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peterbone
11-06-2003, 01:22 PM
I am writing a 3D rendering engine from scratch - ie, it doesn't use OpenGL, DirectX or anything. It's pretty useful as it is but I'm still developing it. I thought it might be useful for anyone wanting to create a 3D game without using external programs like OpenGL. You can download the code with example projects here
http://www.geocities.com/peter_bone_uk/engine3d

I made this simple example with it
http://www.markthomasonline.co.uk/videos/peter/clubsmall.gif

Traveler
12-06-2003, 07:45 AM
Quite impressive. :D
Looking forward to the texture mapping?

I was wondering though. Must of us have these insanely expensive 3D graphics cards to speed up the Opengl and Direct3D programs.
As great as your demos are, do you think it is possible to build a large scene as well, without having having the benefit of these graphic cards?

Alimonster
12-06-2003, 08:46 AM
That's not the point, Traveler - it's just a fun thing to do :).

It is possible to get good results for software renderers, but it's quite difficult. There's a bloke who hangs around gamedev as "c0d1f1ed" (or something like that) and as "Nick" over at Flipcode. He's heavily into this stuff and has a Quake 3 renderer with bilinear filtering, per-pixel mipmapping and all sorts of crazy stuff (in crazily optimized assembly, though). Also, a sofware renderer has been released for Unreal Tournament 2003(!).

Software rendering ain't gonna be nearly as fast as hardware for quite a while, but it's fun! In a few generations time we'll have CPUs that are meaty enough to do this sort of thing without problems.

Also: nice work peterbone.

EDIT: moved to Your Projects forum.

peterbone
12-06-2003, 12:21 PM
I'm not sure how much of the graphics card it uses because I don't know what the exact functions of the graphics card are but obviously it doesn't use the graphics card as much as OpenGL or suchlike. My main reason for writing it was basically because it was interesting but then I realised that it was probably quick enough to actually be useful. I'm not sure if there's any other delphi code freely available to do Gouraud shading at speed.
I like the idea of making a whole game from scratch because then I can be confident when I say 'I made this'.