Rumblesushi3D demos

[rumblesushi]

Still in alpha stages, but I thought I would show some demos anyway.

This is my first AS3 project, but something I've been planning for over a year, to build my own fast 3D engine from scratch.

So far I've mainly been working hardcore on speed testing, making it run as fast as possible. My next step is to import 3D models, add a mode 7 engine, and importantly, make some more cameras and a fast physics engine. I think camerawork is very important in 3D, so I'd like to make a slick tracking cam, hover cam, etc. Luckily I already have a 2D physics engine, it's just a matter of porting it to 3D.

The controls are like a FPS game, so you look with the mouse, and move with the arrow keys.

PS - you can do something other than just walk around in the gallery room, see if you can find what it is ;)

http://rumblesushi.com/gallery.html

http://rumblesushi.com/cinema.html

Cheers,
Joe

[shane-c]

That's looking very slick man, nice work. It was super smooth for me, and looked sharp. I'm excited to see more. :beer:

[glosrfc]

PS - you can do something other than just walk around in the gallery room, see if you can find what it is ;)


Paint your own Banksyesque images on the wall?
Looks good...nice eery footstep sounds too, although it would be better if they ceased when you reach a wall and can't go any further forward.

[rumblesushi]

Shane, thanks, I'm excited to make more too :D Especially when I can build and import 3D models.

Glos - indeed ;)

True true about the footsteps, I noticed that myself, but didn't get round to fixing it yet.

So far what I'm most pleased about is the performance. These demos run at a high framerate, and use less than 20% of a Core Duo. My whole intention behind this engine is to make 3D games in Flash, so I needed to really optimize and streamline this engine to make it fast enough to do that. That phase is done, it runs basically as fast as possible without using alchemy, or FP10 features. I forgot to mention I'm targeting FP9, for maximum viewership.

I have two earlier demos to show too if you're interested.

[excogitator]

Good work and progress but once you add more 3d objects, textures and collision detection, keep a lookout on the FPS.
If you are aiming for games a lot of hacks have to be added later on coz many games do that. Maybe you should check out development work and approaches by other non Flash 3d games.
One of those I noticed when I was playing Vice City a couple of months back. As I zoomed using the sniper looking far off, the vehicles were not vehicles but just a couple of colored boxes moving on the road. And when you get closer the detail gets added onto it.
This is just one of the many tricks for keeping the FPS and game up and running without lags.
Wish you success. :)

[rumblesushi]

Excog, that's LODding. LOD standing for level of detail.

In fact, I've already implemented basic LODing ;) The models are swapped with higher polygon models as you get closer, and lower poly models as you get further away.

There are many tricks for polygon culling/clipping and deferred rendering.

LODing is a big part of GTA's engine, they do it with textures too, textures are swapped with higher resolution textures when you get close.

With bigger scenes/worlds, I think vertex count is as big a problem as the poly count.

Textures aren't a problem at all. I'm using big, high res textures with no impact on performance, no different from using smaller, tiled textures. It only uses more RAM, not more CPU.

In fact it's an odd experience, developing a 3D engine in Flash. You've got half the polygon budget of a Nintendo DS, yet you can use 360 size textures.

Here's an earlier demo. This one is a pure performance demo, 500 3D images running at 60fps - http://rumblesushi.com/art.html

[excogitator]

Awesome!!! Its good that you have got your research done before diving headlong into it.
Thanks to you now i know what that technique is called. Waiting to see your game engine ready and done soon. :beer:

[rumblesushi]

Yep, to be honest I've done a huge amount of research. I've been working on this engine for just over a month, but half the time has been spent studying and researching.

As far as games go, I'd like to team up with someone from a solid console background, to up my game.

[Dom_]

wow very nice demos, would be nice to see more of them

[rumblesushi]

Thankyou Dom.

The first 2 I posted are the latest revision of my engine, and the best demos I have.

I'll post 2 earlier demos though, this one in case you missed it - http://rumblesushi.com/art.html (more of a performance demo than anything).

And this is my very first demo, running on an earlier build, but I still don't mind it, as it has my name written in watermelons by trigonometry :D - and some basic physics - http://rumblesushi.com/watermelons.html

I'll post more demos once I create better ones, and figure out how to import 3D models etc.

[Scythe]

What movie is that from?

[a tadster]

seems smooth, loads well. I like it but would like to see some face work or other complex figures,
will you plan on supporting colladas?

[rumblesushi]

Scythe - Ichi the Killer.

tadster - Cheers, indeed 3D model imports is my next step. But what do you mean by face work? You'd like to see it pushing more polygons (faces), or you'd like to see a virtual face? :D

[Scythe]

A virtual face?
http://img71.imageshack.us/img71/3866/andross.gif

But seriously, great job on the 3D engine.

[theFlashBlog]

wow! nice work.

[pixi]

mASSIVE RESPEKT DUDE - excellent work. well done, i will be following closely.
Pix

[Enasu]

Wow awsome! and sorry for my newbie question but you all Engine, Demos create with Flash And ActionScript 2/3 or use other programming language ?

Sorry for my bad English. :)

[a tadster]

A 3d render of a human face (way better than that starfox rock face) so yes, a "virtual face" i guess.
I'm anxious to see alternatives/addons for papervision. So if you get this working well I will definitely use it.
Keep up the good work!

[rumblesushi]

I've been working hardcore on my 3D engine recently. It runs even faster now.

I've been mainly working on 3D movement and rotation of individual models, and I've developed a slick tracking cam/hover cam. It automatically tracks, rotates, switches targets, pans out etc. I guess it's kind of similar to a replay cam in a racing game.

Anyway, here is my latest demo, showcasing these techniques. It's a flock of 100 basic 3D models, running at 60 fps.

It takes about 30 seconds or so for the flock to properly get into formation. You can press C to change the camera to a shoulder cam, which makes it feel a bit like a rollercoaster ;) Press C again to change it back to the replay cam.

http://rumblesushi.com/flock_01.html

Cheers,
RumbleSushi

[Scythe]

Now there's some virtual faces!

