corner using only certain percentage amount of the seperate strokes.
I what I discovered ended into a little demo:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...ed_path_04.gif
inside my engine it looks like this:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...ed_path_01.jpg


I have some ideas about improvements,- but first let me show you how I did it:

I´ve been playing with B-Splines and Subdevisions before but honestly never really understood the math of them- so usually I depended on some forumulas other already broken up already into usefull AS pieces.
But from analyzing some illustration like this and this, I managed to find a visual solloution myself, the way I usually solve math problems: by drawing them in flash or on paper and trying to solve them step by step.
here is how I did it:
http://www.renderhjs.net/bbs/flashki...ed_path_02.gifI hope that explains it pretty well. I did that basicly with every corner- so that my edgy pathfinding curve ended up into a curvy one.


as for improvements:
I do think that the percentage of each stroke should have a limited in real size units instead of percentage values of any stroke. This is because if you have a very long stroke followed by a rather smal but cornering one its very likely that my character will walk into walls or areas she shouldn´t supposed to be.
So in the end I´d check if the certage of a stroke would exceed the radius of the character and if so,- reset the corner side length to the character radius