i just dug up my old copies of Tekken 1/2/3, and Virtua Fighter 1/2/3 a few days ago and played through them. i''m just curious as to what the developers used to create the pretty detailed environments and characters in these games. i assume pure OpenGL, but i could be wrong. if not OpenGL, what other tools do they use to create this stuff(esp. the character models)? it''s all interactive, so i''m not really sure if they could have depended on Maya or 3DSMax for this. thanks!

To CREATE the models they use 3DS Max, Maya etc along with various plug-ins to handle the animation. Then their custom 3D engine displays the model, applies the texture and moves them according to the animation file.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions
Game Development & Design consultant

is it possible to import Maya models into OpenGL? i''ve heard of something like Milkshape but i don''t exactly get what that is.

if import is possible, can the Maya model in OpenGL be manipulate polygon for polygon?

A model format is just a way of describing a bunch of triangles.
Reading a model format is just reading about a bunch of triangles.
Once you''ve got a bunch of triangles in your engine, who cares where it came from? You can do whatever the heck you want with it.

Deciding on data formats is part of planning your program. Once you have decided what formats it will use you write the engine to read those formats (in this case Maya). If the native format isn''t suitable you would write a converter to convert the Maya format to whatever format you want.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions
Game Development & Design consultant

Btw, console titles generally don't use OpenGL. Their are implementations on PS2, and perhaps other systems, those are pretty much internal. For some reason a lot of people think the Gamecube uses OpenGL as it's graphics API, but afaik this isn't true, and it just uses an OpenGL like API.

Tekken 1/2/3 would use the Playstation libraries\API and the Virtua Fighter games would probably use some kind of custom Saturn code. This is true with pretty much every console, they all have their own custom libraries\API. Generally console programming, even on XBox, which uses a version of D3D, is closer to the hardware than PC programming because you're working on a fixed platform.

It's not practical at all to make anything much more complex than a cube by hard coding triangles. You can make more complex shapes (spheres, tori, cylinders, even terrain, plants and buildings) using various algoritms, but for the most part games use precreated artwork made in a package like 3DS Max or Maya. The triangle data from these applications is exported into a mesh file, which is basically a list of vertices, triangles, materials and animation data, and then loaded into the game and played back by the engine. Remember, that data is data, whether it's in a game engine or in Maya\3DS Max. A very simple mesh renderer (this isn't really something you'd see in a game, but the same basic idea) in OpenGL syntax would be something like this.

glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES);for(int i=0;i<mesh.NumTris;i++){   glTexCoord2f(mesh.Triangle[i].TexCoords[0].u,mesh.Triangle[i].TexCoords[0].v);   glVertex3f(mesh.Triangle[i].Vertex[0].x,mesh.Triangle[i].Vertex[0].y,mesh.Triangle[i].Vertex[0].z);   glTexCoord2f(mesh.Triangle[i].TexCoords[1].u,mesh.Triangle[i].TexCoords[1].v);   glVertex3f(mesh.Triangle[i].Vertex[1].x,mesh.Triangle[i].Vertex[1].y,mesh.Triangle[i].Vertex[1].z);   glTexCoord2f(mesh.Triangle[i].TexCoords[2].u,mesh.Triangle[i].TexCoords[2].v);   glVertex3f(mesh.Triangle[i].Vertex[2].x,mesh.Triangle[i].Vertex[2].y,mesh.Triangle[i].Vertex[2].z);}glEnd(); 

In a more realistic situation you use vertex indices to define the triangles (because a lot of the verts in a given mesh will be shared), and you'd use something like a glDrawElements along with glPointer* or VAR, or a VBO or something, and you need to transform each vertex separately (with the CPU or in a vertex shader) if you want smooth skinned characters, but you'll have plenty of time to learn all that stuff, heh.

[edited by - impossible on August 4, 2003 5:25:38 PM]