Real town simulator.

[djlins]

Hi there, I am new to the forum and to TV3D and I thought I would take this oppurtunity to talk a little bit about what I want to use it for and also use this as a chance to kind of introduce myself a bit to everybody on here.

My history is I love 3D graphics. For my Computer Science Dissertation (10 years ago now) I attempted a real time ray tracer using Borland C++ and a DX 80 machine.
As you can imagine to properly raytrace a small part of the screen on a computer that slow didnt really give an environment that I think any of you would find at all impressive, but it taught me all about the bare bones of a 3D world.
Since then my work involved chasing the money and that took me right away from the 3D graphics industry, until I now have an oppurtunity to jump right back into it.

I'm now more of a C# fan and that reason has made me 95% sure I will be using TV3D  for my implementation as I have had a lot of niggly hassles with other engines and their C# wrappers.

Anyways my project. I intend to write a 3D simulation of an area that is recognisable as a real world area allowing full exploration (walk, run and fly). I have seen some great ideas on this forum to help me, from the laser guided city creator, to easy terrain creators, but for now I think I am best going to an area and clicking away with my camera for the textures and building up the environment myself. I think I will use arial photography to position things at a best guess so it doesnt have to be too exact.
I have also seen on here some great examples of custom landscape editors and some peoples advice is 'Write your own' to get a good idea of what TV3D can do, so I may be pestering a few of you who have already written these to give me a few hints on user interfaces and tricks for this.

Ultimately this project should run for a good 12 months, so hopefully I will get to know a few of you, and become a bit of a regular on here. I will leave this here for now and post up some screens of what I have got as my system progresses to give people something to see / play with and give feedback.

Well I had best leave this large post here for now, I'll speak to some of you in the future I'm sure.

Cheers,

DJLins.

[Raine]

Welcome on the boards and good luck with your project. ^^

[djlins]

Thanks for that,

yeah things are under way now. Although at the moment my time seems to be spent on what tools to use with it.

I have dropped sketchup for its cartoony effects and am now looking at Milkshape.

I have also dropped PnPTerrainCreator because I want to kind of put on a bitmap texture so I can position my terrain correctly but I cannot seem to get the space down to a 100x100 metre area, and the bitmap tiles rather than stretches. So I am today looking at L3DT.

My final decision is to see whether to use 6.2 or start the project in 6.5 and use its special features (I was really impressed with those reflective water effects of 6.5). But I dont want to end up getting into the whole open release argument so have decided to blinker myself from 6.5 and just stick with 6.2 for now. It would probably be best as well seeing as I am a newbie to this and documentation is definately a good thing heheh.


Anyway thanks again for the welcome.

[Raine]

That's what I did, more or less, I started with 6.2 and upgraded to 6.5 when I had the possibility. 6.2 is a bit outdated, but it's still great to start a "test" project.

[djlins]

just to double check tho.

Even though you have moved to 6.5, you  are not actually allowed to commercially release anything with it yet are you?


Cheers,

Lins.

[newborn]

not until it gets released

[java]

6.2 is actually pretty powerful if you make good use of some features like rendersurfaces and TVInternals access... it can actually support a good number of effects and even 1.1 pixel and vertex shaders! (please correct me if im wrong). I am using it to develop a clone of valve's portal and I find it works very well and does exactly what I want without complaining and at a high FPS...

-java

[Eric]

I would just start with 6.5 - the benefits are excessive over 6.2, and if you spend all your time on 6.2 and make an advanced project, you'll have to spend a bunch of time porting it anyway.  By the time you would want to release your project, I bet 6.5 will be out/in open beta and you could release anyway.  Just my 2 cents

[vsleepy]

Do it in 6.2, there is no guarantee that 6.5 will be in a 'released' state within in a year (or two).
vs