As you may or may not know, within a year we will probably all be able to make 3D/2.5D games in MMF2, as some really promising 3D extensions are in the works (and some have been in the works for years). What will the effect of this be on the community? Are you going to use it? Will we have threads about how to make skinmapped models? Will our games be better? Let's discuss!
Will be awesome to see more 3D click games, although Im not sure how many people would make anything I particularly like, judging on the amount of Zombie platform games and other random things I see.
I for one look forward to seeing some 3D extensions cause I've already got some mildly extensive knowledge of how to model in 3ds Max. My concern is that the extensions will require a significant amount of knowledge over how to use it. Knowledge that everyone who knows it, insists that it's obvious and very easy, meanwhile anyone who doesn't know it, looks at it with drew sliding out the side of their mouth like "Uh..."
All and all though, it should be good. People should try to be well acquainted with making a solid static 2D game though before attempting to take on 3D, mainly for the strategy of taking on a limitation and explore how far it can be pushed. Otherwise you're probably not likely to explore 3D.
Maybe, I'm more interested in 3D effects within a 2D plane (as Castlevania and New Mario DS games seem to handle quite well). As for 3D games? Meh!
Old 3D doesn't look good at all. And without post-processing then they would look quite dated especially when making a game set on a 3D plane.
It greatly depends on the quality and the ease of use. If it cannot do anything more than display simple 3D shapes, or if it has the nastiness of Klik OpenGL, then it will seem a lot like this recent "revival" of 3D television. Old hat with a new paint job.
I find it hard to imagine anything in extension form being as versatile as MMF3D would be. You'd be working with 3D during runtime, but not in the frame editor.
I'm still very excited though. If I can use it, I'll try to use it.
3D will eventualy catch up to Click(hopefully)and being able to dsplay at least 32-bit 3D would be fine by me. Finally having an actually simple 3-D game creator will shut out 3D Game Studio, Dark Basic, 3D gamemaker, and maybe people will stop using C++ who are struggling to learn to program 3D games.
I wouldn't mind if it didn't show up either. The possibilities are already endless with 2 dimensions so why would we NEED more.
MMF2 really isn't built for 3D. It doesn't matter how powerful these hypothetical extensions may be, MMF2 just sucks for 3D design. Even MMF3D will suck for 3D design, as Clickteam will probably just update their MMF2 code to tack on basic 3D design, as opposed to completely rewriting the program to handle a 3D design environment from the ground up.
MMF2 3D extensions will be severely limited by MMF2.
MMF3D will be severely limited by itself.
I'd welcome any extension that lets me produce a simple 3D game, or an interactive presentation like the one you're making, Hayo. My hopes wouldn't be higher than that, though.
The extensions would have to communicate with the HWA build of MMF2 if it's going to be any good. A separated runtime will always lead to instabilities.
Originally Posted by Dr. James MD Maybe, I'm more interested in 3D effects within a 2D plane (as Castlevania and New Mario DS games seem to handle quite well). As for 3D games? Meh!
Old 3D doesn't look good at all. And without post-processing then they would look quite dated especially when making a game set on a 3D plane.
Woo that is exactly what I intend to look into it for.
I actually love the way "old" 3d looks. DS sometimes looks like "old" 3d just more readable.
Old 3D is like old pixel art. The limitations gave it something of an artistic charm if done right. With today's 3D, it looks fantastic however most people resort to aiming for realism and quite frankly, I'm tired of seeing realism. I want to see good 3D, not realistic 3D. Perfect examples of that would include Viva Pinata, Little Big Planet, Team Fortress 2, Boarderlands, and a variety of other games that hold a stylistic charm and use the power given to them to aid the style in making it cleaner, sharper, and room for higher post-production standards. Crysis looks good, but the industry needs to stop trying to aim for realism.
Hmm, I always though old 3D had a terrible muddy quality, it's very hard to make things out and perspective is usually wrong. Games like Doom and Duke3D were visually very limited and haven't held their own (worse still; Wolfenstein). It's nice playing them with new engines though.
Personally I think it took 3D a very long time to look great.
Yeah, it's true. You figure with 2D, all they add to do was add more color and the ability to handle more objects at once. Bam, it looked good. It's easier for pixel artists to draw with limited colors then it is for 3D modelers to model with limited faces.
