Project Concepts

[⑨]

Unity maybe?

[jesseoffy]

what does dim3 lack for making these outdoor worlds, Oddity?

[DomReardon]

@ Dom: I like the concept, and Kuu started off the same way  (minus the artstyle).  One pitfall you must avoid, however, is that dim3 is not designed for the type of world you intend to create.

True, but ATM what's the better free alternative?

To be honest, I wouldn't switch away from Dim3 even if there was a better free alternative, it's more about seeing what I can do with Dim. For now I'm just concentrating on making some natural outdoor environments, the concept and plot are written around that plan and can be changed or entirely re-written if need be.

giant crab

Do you have to flip it over on it's back and then attack it's weak point for massive damage?

Hint: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g1fr5vk72M


Looks very nice though. Add some vegetation!

Hehe, yup, vegetation comes next.

Thanks to everyone for the kind words and encouragement!

[Wendell890]

I think that you should make a Showcase topic for this  .

[Jerion]

Unity maybe?

Not free last time I checked.

what does dim3 lack for making these outdoor worlds, Oddity?

Dim3 plays nicely with closed hallways and the like; the sort of thing you see in the early Countdown screens. Open environments slow it down, because everything is in view all the time. You should take what Oddity says about performance with a tiny grain of salt though, since he works on a dinosaur of a computer. 

[_Aaron_]

Unity maybe?

Not free last time I checked.

what does dim3 lack for making these outdoor worlds, Oddity?

Dim3 plays nicely with closed hallways and the like; the sort of thing you see in the early Countdown screens. Open environments slow it down, because everything is in view all the time. You should take what Oddity says about performance with a tiny grain of salt though, since he works on a dinosaur of a computer. 

It's free. Very free. Sadly, if you want to make a nextgen looking game, you're going to have to buy pro. The free version doesn't have full-screen shader fx.

[⑨]

Unity maybe?

Not free last time I checked.

You haven't checked in a long time then. >_<

[Patrick Smith]

Looks very good, Dom.

Giant Crab... oh, I remember an old movie that was about these guys who escaped some prison on a hot air balloon and reached some island where animals were gigantic: they met giant birds, crab, bees, etc. and had to fight them off. That would be cool if you had some big animals. Sorry I can't remember the name...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055207/

[Alexander Smith]

Well, Unity Indie is free now, but it has no animator, editor, or anything like that.

[ggadwa]

Unity maybe?

Not free last time I checked.

what does dim3 lack for making these outdoor worlds, Oddity?

Dim3 plays nicely with closed hallways and the like; the sort of thing you see in the early Countdown screens. Open environments slow it down, because everything is in view all the time. You should take what Oddity says about performance with a tiny grain of salt though, since he works on a dinosaur of a computer. 

That's not true, but you have to understand how dim3 optimized.

If you have fog on, any mesh that outside the fog outer radius is eliminated.
If you have any breaks (like ridges, mountains) use areas to do eliminations.
Anything outside the view port is also eliminated.

If everything is one big mesh, though, that'll be a problem.

If somebody has a project that's extra slow and a big outdoor area, send it in to me and I'll see what I can do to optimize it.

[>] Brian

[DomReardon]

Unity maybe?

Not free last time I checked.

what does dim3 lack for making these outdoor worlds, Oddity?

Dim3 plays nicely with closed hallways and the like; the sort of thing you see in the early Countdown screens. Open environments slow it down, because everything is in view all the time. You should take what Oddity says about performance with a tiny grain of salt though, since he works on a dinosaur of a computer. 

That's not true, but you have to understand how dim3 optimized.

If you have fog on, any mesh that outside the fog outer radius is eliminated.
If you have any breaks (like ridges, mountains) use areas to do eliminations.
Anything outside the view port is also eliminated.

If everything is one big mesh, though, that'll be a problem.

If somebody has a project that's extra slow and a big outdoor area, send it in to me and I'll see what I can do to optimize it.

[>] Brian

I've tried some pretty large areas now and still get a good frame rate I haven't even started splitting meshes up yet. It seems to me that Dim3 is coping really well with large outdoor areas these days. I don't fully understand the Shaders verses Fixed Pipeline thing yet, as far as I can tell so far shaders are a program that replaces the fixed pipeline which is a hard coded thing that deals with calling and displaying graphics. I may have misunderstood this but I think what I'm doing is all Fixed Pipeline stuff which I'm guessing is making a pretty big difference in frame rate. Lights also seem to be a big killer so I'm just using 2.
I'd be really interested to hear more about the possible drawbacks and pitfalls of trying to make large outdoor areas with Dim3, I have to say that so far it's been coping very well, of course my landscapes are still very sparse so, we'll see how I go.

[ggadwa]

Large outdoor maps are probably a good bet for using the light maps, and just using a live light here and there for effect.

[>] Brian

[Oddity(007)]

It has nothing to do with performance, when I made large maps for Kuu, I had the highest frame rates than any of my current maps.  Counter intuitively, large maps are easier to optimize.  The issue comes with the editor, which is designed pretty much solely for indoor scenes.

Edit:  Aaron may remember my massive forest scene that I achieved a solid 173fps.

[ggadwa]

It has nothing to do with performance, when I made large maps for Kuu, I had the highest frame rates than any of my current maps.  Counter intuitively, large maps are easier to optimize.  The issue comes with the editor, which is designed pretty much solely for indoor scenes.

What are the problems, I'm doing a lot of work in Editor right now and I'll try to catch these.  Go add them to the "to do" list and I'll look into them.

[>] Brian

[.Minimum]

Right, so TakeCover is getting kinda boring. I need a side-project to distract myself so I can come back to it with fresh eyes. Everyone I know plays HoN, which is like a rip-off of dota, so y'know what I'mma make a dota ripoff too. In Dim3. In Space. With lazorz.

Are you like?