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May 20, 2003, 2:54am

I would like to have a reflect command that would cause an object to act
just like a mirror reflecting everything in it even avatars and not just
your avatar but every avatar around you just like a real mirror would.
3D games have this effect for there 3D objects.

May 20, 2003, 1:25pm

"dlp anne" <anne at dreamlandpark.com> wrote in news:3ec9b4f9
at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> I would like to have a reflect command that would cause an object to act
> just like a mirror reflecting everything in it even avatars and not just
> your avatar but every avatar around you just like a real mirror would.
> 3D games have this effect for there 3D objects.

The only thing is that those games use precompiled geometry for all the
surroundings, and partially compiled avatars (most of the time). That gives
you a big performance gain, which then allows you to use more CPU on things
like mirrors. In AW, even with some of the most modern and most effective
techniques for these effects (like stencil buffers) it would mean a
*serious* performance hit. Considering I sometimes get quite mediocre
framerates even with top-of-the-line hardware, I don't think it would work
out very well.

KAH

May 20, 2003, 1:31pm

yeah we do need this command, i've seen it done in 3 games and 2 programs
like AW..
[View Quote]

May 20, 2003, 4:00pm

Afaik. Renderware has no raytracing capabilities


[View Quote]

May 21, 2003, 2:54pm

"ananas" <vha at oct31.de> wrote in news:3ECA6CD9.A515F2B9 at oct31.de:

> Afaik. Renderware has no raytracing capabilities

You don't really need it, and it can be slower than other techniques. But
the lack of raytracing would indicate that RW probably doesn't support
other techniques... I really don't get why they licensed RW3 instead of
something more advanced.

KAH

May 21, 2003, 3:56pm

the other programs i mentioned that are like AW have objects that use stuff
more out of date than AW's and yet they can reflect on stuff
[View Quote]

May 21, 2003, 7:08pm

>... I really don't get why they licensed RW3 instead of
> something more advanced.
>
> KAH


i totally agree with that.. even md2 would be nice

May 21, 2003, 7:18pm

[View Quote] MD2 is a file format used by Quake2, not a 3D engine.

-Agent1

May 21, 2003, 7:20pm

[View Quote] I was wondering what he was talking about.

--
--Bowen--

May 22, 2003, 12:27am

i've had no trouble converting MD2 and MDL files to AW Format, with the 3D
Textures and design and they work on AW so maybe AW should use MD2 or MDL
[View Quote]

May 22, 2003, 11:40am

[View Quote] So what? The file format doesn't decide how things get rendered. Using MD2 for AW won't really solve any problems.

-Agent1

May 22, 2003, 1:41pm

like the quake engine which was accidently mentioned :) its only $10k i
believe. not sure about royalties

-SWE

[View Quote]

May 22, 2003, 2:20pm

[View Quote] Still, AW is paying royalties to RenderWare. Isn't one of the quake
engines free?

--
--Bowen--

May 23, 2003, 7:20am

not totally, has strings attached. have to have like a big logo and pay more
royalities. cant remeber, i checked it out ages ago.

-SWE

[View Quote]

May 23, 2003, 7:24am

like what?

[View Quote]

May 23, 2003, 5:50pm

There are other rendering engines out there, with different licensing arrangements. I think it may be of some benefit to look into attempting to adapt one of the ones which allow a development team to work on it for free before their first public release. I do recall seeing wording to that effect in one of the ones I looked at. Of course, there is no easy solution, and much of Active Worlds is built around the way RenderWare works, so... it's not like they can just rip out one rendering engine and drop another in. (Someone in the development team, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this.)

TechnoZeus

[View Quote]

May 26, 2003, 3:37pm

"technozeus" <TechnoZeus at usa.net> wrote in
news:3ece7b7e$1 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> There are other rendering engines out there, with different licensing
> arrangements. I think it may be of some benefit to look into
> attempting to adapt one of the ones which allow a development team to
> work on it for free before their first public release. I do recall
> seeing wording to that effect in one of the ones I looked at. Of
> course, there is no easy solution, and much of Active Worlds is built
> around the way RenderWare works, so... it's not like they can just rip
> out one rendering engine and drop another in. (Someone in the
> development team, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this.)

I believe you can get ahold of the QIII engine freely if you intend to pay
for it (check iD Soft's page for this). It is true that AW is strongly
reliant on RW, and a convertion would take a lot of time, especially now
that there are so few programmers. The mistake was made when AW 3.0 went on
the drawing-board. Since they were going to upgrade to RW3, involving a lot
of changes and a long convertion process, this was the time to change their
mind about the engine. Granted, it would probably have taken even longer to
deliver 3.0, but using a more advanced and modern engine would definitely
have been in their interest. I checked the RW3 licensing (that was at least
a year ago, prices may well have changed since) and found it to be
extremely expensive. They also had to pay the fee for EACH VARIANT (D3D,
OGL and software). I think the total came up to something like $750k! That
the OGL engine is complete rubbish, the two other mediocre, doesn't really
justify it.

This said, engines like QIII or Unreal might not be the right thing for AW,
since they're aimed at games, and take a great deal of control over the
workings of the game. But there are other engines out there, and they
could've spent the money on programmers to code an engine tailored to AW's
needs... In which case they could've done the same clever thing as iD,
Valve, etc and licensed it out to boost future development.

KAH

May 26, 2003, 4:11pm

[View Quote] I disagree, I believe they can be optomized to perform better than RW's
engine for realtime rendering. Much better at that.

--
--Bowen--

May 27, 2003, 1:11pm

"bowen" <Bowen at andras.net> wrote in
news:3ed258c9 at server1.Activeworlds.com:

> I disagree, I believe they can be optomized to perform better than
> RW's engine for realtime rendering. Much better at that.

They probably can, but they're still aimed at games and might not really do
well for AW's use. For example, the Unreal engine takes care of everything
from the menus to the multiplayer engine, and will not cater very well if
there's no guns involved.

KAH

Jul 7, 2003, 4:59am

There are three rendering engines in there already.. Software,
OpenGL and Direct3D.

Even though these are the same 'engines' used at the lowest level
by other games, it's not the *rendering* engine itself that determines
if stuff like 'mirrors' are possible.

Renderware is more than just a rendering engine, just as the Quake
or Doom or other game engines do more than just 'render'. All game
engines need to do collision detection for example and you won't
find anything like that in a rendering engine.

No game uses raytracing for real time display either. Mirrors in games
are done using techniques such as mentioned earlier.. by rendering
a texture from a given viewpoint and dynamically mapping that to
an object.

Contrary to what somone said in the earlier thread about implementing
cameras, that is how games can and do implement things like
live security cameras and live computer screens in their worlds,
and it is not that big a performance hit. The back of the napkin
math that was cited failed to acount for the fact that the texture
created would only be a very small size versus a full sized browser
view, so cameras need not affect the frame rate much at all.


[View Quote]

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