Heh yea, in Jedi Knight 2 (playing at the moment) faces there are just flat planes with a terrible texture on them.
But when 3D is done well you have Team Fortress 2. I played through Crysis over the summer on medium-high settings and it looked superb, just completely lacked character or personality.
Thought the game itself was fairly brilliant though.
I find myself liking real old 3D, from Stunt Race FX 3D to Quake 1 3D. Kind of lost interest since the texture filter. For example Metal Gear solid on the px1 did a lot to me, it has a charm in all it's muddy pixelmessness, gives it a dreadful atmosphere the later MGS games and de GC remake totally lack for me (Not counting MGS4).
Originally Posted by SiLVERFIRE Old 3D is like old pixel art. The limitations gave it something of an artistic charm if done right. With today's 3D, it looks fantastic however most people resort to aiming for realism and quite frankly, I'm tired of seeing realism. I want to see good 3D, not realistic 3D. Perfect examples of that would include Viva Pinata, Little Big Planet, Team Fortress 2, Boarderlands, and a variety of other games that hold a stylistic charm and use the power given to them to aid the style in making it cleaner, sharper, and room for higher post-production standards. Crysis looks good, but the industry needs to stop trying to aim for realism.
I agree with this post. There are places for realism, and places for not-so-realism. There are plenty of non-realistic games, but it seems most of them are either shovelware or are deemed as kiddy games. I want some more high-poly cartoon games! (Mario on the Wii 2 will be awesome.)
As for old 3D having a certain charm, I think it's important to separate what you're thinking about. For some reason I don't typically think of games like Doom as 3D. There's nothing wrong with those games, but I think of them as "2D with special effects." N64 and PS1 era 3D is where most of the charm comes in. Banjo Kazooie was gorgeous, Mario 64 felt like an alternate dimension, and a lot of PS1 games (that I never got to play ) like Spyro and Crash were games, not fancy-pants rendering engine advertisements.
I started Sim & Game Dev II this quarter, and after using Torque for a little bit, I came to the conclusion that MMF3D would kick butt and take names. (I reached this conclusion because Torque was actually pretty great, if that makes any sense.)
Yeah I agree. I was talking about the old real 3D games, not raycaster games and such. I liked the way N64 games did a lot with low-poly, just hated those small, filtered textures right from the start. I remember back then I had a PSX and everybody around me an N64. They were bashing my system for being blocky and I was bashing their system for being blurry. And only having 3 games that are good.
Anyway, I plan to fiddle around a bit with 3D in click, see if I can translate my style to oldtimey 3D. I find 3D modeling to be a bitch tho.
Just revisiting this thread. Has there been any progress with the 3D extensions lately? I just played through Judith by Stephen Lavelle and Terry Cavanagh (not a klik game) and would love to make something even as simple (graphically) as that.
Originally Posted by Dr. James MD Hmm, I always though old 3D had a terrible muddy quality, it's very hard to make things out and perspective is usually wrong. Games like Doom and Duke3D were visually very limited and haven't held their own (worse still; Wolfenstein). It's nice playing them with new engines though.
Personally I think it took 3D a very long time to look great.
When I say old 3-d I think of DS rpgs, old ps1 rpgs (some had really cool looking 3d models and such), and games like unreal tournament. I love how the mountains in UT look for some reason. I'm sure you know, but textures play a major role.
As for "old 3D", i totally loved it, even the poor draw distance and muddy visuals. To me, MGS1 had so much more charm than the cleaner, sharper MGS2. I also loved Quake 1's visuals and i think they looked better than Quake 2's (even the brownness of it looked bettter!).
You know, for me the 32/64bit generations hardly counts as old 3d. I was playing 3d games back in the mid to late 80's like driller or mercenary on my Amstrad cpc.
Driller (flat shaded polygons)
Mercenary (Vectors!)
For me the 32/64 bit generations are the start of that push towards realism everyone seems to be bored with nowadays. (Tell that to Call of Duty Modern warfare 2 owners lol)
oh and to be on topic for a small part of my post at least, I will use it. I'd love to make a nice open 3d platform game like say, Sonic's world on Sonic Jam or the Spyro the dragon games.
I totally lol'd at the people who said MMF2's event system wasn't fit for 3D or that "mmf would need a proper function system and local variables ". Seriously people, have ever designed a 3D game before ?
And "The possibilities are already endless with 2 dimensions so why would we NEED more". That's just not true.