[excogitator]

Amazing progress. Traveling on the Rollercoaster was swell. :)

[Dom_]

that's really awesome!
amazing work

[rumblesushi]

Thanks dudes. A lot of work has gone into this, I've been working on the engine non stop.

Scythe, yes, request filled, some virtual faces, they are nice and smiley too :D

One more thing, press the space bar to change the flock type to a classic flock/shoal, rather than the orderly line flock/rollercoaster :) Press space to change it back again.

[Anogar]

Bad. ***. I'm really impressed. :D

[Scythe]

Loving the engine, still. I just tried about every key on my keyboard to see if you put any more hidden goodies in there.

[skojdk]

Impressive.
Nice to see that You put some serious work in camera movement. Papervision can be a bit tricky when you are used to after affects camera movement.
Best of luck !

[biznuge]

that's really quick man. absolutely awesome work...

will you be releasing any of this for anyone elses use or is this meant as a personal project only man?

1000th POST!!!! :thumb2:

[slideth3]

This is amazing work! Have dabbled in making my own 3d engine, here is a link to where I got to http://experimentalized.blogspot.com/2009/07/physics-engine.html - but this is beyond anything I did and runs very quickly!

I got stuck at texturing. Very nice indeed!

Implementing 3d model imports is quite straight forward - .obj's are a good way to go - parsing them is quite easy.

Have you got any plans of what you're going to use it for, eg games or anything like that?

Cheers

Sam

[rumblesushi]

Scythe - I feel bad now that you didn't find anything else :D

I'm a big fan of hidden goodies in videogames etc. I'll have to include a couple of easter eggs in my next demo.

Biz - you never know, but for now it's being developed for proprietary use. For several reasons. The first being that most of my effort has been focused on speed. The whole engine is geared for speed, rather than usability/versatility.

If I made it into an easy to use 3D API, it would probably be a bit closer to Papervision in terms of speed, which would be a bit pointless.

Second - it would be a hell of a lot of work, to completely rework the engine to be usable to other developers, especially working alone. My main focus and intention with the engine is to make games, rather than make a product to compete with Papervision :)

Sam - I have to admit, texture mapping was one of the areas that was a bit harder than I thought it would be.

You're right, parsing OBJ's is very easy. To be honest I'm not sure I'll bother with Colladas. They are bloated, much bigger in file size than OBJ's. OBJ's seem like a perfect format for online work, because they are possibly the leanest 3D format. I'm surprised that out of the main 3 engines, only Away 3D has OBJ support.

For animated models, I could just hack the list of keyframes into an OBJ file, and use that.

As I mentioned above, absolutely, my engine is basically being built for games, in fact I don't plan to make websites with it at all.

My next step is to implement some fast 3D physics that can be used for games, and learn how to make good looking, low poly 3D models.

I'll post another demo later, a variation on the flock demo :)

[biznuge]

nice work anyway sushi. just had a look back, and that is some lean code.

:bobafett:

[Scythe]

My next step is to implement some fast 3D physics that can be used for games, and learn how to make good looking, low poly 3D models.

Assassin's Creed: Flash version.

[rumblesushi]

How good do you think I'd be able to get it to look compared to the 360 version? ;)

Biz - Cheers, like I said, you never know - but a public release isn't the intention behind the engine, nor is it in my immediate plans.

Got another Flock demo to show though, before I start work on 3D modelling and 3D physics.

This is very similar to the one above, but with a few changes to the camera.

The 3D objects are now ultra simple, flat shaded little spaceships. The fun part is there are 360 of them running at 60 frames a second.

It shows the raw power of the engine, and the ability to handle a LOT of (simple) 3D objects at a high framerate. Maybe for a 3D space invaders type game, or a simple Starfox esque game, it would be cool to have a few hundred enemies on screen at once.

PS - there ARE a couple of Easter Eggs in this demo ;)

http://rumblesushi.com/flock_02.html

Cheers,
RumbleSushi

[Scythe]

C for camera, T for texture, D for details.

I have a feeling there are more but it's hard to tell if something is happening or not in all that chaos.

I played AC on the 360 as well. Not a PS3 person. I'm sure your version could outdo both the 360 and the PS3, even with all the teams of professionals Ubisoft had working on that game :P

[rumblesushi]

Apart from the space bar to change the flock type, there is one more, and it's a letter ;)

I was going to make a joke that maybe I should go GTA with my 3D engine, then I remembered actually, there is GTA on the DS. The DS having very similar 3D horsepower to my engine :D

So technically it would be possible, but of course, the amount of work required wouldn't.

Maybe make a Flash GTA all set within one little neighbourhood, just a couple of blocks :D

[IQAndreas]

Found it. Press "M" for 1000 boids instead of 300.

Once again, that is REALLY impressive. I'm getting around 50FPS, and 60FPS on the one with the flowers.

Do you have any "development diaries" or any logs or descriptions of techniques you used? I always like knowing what happens in the background, and reading long chunks of code isn't always as descriptive.

[rumblesushi]

Cheers Iq.

I don't have a development diary, but maybe I should. Because the engine isn't made for public release, I didn't think people would be that interested in a dev blog of sorts, but maybe they would - I don't know :cool:

People do read development blogs from game devs. I could talk about upcoming games etc when the engine is ready to rock.

[rumblesushi]

Oh by the way, on the one with 360 little spaceships, you're only getting 50fps?

Could you tell me what computer and browser you have?

I've tested it on a Core Duo, almost 3 years old, and it runs at 60fps easily, only using 30 to 40% of the CPU. On firefox and IE.

Cheers.

[IQAndreas]

What do you mean only 50FPS? That is quite an achievement.

I'm trying it again now, and now it's getting around a steady 59-61 FPS, and that's with several other processes running, so I must have been running something even heavier at the time. Just for reference, I'm using a laptop that is optimized for mobility, so the CPU and graphics card aren't the most powerful, but they suit my needs quite nicely.


Well, I'd read the dev diaries. I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but more and more, when playing games, running aps, or watching movies with special effects, I find myself thinking in my mind how they achieved that effect, and which obstacles they would likely have encountered. Some of these obstacles I cannot think of efficient solutions, so I have at rare times sent messages to developers asking how they overcame that certain block. I do the same thing and try to encounter all blocks in my mind before working on any of my personal projects.

