Simple 3D Wireframe Engine

[xConStruct]

Hey all, I'm new here!

I decided to try and build a very simple 3D engine, because the zen does not provide any functions and I wanted to check performance on this. With this, you can draw colored lines in 3D space, to build cubes or other simple objects.

My example app creates the the three axes, a gray cube and some tower-object. To rotate the camera, use the touch screen - Exit is of course on the home-button. There are some screenshots below, including the zip-archive - you can view the code directly on my GitHub repo. Don't wonder about the Dharma-thing, it's some class-based GUI-framework I'm currently developing.

Well, I didn't test the engine with large amounts of objects, but I suspect that the limit really depends on the drawing performance of the x-fi 2.
Don't think it is possible to draw solid surfaces, because we can't draw triangles with the API - and simulating them via lots of lines would possibly fail because of the CPU.

I hope, someone finds this useful or has ideas on how to improve 3D on the zen

[RobertsAccount]

Well done! Let's hope we can push the power of the X-Fi2's CPU slightly harder... Who knows what might come next!

[CleverBullet]

If we get texture suppot, could we see doom come out of this?

[nikc4]

Games show up for a player and everyone's first thought is: DOOM

[CleverBullet]

well why not?

[keirien]

Originally Posted by CleverBullet

If we get texture suppot, could we see doom come out of this?

Im with cleverbullet we should a full 3d doom game with good graphics and everything

[ThievingSix]

Originally Posted by xConStruct

Don't think it is possible to draw solid surfaces, because we can't draw triangles with the API - and simulating them via lots of lines would possibly fail because of the CPU.

Most likely, no DOOM.

[ZaPx64]

I guess the Zen already uses triangles with OpenGL of course without 3D acceleration. What's needed for a 3D rendering system is a texture or an imagebuffer where the pixels can be read and converted to texels which is impossible with lua because there is no buffering and no function to read a pixel color. Beside all that, the compuations that are needed to render a 3D scene are more complex than a simple text-editor - which laggs

[CleverBullet]

Personally i don't think texture support is possible either, although it would be real nice.

A game stemming directly from this could be that 3D wireframe tanks game. it's on the internets somewhere, but i can't seem to find it.

EDIT: Found It! http://www.atari.com/arcade/battlezone

[kushndonuts]

Excellent!

[cilmaviel]

this has some huge potential. textures may be possible if we bug creative enough and they add the ability to distort drawing images (after all they draw images at a rotation in the pic viewer).
also if you add...

for i = 1, 1000 do
    control.read()
end

in the touch.move() part of the elseif in the core file then it will respond a lot faster. the read cue gets clogged pretty fast.

[xConStruct]

Thanks for the tip! Didn't think of that!

I'm now using a while-loop to process all events in the queue, and only after that update the screen.

while(control.read() == 1) do
    handleEvents()
end
updateScreen()

Some affine transformation function would be nice, but most likely this won't happen ...

[Tetrajak]

I've bugged creative to add the Lua-GD library to their interpreter. What that would mean for this app is that you could have textures with the copy-transform functions available in the library.

I heard my request was forwarded to the 'relevant development department'. I've asked them to give me the email of said department so I can communicate directly with them. Hopefully I can get this library added and then this already awesome engine will have textures as well!

[RobertsAccount]

Originally Posted by Tetrajak

Hopefully I can get this library added and then this already awesome engine will have textures as well!

Nice one! Let's hope so, textures would just be the icing on the cake...

[BattleBrat]

could the arcade game "Battlezone" be made?

*EDIT* already mentioned

[3vil7ree]

Erm... Elite on Zen X-Fi2?

[wykasz]

Whell, today i did some test, of that code, results are quite good, but unfortunately to bad to create advanced project.
I was able to show 1323 ( one thousand three houndrets ..) lines (single line was about 1-5 unit long) with fps about 3-4...
for me it maybe enough.
I'm plannig to write advanced math tool, with plotting a 3D charts.

To test that script i created a simple math function ( f: R^2 - > R f(x,y)=z ).
I made calculations for 441 points, after that i used calculated values to create a simple representation of 3D chart. Actually, i drawed a net of lines between neighboring points.
I calculated about 1323 lines at all.

When i limited number of points to 111 (333 lines) it was possible to achive about 8-9 fps.
961 points (2883 lines) - 1.5-2.5 fps
1681 pionts (5043 line) - 1 fps
3721 points (11163 lines) - 1/3 - 1/2 fps

So it is possible to show squite complex scenes, but animation....
For me, for some time it should be enough.

I figured out that everything depends on:
- lenght of lines
- camDist parameter with relation with other parameters
- of course quantity of lines


Sorry for my english.
wykasz

[Redwolfhome]

Originally Posted by cilmaviel

this has some huge potential. textures may be possible if we bug creative enough and they add the ability to distort drawing images (after all they draw images at a rotation in the pic viewer).
also if you add...

for i = 1, 1000 do
    control.read()
end

in the touch.move() part of the elseif in the core file then it will respond a lot faster. the read cue gets clogged pretty fast.

Mh but so the screen will just update if there is any actions and so you cant create a game because the player have to touch or something to enable actions and so there can´t be monsters or something else...
And also its nearly impossible to write a real 3d game with Lua because lua is very small and it would be take years. I and Jbob are writing Pingus and the project start one year ago...

[rvb123]

Originally Posted by CleverBullet

Personally i don't think texture support is possible either, although it would be real nice.

A game stemming directly from this could be that 3D wireframe tanks game. it's on the internets somewhere, but i can't seem to find it.

EDIT: Found It! http://www.atari.com/arcade/battlezone

I would love to see something like that! or 3d flight sim. anyone?!?!

[jameswalker101]

Everyone has been talking about 3D for the zen... ITS HERE!