Hi all! Im in a group of students who have to code a 3D game this year as a project. Everything grew up fine, until the one responsible for the 3D engine gave up :-(... Now I have to take over his part - and there is one month left to the deadline... What I am looking for are some directions, not ready made solutions. I know I should be searching the web, reading the whole forum, but there is really no more time! And perhaps this topic will help other coders in a similar situation. First of all: This game is an open source study project, featuring a pinball game for four players, interconnected through a network (initially my part - now I have to do both) in 3D with OpenGL, 3D sound with FMod, and so on. The language is Delphi. To take a preview look at www.rivatech.net/the-dpp . Once the game is completed (mid june) - it will ecome completely opensource, and there will be tutorials written descibing how we solved our problems (like for me, UDP client server systems with Indy). Now to my request: I will use 3DS max 4 to create the game table, the flippers, aswell as the ball. Then, i will get coordinates indicating where to display the ball from the physics engine, aswell as axis to see how to rotate the 8 (!) flippers. What I need is a roadmap to get from my 3DS objects to a fullsreen opengl rendering, with relative movements through update of the coordinates. the mouse should permit to turn around the table. my problem is that I am overzhelmed by the quantity of informations, and i have one month to start from scratch :-). what I already looked for: 3ds flie loader from mike lischke : undocumented, unable to use. GLScene: dunno how to load 3DS, dunno how to update coords. SDL, glut; mesa : what the hell is this? should I work on these ones? I''d be very thankfull for any directions on where to start and how to proceed. Sorry for any redundance, if this theme has already be thouroughly discussed, please refer me to the threat. Olivier Engelkes

OK, I'm not sure how much these'll help you, but just in case:
delphi3d - this has a library called CgLib which deals with OpenGL in Delphi (uses the VCL a bit though ). It also has a thing called "aseread" which will load in .ase files (I think you can export from 3DS Max to .ase) - I don't know how well documented it is but anyway...
The bad thing is that the site will be going down very very soon because it's moving to a different server, so get the stuff while you can (if it's down when you check, then I might be able to email you the relevant files though).

About SDL, you could use it (get it from delphi-jedi if you haven't already). It will make setting things up easier (but so would CgLib). It would also make your code a bit more portable. But I suspect that given your time-span, using something like CgLib would be easier.

EDIT :: And don't forget that almost all of nehe's tutorials have been ported to Delphi.

EDIT 2 :: There's also Sulaco, but that's more demos than anything else - you might find something useful in it though.

EDIT 3 :: About changing the view with the mouse, you might want to look at the "arc ball" demo on Delphi3D. But it depends what effect you want to achieve. There are also articles about viewing systems and stuff on Delphi3D - so you should find something useful there.

Good luck,

John B

[edited by - JohnBSmall on May 5, 2002 4:15:23 PM]

thx for your advise!

I havent heard about CgLib, will do this next. I have tested the ase importer, but yet the result didnt seem conclusive with the emo: no texture had been loaded, no antialiasing and smooth, no lightsources, strange colors... but perhpas its intended by the demo ;-).

Yeah, Sulaco, aka Jan Horn is a roxor... his demos are quite impressing, especially GLWindows, wich i will also have to recreate later this month, and the FMod sound demo - i tried to look how he arranged to import his F16 model, but ended up finding his own format whose loader is not ready yet...

Thanx for you so far!

Has any other one some ideas? Im open for alternatives like the ase format - i just need some fingers pointed in the right direction ;-)

That''s cool that you are using FMOD. I wrote the Delphi import unit and some samples that are distributed with FMOD.

For networking, try HawkNL. It is am open-source game-oriented networking library that comes with a Delphi interface unit.

As for the 3D stuff, just study the examples given on Delphi3D and Sulaco. They will definitely lead you in the right direction.

Steve ''Sly'' Williams  Monkey Wrangler  Krome Studios
turbo game development with Borland compilers