PureBasic Forum

Hello guys, I will do here a simple game example for demonstrating my petty retro/strategical game engine.

It's completely written in PB and Fasm. I'm not new to pb but was never active in the
community except for two or three bug reports in the old forum.

The engine comes not as DLL but is controlled by DLL's. It is a plugin based approach:

First a scene is set up in the editor in which you can modify the map, create objects
and arrange them. It's possible to assign plugins for physics and ai handling to every
geometrical object. After that pressing the play button runs the scene and calls the
plugins in intervalls(for every frame or more).

The editor will be commercial and the free version is a bit restricted at some points.
The editor will reach the beta state in some weeks.

In this first example you can control a small tank with the keyboard and fire some rounds
into the terrain. I'm sorry that there are no sounds but I don't want to come into trouble
with copyright infringements. You can find the file pathes for the sounds in the plugin source codes.

To start the demo drag the demoScene.scn file over the freeViewer.exe and release the mouse button.

Download-Link:
http://www.imagenetz.de/fbfe89223/minigame.rar.html

Pretty cool, but runs jumpy on my laptop for some reason:

ASUS G74SX-TH71
I7-2.8Ghz Quad Core
8GB DDR 3 RAM
GeForce GTX 560M 3GB DDR5
WD 500 GB 7200RPM HDD


I will test on my desktop and see how it performs there when I get home. I will just edit this post with the results.

EDIT:

About the same on the desktop as well:

AMD Athlon 3GHX dual core
4GB DDR3
300 GB 7200 RPM HDD
ATI Radeon 4800 Series 1 GB DDR3

Thank you for testing. I have uploaded a better version here:
http://www.imagenetz.de/f6c592cfa/freeViewerB.exe.html

Please put the new viewer in the "minigame" folder.

The driving should look smoother. But now there is a small timing bug.
It will run a bit faster or slower depending on the cpu.



--------------------------
I forgot to mention that it's for windows only and that I'm still
using PB 4.00. So let me know if the code doesn't compile.

Yes, it does run better. Funny thing is, it seems to run faster on my PC at work which has an Intel Q45/Q43 Video. Weird that it runs better on that than an ATI 4800 series or NVidia GTX 560M, dunno why that us.

Sorry doesn't even start on Win7 x64 ...

@Num3

Wonder why that is ? My laptop & desktop at home are both Win 7 HP X64, it worked OK for me.

same here

I have win7 x64, too.
Sounds to me a bit that you just have double clicked the .exe.

Does a window open?

Please drag and drop a file other then the "demoscene.scn" over
the "freeviewer.exe".

If there comes no messagebox stating that the file can't be loaded
then the app crashes at startup. In that case I will upload a
version with some debug output.

Doing it this way it works!

Nice

CPU hits 100% use...

I seem to have spotted a couple of minor bugs... but nothing massively spectacular.

There seems to be a problem with shadows. if you have a large hill/mountain sometimes it will cast a shadow behind it right up to the edge of the screen and and as you get closer to the hill/mountain, the shadow will just disappear.

There is a diagonal line that is most noticeable in desert terrains, but once you spot one, you will see them everywhere you go. They seem to appear every time you get a new section of terrain being drawn. I am not sure if this is related to the shadow bug above? but, when you fire your tanks weapon, the line will disappear as soon as the projectile hits the ground. When you start moving again a line will appear on the next newly drawn terrain section.

These are pretty easy to reproduce at least

But, apart from that... Very nice scroxel, Very nice indeed

If you need screenshots/video to highlight the bugs, let me know and I'll put something online to show the issues.

Ash.

@lucifer
Thank you for testing and your offer to upload screens and videos
of the bugs. I know these visual artifacts very well. It's not all
perfect. There are some inaccuracys and there is much room for
improvements. But first I want to have a stable and usable engine
which is easy to manage.
The shadow is not updated for static geometry every frame. It is
possible but slows down rendering. The kind of scrolling used in
this demo doesn't assist precalculated ambient occlusion for the
terrain. But this is made up when the shell hits the ground. AO
is set to zero but the processing slighty darkens the ground.

@num3
that's fine

A new version is out. We have placed some red tanks in the terrain.
If you think that they are a too easy game for you then you find
the source file under "tank\redTankAI.pb" for improvements. You just
only need to compile this file as a DLL and replace the redTankAI.dll.

Download-Link: http://www.imagenetz.de/f2f36649e/minigame2.rar.html
Drag and drop the RedTanks!.scn file over the freeViewer.exe file.





In the next update we will add some instruments like compass and radar.

Hi

It's very interesting.

On my pc (windows xp), it works , but the texture (ground) is flickering when I move the tank.

With your editor, could we create other kinds of games, like rpg, adventure.. ?

Yes, the flickering is sometimes annoying. The bumpy height map and
the light settings in the demo are producing high contrasts. Try to
rotate the camera into a better angle (middle mouse button).

This engine is a good choice if you want to make a game\simulation
in isometric view. It enhances your world to 3D and you don't have
to care about z-buffers and other things that are hard to realise in 2D.

The realtime 3D editor is especially developed for game artists and game
level designers. It is not needed for programmers but of course very
comfortable as you can create and configure pathfinder and particle
emitter objects from there.

The demo presented here is thought to show the ease and speed of developing
a 3D game with this engine. For example if I now would want to have
a tank factory I only needed to create an entity, assign a model and an
event handler to it and place it somewhere on the map. In the event handler
a countdown has to be calculated. When that reaches zero a tank is cloned
from an existent one and sent a message to drive out of the factory.

Everything is modular and other programmers can (if you want to allow
it to them) replace your handlers with their own ones. Imagine a rts
game where you have replaced the ai handlers of the units with handlers
written from other coders. Then you can lean back and watch which algorithm
wins the fight.