I'm not sure why I do it. It's mostly automatic, but I find it very "satisfying" for my mind, like solving brain teasers. In fact, that's most of what I go around thinking of all day. Either that or how to tackle real life problems.

[IQAndreas]

So, if the 3D engine isn't planned for public release, what do you have in store for it?

Where you planning on designing it, and then sitting back in your chair watching your 3D projects all play upon your screen, as you smile at your creation. It seems like a nice ending for a movie, but... not sure how to end that.

EDIT: Nevermind. I just read through the other posts.

Also, in the "art" example, if you walk too close to one of the paintings, the texture tends to warp/stretch/skew a little funny. It's not too noticeable, but if you are striving for perfection. ;)

[rumblesushi]

Iq, yep, slight texture distortion.

There is actually LODing in that demo. The walls are swapped for higher polygon walls the closer you get. I could eliminate that distortion by simply increasing the poly count on the close up wall, or use perspective correction.

However, I've experimented with dynamic triangulation as a form of perspective correction, and it's slow, too slow for games.

Unless I can develop a much faster method of perspective correct texture mapping, I'll just have to make good use of LODing.

And with fast moving games, you probably won't notice some slight texture distortion.

[rumblesushi]

I was getting pretty frustrated with 3D model imports, they were being loaded in fine, but the texture mapping was all over the place, despite everything being parsed correctly, including the UV values.

It turned out to be Flash's stupid inverted Y axis :D

So I uninverted the Y axis, and the texture mapping was fine.

Here's a little demo of some imported models.

I haven't enabled control of the cars, because I'm going to develop some proper handling and physics before allowing user control, and also make the wheels move etc. So they just drive around randomly, with some basic collision detection.

There's only 1 button you can press in this demo, so I might as well tell you. If you press the space bar, the two models are replaced with 20 basic little cars :)

http://rumblesushi.com/cars.html

Cheers,
RumbleSushi

[biznuge]

wow. sick how fast that runs man. well done. how many triangles in that model?

I want....

[rumblesushi]

Biz - the two cars are 662 Polys each.

The 20 smaller cars after pressing the space bar are just 102 polygons each, so 2040 polygons in total, plus the floor.

[biznuge]

how does it run at full screen man? Don't suppose you'd maybe do a quick and dirty version just to show off speed at large size wouldya?

I gots me a 1920 x 1200 monitor, and it does tend to lag out complex geometry in pv.

was just wondering how this would compare.

nice work though, again!

[rumblesushi]

Sure, I'll upload a fullscreen version.

[rumblesushi]

Here you go.

The reason all my demos are windowed is that I'm not making websites, just games, so I'm just working on a fixed size stage.

This fullscreen version uses more juice of course but still runs at 60fps on my 22 inch monitor, at 1680 by 1050. I'd be interested to know how it runs at 1920 by 1200. What CPU do you have?

http://rumblesushi.com/cars_fs.html

[Templarian]

On a Q9300 I get 50 to 60 FPS on 3360x1050 (stretched it across 2 monitors).

Only sitting at 50% total cpu usage so not sure how accurate the little FPS thing is

Really nice tests can't wait to see a fun little game made with it.

[rumblesushi]

3360 by 1050? Jesus, hahaha. I actually have 2 screens too, but I only use of them, I'll try a dual screen setup and see how it runs too.

And thanks. I can't wait to make some fun games too.

There's only a few things left to do before I start making games.

Phase 1 - Get perspective correction and LODing to be as fast as possible. Try out occlusion culling and see how it performs compared to just LODing etc. Import bone animation in 3D models.

Phase 2 - Learn how to make good quality low poly models and levels, which is a skill I don't possess :)

Phase 3 - Make fun games.

PS - the FPS counter is very accurate, it simply tallies the amount of rendered frames per second. Strange that the CPU usage is only 50%, just maxing out one of the Cores.

[rumblesushi]

Oh and here's another demo, experimenting with my super quick flock code again.

This time it's an underwater scene with 4 seperate shoals, all with their own characteristics.

Press M to load a Yann Tiersen track.

http://rumblesushi.com/sea.html

[Templarian]

PS - the FPS counter is very accurate, it simply tallies the amount of rendered frames per second. Strange that the CPU usage is only 50%, just maxing out one of the Cores.It's a quad core. 3 of the 4 cores are at like 45% the first is at like 55%. Either way it's perfectly smooth.

For making some low polygon objects I suggest using wings 3d (once you get use to it you will find uv mapping and creating low poly objects pretty quick).

[rumblesushi]

Wings 3D?

Cheers, I'll check it out, I've never heard of it actually.

I've been deliberating between Lightwave, Blender, and 3Ds Max. Veering more towards the first 2, because from what I hear, they are easier to learn.

I downloaded a lightwave trial and had a play around, it doesn't seem like something you can just pick up and work out on your own, I'll have to study hard, read some tutorials, join a 3D forum etc.

I used to work as an illustrator, so once I get the hang of it, I'll be fine, but 3D modelling obviously requires a lot of work.

[prg9]

:genius: Very nice, impressive stuff.


...the engine isn't made for public release...

:cons: Do you ever have plans to release this engine publicly (open source perhaps) ?
As another alternative for Flash 3D libraries.


...low polygon objects I suggest using wings 3d...

:block: Agreed, Wings 3D is a nice little app.

[Dom_]

very nice news demo!!
great work.

[biznuge]

tried the cars at 1920x1200 man. cheers for uploading the FS version.

It never dipped below 40FPS and looked just as good as the smaller version to my untrained eyes.


I swear the underwater thing you've provided is as good as the playstation 1 (that seems quite retro for some reason) demo that came free with the console. think it might have been a manta ray or something else fishy. Although I don't remember that ever having 326 models at the same time.


Cracking work! Look forward to seeing more. :)

[rumblesushi]

prg - I haven't ruled it out, but it's more something that I'm not currently working on, or have any real plans for.

As you can probably imagine, creating a 3D API that is very versatile and easy to use and comes with documentation etc would take a lot of work, especially for one person.

