Cross-Platform A3D nGine

[technomage]

Hi

I just wanted to let people know what I've been up to for the last couple of weeks. I've been converting the A3D nGine to work under Delphi and Kylix using JEDI-SDL. I've made some good progress, if anyone has any comments or want to help let me know. :)

Dean

PS Sorry if the images are bit big

http://www.cerebral-bicycle.co.uk/images/A3Dngine/a4dq3developwt.png
http://www.cerebral-bicycle.co.uk/images/A3Dngine/a4dq3developwt2.png
http://www.cerebral-bicycle.co.uk/images/A3Dngine/a4dheightmapmult.png

[freedelphi]

Very COOL! :o

[andygfx]

Nice JOB .... very nice ....

[technomage]

The work on this Cross Platform A3D nGine is continuing. I now have a working Particle system ,MD3 model loader, Scene loader, Landscape Loader and rtg loaders. But there is still some work to do on the collision modules and a few other classes, for example the new version of the Q3 bsp loader needs to be implemented. :)

One thing I have had to do is modify the engine to load the directory paths from the config file. This way we can replace the path delimiters depending on the platform we are using, is should also give developers a bit more flexability when developing with the engine.

Unless there are any objections I would like to commit this version of the A3D nGine to the JEDI-SDL project cvs repository.


Dean

[andygfx]

Yes, of course, you make commit A3D as CVS at JEDI-SDL.

[savage]

Hi Dean, Andy & the A3D team,
Ideally it would be great if there was only 1 code base that was being worked on, as this would avoid duplication of work if someone adds a cool feature to either of the 2 versions.

Andy and the rest of the A3D team, what are your thoughts on this. Will you continue work on the Windows only version, or do you think it would be a good idea to only have one unified code base that supports Windows, Linux and soon MacOS X.

Keep in mind that the core engine will always be pure OpenGL only the window rendering context is handled by JEDI-SDL similar to what GLUT does, but I think ( humbly ) JEDI-SDL is more flexible.

[andygfx]

1) Base code from my page is good for novice and beginers.
2) YES. JEDI-SDL more flexible, but it is for advanced programmers.

Just now i dont now, what is better. One or two base code. It remains to be seen. I do waiting for sentence.

[technomage]

The code hasn't changed that much from the base code, for example the A3D_Screen class has changed internally , but I have made sure that the interfaces have remained the same, but with a few extra methods.

The only real difference is that the SDL version is console based rather than form based, so the keyboard and mouse handling is different. But apart from that is't basically the same. Other changes have been made to support cross platform loading of files and to use SDL_Image for loading textures (the SDL versin supports png, jpg, bmp, tga). I have also tried in places to allow the engine to run of systems that don't support the Multi Texture extension (one of my test machines doesn't support this).

If you like I can send you the code I have, with a colsone demo so you can see the differences and evaluate it.

Dean