Realtime Engines

[Anonymous]

I’ve just put together an interactive that uses 3dsmax to generate a frontend for projection from web content, but the performance is godawful.

Does anyone else have any suggestions for doing 3d interactives? I’ve looked at a few options but all of them have been unsatisfactory;

1. The Havok Plugin for Director – It gets really slow when you start adding lingo script and I’ve heard that Havok won’t be doing more support for it (it’s not even clear if macromedia are going to continue developing director).

2. Derivative Touch – Hard to find, expensive and the houdini-style scripting looks tricky

3. Unreal Engine – don’t know too much about this; is it developer friendly? What’s the licencing like? I’ve read some interesting articles about people using it to do music videos.

I could start doing OpenGL/DirectX code, but I really want to devote my energy to the content, rather than start from scratch, translating cylinders, etc.

[Anonymous]

On option 1;

It has not been clear for 10 years if acromedia are to continue developing Director – yet it’s been revamped many times.

If you find Director 3D slowing down with lingo, mabe some code optimisations are required (in-build behaviousr can be un-weildly and bloated – quite often you’re better off rolling your own.

Have a look at Mal’s 3D stressball game to get an idea of performance. Also, and Qs on Director 3D, he’s your only man!

Peter

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the update, perhaps I should go back and look at director again, I just don’t want to be bogged down in optimising from the very start of the project.

I appreciate that the havok engine is fast, but after getting away from years of using director, I’m not enthusiastic about going back to their, shall we say ‘idiosyncratic’ or ‘organically developed’, script language

[Anonymous]

By the way, where can I find a demo of the stressball game?

[Anonymous]

You can download the game here. Once downloaded you will be asked if you wish to purchase the game or if you would like to play the demo. That simple really.

[Anonymous]

> Does anyone else have any suggestions for doing 3d interactives? I’ve looked at a few options but all of them have been unsatisfactory;

For the web, you’ve already mentioned Director ( which is pretty good for generic solutions ).

There’s also Axel http://www.mindavenue.com, Anark http://www.anark.com, Virtools http://www.virtools.com, and a few other less popular ones.

> If you find Director 3D slowing down with lingo, mabe some code optimisations are required (in-build behaviousr can be un-weildly and bloated – quite often you’re better off rolling your own.

That’s definitely true… Director and 3D can be surprisingly fast, it’s a matter of using Lingo to tell the engine to do as much as possible, and not trying to code too many complex operations in Lingo.

> Have a look at Mal’s 3D stressball game to get an idea of performance. Also, and Qs on Director 3D, he’s your only man!

I don’t know about that! :) If you have any questions, send them over or post them to a new Director 3D thread and I’m sure someone will be able to give you a hand.

> By the way, where can I find a demo of the stressball game?

There’s also a web demo at…

http://www.candomultimedia.com/games.htm

You can also find some non-game examples of real-time 3D here…

http://www.candomultimedia.com/demos.htm

and…

http://www.candomultimedia.com/learning.htm

( this includes an online DNA / Protein viewer that we created to stress test the 3D engine )

Hope that helps…
Mal

[Author]

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