Right now my focus is prepping the engine for game development, making it as quick as possible, and learning how to make 3D models and game worlds etc.

Also, I'm not sure if I'd be able to make it run quite as fast as it does, making into a versatile, user friendly interface.

biz - Ha, cheers, that's quite a compliment ;)

Also, did it average around 40fps, or occasionally dip that low, but usually run faster? What CPU do you have? :)


For those that are interested I'll tell you a bit more about the project.

It feels like I've been working on it for aeons, but I actually started it almost exactly 3 months ago.

I started off just transforming some sprites on the stage in 3D. Then just kept building it up, bit by bit.

I developed a first person camera, then polygons, then texture mapping, then essential primitives (planes/spheres), then clipping, then 3D movement and rotation, then a tracking cam/hover cam, then 3D model imports.

The major things to do before making games are...

1) Perspective correct texture mapping (dynamic triangulation) - which I've just done actually, now I just need to get it running as fast as possible.

2) Proper 3D physics and collision detection. Per polygon collisions and 3D slope collision detection etc. But fast of course ;)

3) Collada imports, mainly for character animation. Looks like a right nause :D Working with strings/XML etc isn't really my forté. But it seems to be the best way to import keyframed animation etc.

4) Getting skilled in a 3D modelling program and learning how to make quality low poly models.

And then it's on to actually making games.

In regards to power, on a Core 2 Duo it's roughly the power of a N64 or DS in terms of raw poly pushing power. Slightly less on a Core duo, and slightly more on a Quad Core.

I'll assume that most people have a Core 2 Duo, so I'll target that for poly count. I'll do a quick performance test when the games start, and if it's not hitting the target framerate, I'll cap the framerate at 30, probably for Macs or older PC's.

You may have noticed on my demos, I'm shifting a lot of objects. One of the things I've worked on is super quick per model transformations, so having a few hundred basic models with say 2000 polygons between them, doesn't use much more juice than one 2000 polygon model. And even with individual movement and rotation, not much more than that.

One of the reasons for that is with such a low polygon budget, even if you use ALL your available polys for just 1 model, it's still a low poly model :D You're not going to get realistic, high polygon models, so to me it's more impressive and fun to have a truck load of really simple models.

I'll make my next demo when I've got the collision detection down, to showcase some of my new techniques :)

I'll also start a blog when it comes to making games, with info of upcoming games, demos etc.

[biznuge]

^ as low as 32 now I've just tested it man. but also as high as 61. depends how much of the floor and the two models are in view I suppose.

I'm running Dual Dual Core Opteron 2212 with 8Gb RAM. I'm also running Windows XP 64 2003, although I don't suppose that matters any.

Currently I've got a few apps running. Cinema4D, PhotShopCS2, IllustratorCS2, Spotify, 3 IE's , a Firefox, a Chrome, DreamWeaver and MS Calculator. (I think MS Cal might be using up a lot of system memory to hold the amount my latest client owes me though...). Apps might have a fair bit to do with the dip in framerate. Although now I look, my PF is only 1.1GB, so maybe not.

hope this helps anyway. Nice work again! :)

[flashmove]

Nice work, i think the artwork themselves look good too. But when i walked closer the images appeared pixelated. Perhaps it would be good to have it render a high res version when user walks close to examine your work. Cheers!

[rumblesushi]

Happy New Year people.

New year, new demo. My 3D engine is now bigger, better, faster, stronger.

It's almost ready to make games now. I need to add some proper 3D collision detection, and import 3D model animation (either collada or 3ds).

My latest demo is showcasing some new techniques like perspective correct texture mapping (dynamic triangulation) and mip mapping.

I decided to try something a bit different for this demo, I've created a much bigger world than my other demos, bigger scene, bigger objects.

It has 150 buildings and 500 moving flowers, running at 60 frames a second.

It has FPS style controls, walk with WASD or the arrow keys, and look with the mouse. Press V to enable vertical look.

http://rumblesushi.com/city.html

Cheers,
RumbleSushi

[TheCanadian]

Wow that's impressive. Some buildings look like their getting crushed or twisted depending on what angle you look at them.

[biznuge]

^ are those buildings set to be made up of just four right angled triangles per face?

If so is the twisting effect not just due to the lo-fidelity of the objects themselves?

This was quite noticeable on my works pc. As was a pretty severe drop (to ~14fps) when moving about the scene, although not when panning, strangely.

Might be nicer to see with more complex meshes and less buildings rumble, should you have any time. or maybe some settings. Or maybe you could smoke us a kipper, and be back for breakfast!



Happy new year man!


You too Montanadian! :)

[rumblesushi]

Are you talking about a sort of moire effect, like banding at a certain range?

If so, that's due to the textures being gridded. That's one of the reasons I introduced mip mapping. When they are a certain distance away, the texture is swapped for a much lower resolution, slightly blurred version, that does away with the banding.

As for more complex meshes, I've experimented with them, in the car demo for example - the reason you haven't seen any since is because I just downloaded that car from a 3D model site, I don't actually know how to make 3D models yet :)

Most of the geometry in these demos is generated from within the engine.

I've just been working hardcore on the mechanics of the engine, before I actually put in some proper effort to learn how to make quality 3D models.

The good news is the mechanics are almost finished, I just need to be able import animation like I said, and add some proper 3D collision detection (the collisions in this demo are just basic 2D collisions, as the surfaces are flat, there are no slopes etc).

Biz - that's weird about the drop in framerate, because on a Core 2 Duo it runs at 60fps with room to spare (the average CPU usage is only 30 something %). I bet it's firefox's stupid session restore function, and it's use of cache.

For Firefox users - type about:config into the address bar scroll down to the entry browser.sessionstore.interval then double click it and change the value to say 180000. Then scroll to browser.cache.disk.capacity - double click it and change to say 150000.

You should get no stuttering now, at least not after the first few seconds.

Oh and if you do have a Core 2 Duo or above, press T to increase the level of triangulation.

I'd be interested to see what performance people could get from the other Flash 3D engines, with an identical demo to this - 150 buildings, precise textures, frustum clipping, collision detection, and 500 moving flowers. To be honest I would be very surprised if someone managed to get more than about 15 frames a second.