Adding a new dimension opens a host of new possibilities. You can try to emulate 3D using basic 2D drawing operations, but it's obviously not the same thing and doesn't work all the time. You can make 2D racing games and top down shooters, but you can't make a game like Doom or need for speed.
The problem with having MMF3D or something like that is that it would need a decent engine and it would need to be updated regularly because unlike 2D, 3D engines can age pretty fast. I believe this was the reason why Clickteam didn't work on this before (and I doubt they are now), along with the fact that as far as I know Clickteam don't have any member of their short staff with experience in coding 3D engines. I know there was jamagic but that was over 10 years ago, things changed a lot since then so I'm pretty sure they would need to hire one or two 3D programmers.
but oh well, I'm still confident sooner or later they will try again, and I'm sure it will bring a huge lot of new klikers.
edit: thinking of it, the HWA version of MMF2 uses DirectX which means they do have some experience with 3D since all the hardware accelerated functions of DX use 3D. A glimpse of hope
they can always use an opensource 3d renderer like ogre or irrlicht. both of which are updated to be current and are also crossplatform (crossplatform mmf3d anyone?). so whats the problem?
Mmmh that could a decent solution, it would save them some work time and money, but they would need to know the engines very well and have (or hire someone with) some knowledge and experience working with the chosen 3d graphic engine. Personally I'd go for Irrlicht, Ogre's art pipeline is crap imo.
Actually, I COULD ask Matt to release the extensions he did. It is not perfect performance-wise and won't work with any exporter, but it is fun to play around with.
But anyway, I wish this thread hadn't died. I love old school 3D effects whether they're made with stacking and scaling 2D sprites or using rudimentary 3D engines with no texture filtering. That pixel art 3D cyberpunk game by Sinclair Strange looked amazing.
Did someone say fakey 3D-like effects using sprite scaling?
Here's something I toyed with a while back:
It uses the Text Blitter as a base for the tiles (of course), then changes their size using a shader, gives it that weird, fake-y depth using another shader, incorporates the sprites using a third shader, and then smooshes it all back together with a fourth shader. It's a big-ol' shader sandwich, and the result is kinda neat, but it's also got its drawbacks.
You can already see that the extending the tiles leaves these big-ol' gaps in the top/bottom and sides, and since it's all just the same tile repeated over and over, the only way to distinguish the top/bottom and sides is by making the tile with distinct edges, like the test tile here. This also means there'd be no texture variation on those surfaces.
Also, since for some reason you can't use the Text Blitter's "callback" at the same time as a shader, I had to resort to some clunky methods to get the tile data to display and update, which means that the framerate suffers pretty badly the more layers you give it in the back (what I've got here is pretty much the limit on depth), and also that I can't use anything beyond the normal/extended ASCII set for tiles, which, removing the unusable ones, ends up being about 220 tiles.
However, it DOES also have support for non-box-shaped tiles. Those weird purple tiles are testing that, where each "layer" of depth can be turned on or off. I just never made any tools to make these weird tiles a thing, so there's only the test garbage.
I don't know if I'll ever use it for anything, but it was a lot of fun to make!
Fifth, that's very impressive! I also remember Rolleroo which had a similar 3D look, although I don't think you were using shaders for that. I've never used text blitter for tiles, or shaders, so a lot of the explanation went over my head. I'm very impressed with the colour blending (is that what it's called?) that adjusts the shade of the tiles depending on their z-distance from the camera. Is that done with a shader or using some other Fifth magic? Good to see you're still using MMF!
Yeah, the Z-axis color fade is done in the shaders.
Glad you remember Rolleroo! I was going for something similar at the time, but had no idea how to use shaders, so that one was all Text Blitter tricks. Which meant I could adjust the size of the tiles, but not resize the tile's graphics. So any time a tile got smaller in that game, the edges would slowly be cropped away. It was kinda weird. It also had a ton of other issues.
And it's MMF (or CF) forever! ...since I don't think I'd be able to learn anything else, heh.
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If I can use it, I'll try to use it.
Edited by OMC
N64 and PS1 era 3D is where most of the charm comes in. Banjo Kazooie was gorgeous, Mario 64 felt like an alternate dimension, and a lot of PS1 games (that I never got to play 
) like Spyro and Crash were games, not fancy-pants rendering engine advertisements.
