Talent 3D Designer

[bwinkel67]

There is also Tank Busters. I forget if it had copy protection where it needed the cart in MDV1. But it was a wireframe tank game for an unexpanded QL that I played a lot back in the late 80s and early 90s.

[bwinkel67]

Ok, so you can show static 3d objects with the Talent program, or rotate them.
But why not include them in 3D animations, once you have the x, y & z coordinates ?
Take a look at orbiter3D_bas, a game posted on the QL Forum a couple of years ago....

Animations...
Sounds good to me ...
How could it be to get an feature to allows export it and add it into games?

That's a good question by Popopo. Steve, how do you export the wireframe stuff from the Talent software and use it in a BASIC program? Does it generate BASIC code for you?

[stevepoole]

Hi Bwinkel,

When I return from holidays, I will try to take a look at the Talent 3D program on my SGC.

If they store their wireframe coordinates as readable DATA files on media, they should be readily accessible. If not, ouch ! Steve.

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[bwinkel67]

When I return from holidays, I will try to take a look at the Talent 3D program on my SGC.

If they store their wireframe coordinates as readable DATA files on media, they should be readily accessible. If not, ouch !

Thank you but that's not necessary. From your post above, which Popopo replied to, you made it seem like you used the output of the Talent 3D program to build your wire-frame in orbiter3D_bas. So I believe it was just a miscommunication that he and I garnered from your post.

I suppose if you had all the points, you could draw the object, but to be able to rotate it in a sensible manner would not be as simple as just changing all the x,y,z coordinates, as you'd have to choreograph how to do that. That's why I thought, when you built the examples you spoke of, and were referring to Talent, somehow that software spat out BASIC code (i.e. maybe a function per object) that allowed you to send it orientation information and it rotated/moved things for you. I figured that'd be pretty hard but was intrigued by that :-/

[Popopo]

In my opinion (without experience in that matter just in Autodesk 3DS ancient times )...
Even when to apply rotations to the models into a SuperBasic program could be not easy, the tool is great if it exports the models.
It helps to designs and later to rotate the points applying some maths by arrays...
Even... could be very helpful for the design of the scenery.
It will be always much better than to work from 0 in a raw environment.

It is only my imagination and how it could be powered up.

Of course, it is not the same to work with Autocad system grouping points than an array of objects defined by some vectors. Vectors are much more to transform and translate.
What helps to use it into games (for example).
Perhaps a plug-in?

I wanna join it!
I hope to finish what I have in my hand awaiting (some projects) and try to help with it. I love it

[dilwyn]

Where 3D information already exists as DATA statements, a good starting point to gain experience with the various aspects of coding 3D wireframes (including animation, hidden line removal and filled surfaces) is to look at the lovely little QBits 3D program. I learned a lot about the 3D maths and QL graphics involved by reading its manual and studying the BASIC. For some reason I had expected it to be far more difficult to understand than it turned out to be - even though I did mathematics in school, at my age it frightens me nowadays!

I've yet to build anything constructive from what I learned, although I've done the basics of a 3D spinning cube as a screen saver for my Q68. The only difficult bit is trying to make it fast enough with complex shapes, but there are fairly straightforward speedup tricks such as using lookup tables for trigonometric values to prevent the overhead of repeated SIN/COS calculations etc.

And if I can understand it, I'm sure most on here would.

Which brings me to the next step of the problem... having too many software projects on the go at once prevents me decently finishing any of them. That recent Catacombs adventure although satisfying to finish, did cost me time on other projects. Gratifying to see the post was viewed about 700 times and my website registered about 90 downloads of the game.

Wish I could learn to focus on one project at a time though!

[stevepoole]

Hi Folks,

Perspective animation requires no more maths than GCE 'O' level trigonometry. SIN, COS TAN and their inverses.

The main problem is that our 'QL' trigonometry functions do not extend to all positive/negative spherical values.

This is cured by extending them somewhat. Projecting scenes onto a screen uses the same trig techniques.

More complicated is calculating several trajectories simultaneously. Rotations are also done using trig.

For speed, with plenty of memory, save each calculated frame to RAM. Replay is then extremely fast.

It is surprising what can be achieved already in SuperBasic ! Thanks to QPC2, Perspective animations are within reach...

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[FrancoisLanciault]

I started working on a 3D vector game/demo many years ago. Coded in C and assembly. I coded the trigo function using a lookup table in machine code. Each object could have its own 6 degrees of freedom motion + camera motion. BB QL was quite slow, but ok a GoldCard or faster. Went as far as producing a small demo of shapes spinning and rushing towards you.

I might go back to it one day, but this time using quaternion instead of sin/cos.

Francois

[stevepoole]

Hi Folks,

Azerty PC keyboards don't have easily accessible function keys, when I developed the game using an external keyboard....

So now, F1 & F2 keys are replaced by 'x' & 'c'. That should cater for any keyboard. Tell me if I am wrong...

So here is version two. You have to get used to x, y & z directions in 3D, which are not the same as QL x & y ones !

The game is fully tested on QPC2, preferably, but should work on other emulators. ( It doesn't use Quaternions though ).

Just unzip & Lrun, instructions are on screen. Regards, Steve.

Orbiter3Dv2.zip

(7.26 KiB) Downloaded 165 times

[dilwyn]

Hi Folks,

Perspective animation requires no more maths than GCE 'O' level trigonometry. SIN, COS TAN and their inverses.

What I meant was that before studying what's involved, the thought of all the maths which might be involved scared me. In fact, I was wrong, it was nowhere near as bad as I'd feared. As Steve says, little more than basic trig at its simplest level. The real skill comes in coding it all up in an efficient way.

What inspired me to learn about it (before I did a lot of the learning from the QBits software) was the little 3D wireframe demos in QemuLator. Runs really fast when the emulator is allowed to run at full speed. Good at Gold Card speed and still OK at original QL speed for simple shapes like cubes which don't have too many points to join up. There's a choice of shapes in the demo, from cube to a suspension bridge and a torus (a donut shaped revolving circle made of loads of points and lines). It was all enough to catch my interest.

Might go back to it as I'm stuck at home with acute man-flu (as my partner puts it) this week, but after telling myself off for having too many projects on the go at the same time, I'd better focus on finishing at least one of them first!