Biz - I'd be interested to know what the average FPS is after applying that firefox fix, or indeed if you could test it in IE, that would be great :)

[Scythe]

Ha ha, did you just generate a bunch of random katakana? It looks like gibberish to me :P

Anyway, I use MSN Explorer and I get 60 fps when I'm outside the city and not rendering as much. But when I'm inside the city it drops as low as 38. IE seems to handle it much better and only went down to about 46.

Excellent work, by the way.

[rumblesushi]

Scythe, actually I got someone to put the graphics together for me. I asked them to put some Japanese words in a Sega style font, but they couldn't be bothered to actually do Japanese words, so yes, just wrote gibberish, hahaha :D

Thanks for the info too, that's a little strange though, I don't understand the bad performance. I've even tested it on a Core Duo 1 laptop and it runs at a rock solid 60fps on IE, never drops at all, not even as low as 50. That's even right in the middle of the city.

What CPU do you have, and did you have other processes running?

Cheers,
RumbleSushi

[rumblesushi]

By the way, I'll post a Flash 10 version tomorrow, with the native Flash 10 perspective correct texture mapping.

It runs at about half the speed of my homegrown perspective correction but looks perfect.

[Scythe]

It's a 3300+ AMD Athlon 64 Processor. And my updater was probably running. It seems slightly better now.

Anyway, it's usually at 60 fps when I'm inside the city, so it's hard to tell what exactly triggers it to drop. And usually when it drops it's to a level above 50. It's very rare for it to go to 46 and after that it just hops right back up to 60 or so. That's for both IE and MSN.

(Screw MSN, I'm the only person in the world who uses it.)

In fact, I just tried it again for about 2 minutes and it only dropped to 48, and only once. It's kind of unpredictable.

By the way, there's no noticeable decrease in performance, so I wouldn't be able to tell if it didn't tell me the fps. It's perfectly solid the way it is now, and far exceeds my standards.

[rumblesushi]

Scythe, ah I got you, so it was mostly 60fps, just with the occasional dip?

I have to admit, it's still surprising. I tested it on an old 1.6 ghz AMD Sempron with 512 megs of RAM. It actually ran at a pretty solid 60fps, with the occasional dip to 50/55.

I was concerned about what level of performance I should be targeting, what framerate and polycount I should be targeting in my games, perhaps aimed at the average user's CPU.

But it seems with different browsers, different versions of Flash, different CPUs, different systems, performance is varied and unpredictable.

So I decided the best thing to do is just implement timestep based updating. It's already done for the player movement etc, I'll just have to do the same to the enemy movement, and all my flock code etc, and the tracking cam movement.

For a time attack based game it would be the only fair way to do things too. This way, a user whose system can only run the game at 30fps would still be able to get a better time than a user who gets the full 60fps.

So I'll be targeting 60fps, but with the timestep based updating, a user who only gets 30 or 40 is still going to be walking/running/driving at the same speed in essence, and fluctuations in framerate should be relatively seamless this way too. There shouldn't be noticable slowdown.

Anyway, here is a new version of the same demo. You need Flash 10 for this one.

This version uses a different rendering technique, it uses more juice (more likely to dip below 60) but the rendering is pixel perfect ;)

http://rumblesushi.com/city_F10.html

[biznuge]

sorry. I realise I never got back about my own fps drop. I was getting ready to have a baby I'm afraid. She was born sunday morning! I'll look at the drop when I return to work for you to confirm!

ps latest one on my home puter runs at 33fps when rotating and moving when situated at the edge of the world looking in. which in my opinion is pretty damn fantastic when you see the amount of objects present in the scene!

nice work sushi! you got anything you could perhaps release on an ad-hoc basis? I got some free time over the next couple of weeks and would be intrigued to have a look under your hood.

cheers!

by the way, I'm an eejit... This home puter is the one I used last time, but it still seems to give around the same fps as my last test, so ho-hum.

texture do look better in this one too though, with none of the strange warping effecys canadian noticed happening now. good ****!

[Scythe]

Pixel perfect yay!

So did you implement that new time-based system? Because I seem to move at the same speed whether it's going 60 fps or 30.

[TheCanadian]

sorry. I realise I never got back about my own fps drop. I was getting ready to have a baby I'm afraid. She was born sunday morning! I'll look at the drop when I return to work for you to confirm!
Sweet man, that's awesome! Congratulations!

Buildings look way better. I'm getting 60FPS in Chrome

[rumblesushi]

Biz, I can't believe you didn't get back to me just because you had a baby :P

Just kidding, congratulations ;)

I'm seriously miffed that you're getting 30fps in spots though biz. You said you've got a Dual Core Opteron 2212 right? That's a good CPU.

I've tested the Flash 9 version on an ancient AMD Sempron 1.6 ghz with 512 megs of RAM and it rarely drops below 60fps.

The Flash 10 one uses more juice, but I've tested that on a Core 1 Duo 1.6 ghz, and that runs at a pretty constant 60fps too, regardless of where you are. That's in firefox and IE.

Oh and Biz, I really appreciate your interest, but I can't release any source code as of yet. I'd like to keep the source under wraps for now but I'd be happy to answer questions you might have though, in regards to the mechanics, or performance etc.

The Canadian - that's good to hear. I benchmarked Chrome, and it actually runs Flash 25% slower than Firefox and IE. I only get 50/55 fps in the Flash 10 version in Chrome.

Scythe - indeed I did ;) Where as before you would be moving at half the speed, you're right, now in essence you're moving at the same speed. It's such a simple concept too, using the timeStep as a multiplier. So essentially if this demo is running at 20fps, you'll actually move 3 times faster per frame, but with only a 1/3 of the frames rendered per second, the result is that you move at the same speed.

By the way, in regards to the first demo, that's dynamic triangulation, which is a homegrown method of perspective correction, to correct the texture warping caused by affine texture mapping when large polygons are too close, and at more than a certain angle.

To put it simply, you fill a large polygon with smaller polygons, the amount of polygons dynamically added is determined by the distance to the polygon, the angle of the polygon, and the area of the polygon. And also the threshold you use in the algorithm, to change the amount of polygons that are added, and thus the overall level of correction.

