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Software 3D For PlayBasic V1.64
By: Kevin Picone
10,Mar,2010
Those reading the PlayBasic development blogs on our forums, would no doubt recall the mention of the wanting to combine the various software 3D rendering routines into a bit of 3D library for PlayBasic V1.64 users. The objective of the library, is to allow the users to create 3D scenes quickly and easily. However, given this is software rendering (affine / with no perspective correction or Z buffering), the purpose of the library is not to create 3d games with, more to augment your existing 2D applications with some 3D effects.
This is a video of version V0.01 of library, which at that point only supported textured terrain and simple cube objects. More recent editions of the library support loading Animated MD2 objects which can be seen in the screen shots bellow.
As you can see even though the library is using software 3d, you'll still be able to have some fun with it, and more importantly start learning about 3D programming.
This release upgrades (transforms) the existing PB1.63m to PB1.64c retail releases or the PBFX1.7x releases (the ones above) into the current WIP version of PlayBasicFX V1.76
This is this next step in the long migration of a PB project into the PBFX world. Ironically, while PBFX is the successor of PB, it's slowly got behind in terms of various compiler features added to V1.64 editions of PB. So this edition implements all of those features such as, optional parameters, passing UDT types in/outs of functions/spub, returning arrays from functions, loads of new math short operators such as (++, --, +=, -=, *=,/=, &=,~=, |=) , dynamic function calling (CallFunction) and various others tidbits..
Not familiar with PlayBasicFX ?, well in short, it's the next generation edition of PlayBasic, that we've been developing in parallel with the existing editions. The main changes in the product are the move from the DirectDraw engine (found in PlayBasic V1.64 and bellow editions) to the Direct3D engine. Moreover, previous releases of PBFX package, we're running upon virtually the same runtime (VM1) as standard PlayBasic. So they had much the same calculation performance and the same linguistic limitations. With release V1.76, this is no longer the case. PBFX editions are now exclusively using the new VM2 runtime technology. Confused ? - PlayBasicFX is the big brother of PlayBasic.
So what can PBFX's VM2 do for me ? - Well VM2 brings a world a new possibilities to your PlayBasicFX applications, from the users perspective it's primarily all about speed at this point. Even though, the edition in V1.76 isn't the final, conservatively speaking VM2 is anywhere from 2 to 5 times the real time performance of the Vm1 runtime. To put this in perspective, this means VM2 yields very similar & better (in some cases) performance than even some natively compiled basics. Which means you can write more complex programs and know that PlayBasicFX will keep up with you!
Other differences found in PlayBasicFX come in the form of Direct 3D support. What does mean ? - Well, it means that PlayBasicFX can now take advantage of the 3D hardware acceleration found in your computers video card. Which can be used for not only 2D effects, but creating 3D scenes as well. The new graphics engine includes things like a sprite meshes (2d/3d) rotation, particle engine, perspective projection (view scenes as 2D or 3D), new map engine, more collision methods etc etc. It should noted though, that while FX can do 3D, it isn't the focus of FX. But it's there for you get your hands dirty. Here's a few screen shots to show what it's capable of.
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Have fun !
For more information about PlayBasic, please visit the PlayBasic home page and download the FREE (TIME UNLIMITED) LEARNING EDITION and dive in.
Registered PlayBasic owner ? - Want to upgrade to PlayBasicFX for FREE? All PlayBasicFX upgrades are only available through the PlayBasic maintenance forum. To access these, and all manner of the other PlayBasic related goodies, you'll need to sign up and log into the UnderwareDesign Forums.
IDE LESSON - How To Load & Run Examples
This video is aimed those new to PlayBasic IDE, and tries to give the user a quick overview of how to load and run one any of the included examples.
YAAC (Yet Another Asteroids Clone)
Fairly simple asteroids demo with various special effects applied, such as Blur-O-Vision and particles
Spooky Shadows
2D lighting and shadows tech demo. This one makes use the PlayBasics world and ray intersection features to model light. This is then rendered as lightmap and merged with the background.
Parallax Platformer Tech Demo
This is updated version of the standard 2D platform game that comes with PlayBasic. Except this version has a number special effects jammed into it, just to test everything out all at once
After tinkering with various video capturing packages and not really loving the results, I ended up deciding to just write some wrapper functions for saving an AVI streams (video only) from within a PB program. While this won't suit everything, it's turning out to be relatively painless to implement into an existing project.
To use the AVI wrapper, require a few steps, due to needing to move the image data from PB into a window bitmap, so the AVI writer it happy. So we're drawing our FX screen as normal (it won't work on Video images!), then copying this to a Windows Bitmap so we can dump it to the Avi stream. Actually, what I find works best, is first copying the FX screen to another 1/2 sized screen, then copying to it the windows bitmap and dumping that to the avi stream. Which kills two birds with one stone, 1) it lowers the bandwidth and 2) it allows for the screen image to be post filtered...
Anyway, the main reason for wanting to do this is just to make a manually creating videos for YouTube of PB games/app's a little easier and without the need for buying 3rd party app's..
Video=PlayBasic Write AVI Test (Sparkles) - Demo Src
Unfortunately, due to a lack of entries this year, no second place could be awarded. However, our congratulations go out to Micheal for yet another superb effort !
Sponsors
This competition is proudly sponsored by,
Well, it's just past the submission deadline for the Casual Creations competition, so this competition is now officially closed. Thanks to all who participated, we'll post the results soon !
This release updates any of the PlayBasic V1.63w2 through to PB V1.64j2 retail upgrades, to the current retail release version of PlayBasic V1.64k. If your version is older than PB1.63W, then you'll need to install patch PB1.63w2 prior to this one ! (if you haven't already)
The PB1.64k package includes updates of PB Compiler, Release / Debug Runtimes, SLIBS, DOCS & IDE V1.17.
This upgrade is mainly to correct some issues detected in previous release of V1.64k after release. These issues mostly concern internal and user defined function parameters. Correcting issues with optional parameters and with long hand declarations.
The only new functionality (that comes to mind) would be VSYNC support in windowed modes. It's important to understand that you can't control the ends users displays refresh rate. So therefore you shouldn't assume that everybody playing your game has their windows desktop refresh set to the same as yours. So if your system has a refresh rate of 60 say, and your friends system has a refresh of 75. Then your game will run faster on your friends system than yours. Mind you, the same applies in full screen exclusives modes also ! So Vsync should be used to smooth out display refresh, not as a speed limiter!
To learn more about new compiler features added in PlayBasic V1.64K, check out the V1.64 WIP thread, which includes some examples and some theory stuff about the new features found in this upgrade.
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