Credits
- Code: Peace, Bobo and Epyx
- Design and Direction: Roy/SAC
- Music: "Fusion" by Neurodancer
- Light Blue Fonts Conversion (Amiga->OSDM): Wildcop
Additional Information
The latest demo. Short but sweet IMHO. It makes use of serveral of the new OSDM features including the manipulation of Sinus scrollers. I was working again on my OSDM VOBJ utility (download available on the OSDM section home page on my site) and are still looking for a way to come up with some kind of editor for VOBJ vector object files. I did some stuff in PureBasic, the language OSDM itself is written in, the integrated vector object viewer in my tool is the result of those experients. I also played around with a old 3D engine that was written in Visual Basic 6.00 called Dex3D and made some progress there. I modified the engine to be able to load and save VOBJ meshes and can also use it to delete polygons and change colors of existing polys.
The vector objecs used in this demo are a result of the whole mix of things I was looking into at the same time. They are converted, poly-reduced and recolored VRML, Renderware or Wavefront meshes that I used for testing, writing or modifying the various mesh editing/manipulating/converting/optimizing tools and 3d engines. The crux of the problem are mainly two things: 1. most 3D engines (at least the most basic ones, which should be enough for handling OSDM meshes) are based on triangular polygons with 3 data points and 3 vertices and not so called quads or four point/vertices polygons only like OSDM is using. 2. I have not seen any simple 3D engine that allows variable transparency like the one used by OSDM. The engines that do have a transparency feature are always limited to two options only: transparency "on" or "off", without offering a variation of levels. OSDM offers 255 different levels. The "fast vector shading option" in OSDM also seems to be a slight problem, mainly because I am still not 100% sure what it exactly does and how. It's some obscure custom lighting effect to enhance the 3D perception, but it is not something generic like "flat-shading" or "gouraud-shading". It is something in between with some, how it appears, PI * Thumb (ballpark) applied lighting visual effects, which can work as great as they can completely "miss the mark" and produce "weird" looking results.
I also learned that adding a 4 point polygon to a 3D mesh without an exact idea what you are doing and why is not as easy as I thought it would be. The adding itself is not the problem though, but adding it in a way, a place, the size, an orientation, a position in 3D space relatively to the projection plus viewing plane and the right shape that the user will be able to find it and do something useful with it, is not trivial. Well, I hope that I will find a feasible solution eventually. hehe
Goodies