This method is actually faster than Flash 10's native perspective correction in most cases, but it introduces artifacts of it's own, as you can see in the buildings. Broken textures and texture swimming.

It works much better with busier textures. The artifacts are exposed to the max by those clean grid textures on the sides of the buildings. If you notice, the effect is nowhere near as bad on the front of the buildings, because the textures are much busier.

Because of that, the Flash 10 rendering suits this demo far better, the buildings look perfect.

Dynamic triangulation is better suited to messier textures like grass or concrete or snow.

In fact the demo I'm working on now is using DT on some snowy terrain, and it looks fine, barely noticable compared to the buildings.

The Flash 10 rendering uses (I think) a trick that was used in software rendering in the Quake era (I think starting with quake). Which is to recalculate the UV/Matrix values every few pixels, using the Z coordinate of the pixel. As you can imagine that's pretty intensive, given the amount of pixels in a decent sized polygon.

And that's why this Flash 10 technique is much slower the bigger the polygon, the increase is exponential compared to affine texture mapping, where it's just the increased fillrate that dents performance.

You can have just 1 plane, using 2 polygons on screen. Now let's say that plane is the size of a matchbox in the middle of the screen, the cpu usage is going to be next to nothing, like 1% or so at 60fps. You get close so the 2 polygons are completely filling the screen and the CPU usage shoots up to about 40%. Yep, just for 2 polygons, because it's more down to the amount of pixels than polygons.

Because the perspective correction is quite so pixel perfect, I actually think it might be recalculating the UV/Matrix every pixel, rather than every 4/8/16 pixels to improve performance. To be honest I kind of wish there was an option to sacrifice a bit of accuracy for speed.

[biznuge]

^ as someone stated previously though man, if i hadn't had an fps display in front of me, I wouldn't have even thought about the slow down...

I think at some point you have to just accept that great as flash 10 is, and as improved as it is, you're still running this in a browser, and you're still doing everything within the flash player, running in said browser. I guess there's limits and variances to be expected from this.

Why not try maybe publishing it as an AIR app and see if running it outside of the browser brings any kind of stability to the piece.

keep up the good work man, and cheers for the congrats!

[TheCanadian]

The Canadian - that's good to hear. I benchmarked Chrome, and it actually runs Flash 25% slower than Firefox and IE. I only get 50/55 fps in the Flash 10 version in Chrome.

My computer's kind of a big deal. I was actually getting like 63-65FPS if that's even possible :bounce:

[biznuge]

is your computer magrathean (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#M agrathea)? that would be a big deal!

[TheCanadian]

No it's a dell . . .

[rumblesushi]

Hello people,

It's been a while since my previous demo, and that's because I've reworked half my engine to use Flash 10. It now has perfect perspective correction and runs slightly faster than my Flash 9 engine with uncorrected affine texture mapping. Quite a result. When I used the Flash 10 rendering before, I was doing a draw call per polygon. Now I'm rendering in batches and it's much faster.

Here is my latest demo, a snowscape with 1000 trees and 12 ice boulders. It also has some basic per polygon collision detection.

Use the up key or W to accelerate, and the mouse to steer.

http://rumblesushi.com/snowscape.html

Cheers,
RumbleSushi

[biznuge]

that's absolutely awesome...

and actually quite fun pushing the boulders down the hill too!

Seriously though... This thing is sitting there at a consistent 60fps mate. saw it dip once to 57 but couldn't get it to do it again. think that was right after a head on fast collision with 2 boulders simultaneously too...

Really, really, well done with the optimisation!

[rumblesushi]

Hey Biz - thanks amigo, I'm glad you like it ;)

The coolest part is that's it's running this fast with proper perspective correction, no warped textures or broken/swimming textures from dynamic triangulation.

I've worked hardcore getting it to run this fast, and now that the mechanics are more or less complete (just a bit of development on collision detection, including a fast broadphase, plus rigged animation importing) - I'm itching to actually start making some games now.

I've spent a few solid days learning 3D modelling.

Here is my other recent demo, with a basic Katamari esque model I made of my friend Dan with rocket skates. This is more of a performance demo/benchmark, there's some stats there too.

40 models, each made of 192 polygons, with some basic physics/collisions etc.

http://rumblesushi.com/katamari_baldwin.html

Click and drag to zoom in and rotate the camera, you can also press the spacebar to panout and see all the models at once.

I hope you're all looking forward to seeing some proper 3D games in Flash, I'll be setting up a blog soon to talk about upcoming games and post demos etc.

To me the most daunting aspect of game development is sound. I'm very confident in my abilities as a programmer and graphic artist etc, but sound I'm clueless. I'd like to get some advice on using out of the box sounds, ie where to get good ones :D - or even creating my own if it's something I could learn fairly quick.

Cheers,
RumbleSushi

[biznuge]

getting 60fps zoomed in but only around 15fps when viewing the whole scene.

I'm currently running illy, ps cs3, flash cs4, spotify, trillian msn client, and about 10 FF windows though so this might not in fact be the best point at which I could stress test...

lol.

I'll stick a post it note on my keyboard to test it on a system restart over the weekend for you though.

Really enjoying the updates though. I'd definately be subscribing to a dev blog.

I've just been dipping my toe into away over the last fortnight after getting a bit sick of papervisions performance but that snowscene pisses all over anything I've seen so far in terms of performance.


Keep up the nice work man!

[Scythe]

Wowzers, those are amazing, especially the snow one. It reminds me of Elder Scrolls II, except that didn't have those boulders and stuff. And I can seriously get some airtime. At one point when I landed a jump my face got plunged into the snow and I could see out the other side for a split second. Couldn't do it again, though. As for the frame rate, it's the same deal as before. I can get 60 facing away from the landscape, but inside it the framerate drops as low as 39 once in a while.

Here's an example of a fast 3D Flash game if you wanna check it out: http://armorgames.com/play/5011/big-pixel-racing

As for sound, I generally go to the Newgrounds audio portal for music and freesound.org for sfx. Creating your own sound effects is generally just a matter of finding something similar in your house and recording it. People use kitchen knives for swords, etc. Professional foley artists get really creative. They'll drag rocks across cement for a monster's screech and stuff like that. I use Audacity to edit my sounds, since it's free and it has noise reduction and stuff.

[rumblesushi]

Biz, haha, yeah maybe it would be more accurate on more of a "clean" run ;) I'd be interested to see what you get when running on it's own.

I'm genuinely quite confused by the performance that you two get specifically.

Most other people are reporting 60fps for most of the demos, apart from people with genuinely old computers.

I've emailed my mum some of these demos to see what performance she gets on her 5 year old AMD Sempron, and even she gets 60fps on the city demo for example.

That is of course if you're both using PC's, which I seem to recall you are? Macs run Flash significantly slower.

I've tested these new demos on a Core 1 Duo, not even a Core 2 Duo, 1.6 ghz - and it runs the snow demo at a rock solid 60 fps, and the Katamari Dodgems demo, it still runs at over 50 even when almost all models are in view. I've also tested it on a 2.0 ghz Core 2 Duo, it runs the Katamari demo at 60fps with ease, even with every single model in view, rendering around 4000 polygons.

Have a look at this screenshot. This is running on my 1.6 Core 1 Duo, almost 3300 polys being rendered, and still over 50 frames a second.

http://rumblesushi.com/stuff/kbstats.jpg

Scythe - thanks for the info, I appreciate it. I'll check those sites out, and Audacity. Funnily enough, I saw similar things on IQ, apparently the doors in Star Wars were done with a piece of paper being pushed in and out of an envelope, hahaha :D

What about the classic videogame-ey beeps and boops, you know, Nintendo and Sega style, when picking up an item in game, or even when selecting a menu option etc - how do you think those are created? Do audio programs like audcity having any preset sounds that you can then manipulate into something that sounds more like that?

Also Biz or everyone else - do you have any recommendations on where to start a dev blog? I'm too busy to build my own blog, so I'd rather just create an account on an existing blog site, one that's easy to update etc. I only really know of blogger and wordpress for creating blogs, are they much of a muchness or is one better than the other?

Also Scythe, ha, yeah that's happened to me once or twice, you can see the bottom of the skybox etc :D It happens sometimes after a particularly big jump, but it's hard to reproduce.

[biznuge]

a) is the bottom of the skybox black?

b) I may not be the best person to judge blogs but wordpress is pretty easy to use/configure/theme and plugin, and it's free...

c) again. nice work. showed the guys in the office the snow scene today and they were all impressed at the fps.

[Scythe]

Okay, so maybe you shouldn't worry about the performance I get. My computer doesn't run nearly as fast as it should. I keep feeling like there are viruses and stuff on it because I can hear it running processes when I'm not doing anything but I haven't detected a single item of malware for the past 3 months, and that's with 3 different security programs. So it's probably just getting old, since I've had it for over 4 years now, I think. It's a PC with a 3300+ AMD Athlon 64 processor and 2 GB of RAM. Processor speed 2.40GHz, 256KB L2 cache, 1600MHz System Bus. Yeah, I don't know what most of that means.

Videogame-ey beeps and boops are usually the easiest sound effects to find. Flash actually comes with a library of sounds, and Adobe Soundbooth has even more. If you can't find it there, search the internet. You'll almost certainly be able to find it for free, or if you want only the best quality and widest selection then you can pay a few bucks for it.

I haven't started a blog yet, except on Newgrounds.

[Dj-Studios]

This is good stuff. Doesn't run as well on my Mac as on my PC I would assume (haven't tested that theory though but usually my mac runs much slower). I still get a solid framerate on all of those demos!

I'll test on my PC tonight and see what happens. It's a monster but not sure if that will speed Flash up.

[IQAndreas]

Fantastic! Those demo's always amaze me. :)

I seem to get great performance, but when I look at the FPS counter it's usually dipping between 25-35FPS. If I'm facing the "outside" on both, the FPS jumps up to 60 or so, but when I look at a lot of models (such as trees or all the people) it jumps back down to the 25-35 range. (EDIT: It's usually down to 20-22 when you see everyone zoomed out in the "ball player with red cap" one) Though, even though I do notice a tiny difference, it doesn't really affect the "game" in any way. It's not like a lot of lag where everything moves half as fast and you get annoyed that you are unable to do anything in the game, so it doesn't bother me.


But here are my specs in case you are curious:

Computer/Laptop
HP Compaq 2710p
Microsoft Windows XP - Tablet PC Edition 2005
Version 2002 - Service Pack 3
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU U7600 @ 1.20GHz
790 MHz, 2.99 GB of RAM

Graphics Cards (Both of these show up, so I believe it is a dual card system or something)
Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family
Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family


And I'm running in an Ubuntu LiveCD using Gnome and running FireFox with the latest flash player (no beta players, just the latest full release)


Also Biz or everyone else - do you have any recommendations on where to start a dev blog? I'm too busy to build my own blog, so I'd rather just create an account on an existing blog site, one that's easy to update etc. I only really know of blogger and wordpress for creating blogs, are they much of a muchness or is one better than the other?
I use blogger/blogspot, and although you can edit the template for it, I still feel VERY limited. I'm more of a PHP guy (and you are only able to edit the HTML and JavaScript), and I would rather have more control over the database etc. I have been planning on switching, but I think I will end up writing my own CMS that fits my purposes just right.

From what I hear, Wordpress is a lot more adaptable and seems to have a lot of followers. I would recommend it, even though I actually haven't tried it yet. :P

[rumblesushi]

Iq - to be honest I'm not that surprised that your netbook doesn't run it at 60fps.

In theory your 1.2 ghz Core 2 Duo should be almost as fast as the 1.6 ghz Core 1 Duo in one of my laptops, but my laptop runs at it 60fps with ease. I just noticed too, that your processor is capped at 790 mhz, you must have a dynamic performance utility, to save on battery power. I have one of those too, I just set it to max performance.

For some reason, netbooks just aren't that fast, even netbooks with Core 2 Duo's, I can only assume the bottleneck is the tiny little motherboard, with slower bus speeds than a proper, more performance oriented laptop.

Here's another quick little demo. I'm learning 3D modelling at the moment, this is the first car I've built. 20 Toyota AE86's, with some basic collision/physics.

http://rumblesushi.com/hachi_roku.html

[Dj-Studios]

Nice new demo. Models looked great! You need a toggle for the f key though. ;) Can't get out of low-fi mode after hitting f key. lol

[rumblesushi]

Thanks, and oh yeah, I know, I haven't implemented the reverse switch yet ;)

To be honest the low fi mode that renders internally at half res, doesn't have much effect on the katamari and car demos, but it has a significant effect on the snow demo, because the snow terrain is full of pretty big big polygons and decent sized trees too (with transparency). Rendering stuff like that at half res gives a significant boost.

Most people shouldn't need it, but I created it partly so that it can auto switch to that mode if I detect that someone is getting really bad performance in a game, someone with a really crap computer etc.

That AE86 model is only 202 polys by the way ;)

[rumblesushi]

Hello people,

It's been a while since the previous demo, I'm really busy at the moment polishing/tweaking the engine, and also learning about modelling/texturing/lighting/level design.

I've got a quick demo before I start work proper on my first game though.

Just a simple car demo, where you can drive a car around a beach, with moving wheels etc. Use the arrow keys to accelerate/steer/brake, or WASD. It has basic handling/physics, obviously I'll improve it a lot for the game.

http://rumblesushi.com/beach.html

Cheers,
RumbleSushi

[Scythe]

Really awesome beach demo. Another 3D Flash racing game just came out. Check it out if you haven't yet: http://armorgames.com/play/6001/horizon-gemini

I'll bet you could top that.

[Templarian]

That runs really good. Can't wait to see actually playable maps.

[birdwing]

runs great! even on my mac!

Nice work man, i don't even want to imagine the hours of hard work you put into this thing. It makes my head spin :lol:


Keep it up man!

[rumblesushi]

Thanks guys.

Temp - My first game is almost underway ;) I can't predict a release date, but I'll be working on it hardcore. I'll be putting a lot of effort into it obviously, to make it as good as possible, but I'll be doing all the programming myself, and most of the level design, with one other person doing most of the modelling and texture work.

birdwing - That's good to hear, it's annoying that Macs do run Flash so much slower than PC's. Indeed a huge amount of work has gone into getting it running as fast as possible.

Scythe - I checked out that game. Credit to the guys for making a 3D racing game with a playable framerate (it runs at around 30fps) - but overall I'm not impressed. Mainly because to get it running at an acceptable rate, the track is absolutely bare as ****, just a floor and a handful of obstacles. And it's pretty ugly, each track uses that same pink texture, with just a different layout.

Most of which isn't their fault to be fair, they obviously needed to make it as stripped down as possible to run at 30fps rather than say, 15.

But gameplay wise I think it could be much better. It's completely flat, which is weird for a futuristic racer, usually they have lots of hills/jumps/swirley tunnels etc.

Again though, that's not their fault, it's due to the performance of the available engines. A roller coaster style track with lots of bends/tunnels/halfpipes is going to use far more polygons than just a few planes on the floor, with transparent textures.

I think the flipping up to the ceiling is an interesting gameplay mechanic actually, kudos for that, but is let down by pretty clunky handling and the very annoying addition of slowing down to a crawl when going off track, then losing the race when you can't get back on track, which is not difficult when you slow down to 2 mph ;) It would be much better with some Wipeout or xtremeG style collidable walls, or really like any racing game. Especially if they don't slow you down TOO much, it just allows for a faster, more fun race.

Solid effort though, given the capabilities of the available engines.

Without wanting to sound too arrogant, I can guarantee my first game blows that out of the water though ;)

It's going to be a learning curve obviously, because although I have a kick arse engine and I'm a hardcore gamer myself, this is my first game, so the game is probably going to be a little rough around the edges, not as polished as it could be.

I am going to work extremely hard to make a proper, solid 3D racer though, my objective is to make it to the level (technically and gameplay wise) of a decent DS or N64 racer.

And I can guarantee it's going to be closer to that level than any other 3D flash game ;)

Edit - why do I write such huge posts? :D

[Scythe]

Yet another 3D Flash racer has come out: http://armorgames.com/play/6087/skid-mk

It's even better than the last one since there are items and stuff.

I know you're not gonna like it since you're a pretty tough judge and well the race courses are all flat surfaces like the other one. But there are 3D background objects and stuff.

Yeah, I know. They can't compare to you.

[rumblesushi]

Scythe, well I don't want to seem too harsh. As I said, I certainly give them credit for the effort.

Having said that, this one is MUCH better than the other game. The graphics are far better than that horrible looking futuristic racer. The tracks, buildings, and vehicles all look better. Plus the handling and general gameplay is better.

You may already know this, but both of those games are using Mode7 rendering for the track. And 2D sprites for most of the objects, including most of the buildings in the second game.

Obviously the vehicles are polygonal.

Which is a good idea, because you save a huge amount of polys that way. But of course that's why the games are flat, with no hills etc, because Mode7 is only for rendering a flat surface. And it does that very well, rendering infinite tiled space, with no texture warping.

Because of the Mode7 engine and the 2D sprites, they are either using Sandy, or their own 3D engine.

Either way, pretty good effort on the second game, far better than most attempts at 3D driving games in Flash.

RumbleSushi

[rumblesushi]

I'm in the process of tweaking and optimising my collision broadphase, so I can get on with working on my first game.

I LOVE grids as a collision broadphase. With small enough grid nodes, you can get the amount of checks down as low as a quadtree, but with almost no overhead.

The grid is so simple and so fast.

It's 360 objects (little spaceships) running at 60fps easy on an average computer.

Brute force that would be like 130,000 odd checks.

Here it is - http://rumblesushi.com/grid.html

Drag the mouse to control the camera.

Space bar - pan camera out.

r - change the rendering of the grid to a Geometry Wars style pure wireframe.

s - Spawn ship.

For people with fast computers, you can spawn up to 1000 ships. That would be 1,000,000 checks using brute force ;)

Cheers,
RumbleSushi