I do not mind if someone helps me out, but in a way, I do not feel that its right, plus I do not know anyone in real life that would want to continue after me... I wanted to know how is everyone else coping with such a calamity... I am sure that I am not the only one whose life doesn't revolve around game programming, but would want it to...

Did I forgot to mention sword practice~? Scary 68 inches, 30 pounds~~

Due to work, friends, games, anime and family, I have been noticing that game programming time is reduced to zero minutes.. I was wondering how does a programmer get the motivation to keep moving on. I just feel that there are times where I feel that the day does not have enough hours in it. To make things worse is that my job is computer related, so by the time I get home, I really do not feel like typing anything on the keyboard... I made this post because I wanted to know what goes on inside the mind of a professional~



PS: If EgonOlsen is reading this thread, I wanted to know if the source for the deformed plane is available for studying. I am referring to the program that uses IVertexController. The screen capture that you supplied was http://www.jpct.net/pics/vertexcontrol.jpg Thanks Egon~!

Hee hee... Admittingly, I wanted to make a new Loader but was too afraid to ask~

I use Rhino3D for modelling, 3D Studio for tweaking, lowering polygon count and texturing, and Misfit3D for animation... I really like all three software because they are easy to use. Poser is not a bad program to use at all, but I feel that with "ease of use", you lose a lot of control and flexibility.

QuoteWould it be a good idea to use 3d studio max? What plugins would be helpful to minimize the effort of creating animated 3d modells?

Simply, less effort is less result.

How about changing your text color to an off black color like (1,1,1)~? I haven't tried that but I would think that would be the most easiest solution. Besides, I doubt that anyone can tell the difference between (1,1,1) and (0,0,0)...

As usual, you always save the day~! It sounds like a good idea and I will try it out!!

QuoteBut why do you actually want to think in pixels when doing this? Why isn't the current kind of movement based on the SimpleVector alone sufficient?

Since "I suck" probably does not make a good explanation, it is because I used to do characters for a fighting game engine called M.U.G.E.N. The engine is based on finite state machines. Since the engine died out (the author seems to have fallen off the face of the virtual world (Hah! And scientists said that the world is not flat.... :wink: ) ), I wanted to try to write something that is similar to the engine so that it will be easy to port over some data without too much editting. Anyway, to make the story short, most of the states involve the location and movement of pixels!!

I am really enjoying JPCT a lot...

Before JPCT, I used to attempt making 2D side scrollers. So maybe my problem is that I am still thinking too much 2D...



Anyway! This picture is an example of the textured polygon.. The sprite has a transparent background of purple, and it has been shifted so that the sprite is slightly above the green dot (kinda hard to see, but its a dot between the heels) The white background also transparent as well since there is no color data there.

The important thing about the picture is the green little dot because defines the coordinate (0,0) inside this particular polygon plane. I can specify collision boxes (shown in blue) by using that green dot, and say something like... upper left corner at (blah,blah) and lower right corner at (blah, blah)... The green dot is also important for moving because when I would want the player to move in a 2D side scroller, I would say something like... move whatever pixels to whatever direction.


The problem is trying to convert the inner coordinate system to the world coordinate system. So in this picture, if I wanted the player to move 3 x units to the right, the player has to move 3 green dots to the right. I hope that helps~!!

I suck at explaining things but maybe you did answer the question and I am too dumb to understand it (for now).

Say for instance, I am trying to create some box-like collision boxes. The box is specified by two coordinates; one for the upper left corner and the other for the lower right corner. The problem is that I textured the 1 by 1 polygon in such a way that the texture is centered in the middle of the polygon. Its kinda like the polygon has its own axis for the sprite. I want to somehow convert a coordinate into a point that will be somewhere inside a polygon I guess (?)

Eventually, I also wanted to make the player move a specificed amount. The problem is that the player has to move in accordance to that weird sprite coordinate system and not by a SimpleVector alone.

If I am still not quite explaining things good enough, you can always tell me so~! It seems that every post that I have made so far has to have pictures... Pictures are good~~~

QuoteClothing simulation should be possible as it is possible to get access to the raw vertex data of a mesh by using an IVertexController (like this deformed plane shows it: http://www.jpct.net/pics/vertexcontrol.jpg).

Oh my goddess~! How did you do that? I would love to try to get started with clothing simulation~!! Too bad that I am not at a place to be game programming...  :cry:

Oh my goddess~!! I have been sooo out of programming, and eventhough its been a while since I last worked on a project that uses JPCT, I still have not given up~!!! Anyway, I am going to have a problem with pixels! If you can remember my project, (if not, then go here: http://www.cs.uno.edu/~tvle/hotaru/New%20Text%20Document.htm) I wanted to make 2D sprites that exist in a 3D world and have them do whatever...

My problem is that in 2D games, if I wanted a player to jump, I would say something like move a certain number of pixels up and then after a certain amount of time, I would say go down until the player touched the floor. I wanted to know how I can translate the player by an amount of pixels of the player.

Even if I got tired and decided not to bother with accuracy, I still need to be able to do something like that because I need to do collision boxes~!! Again, the boxes would need to be based on some sort of specified size while using the player's sprite size as a reference. What I mean is that I want the collision box to be a certain amount of pixels based on the pixel size of the player. I hope that I do not come off as confusing!! Its like... I do not want to use Interact2D because sometimes the camera may pan or zoom thus messing up the size of collision boxes. My player is based on a 1 x 1 polygon and the textures are 256 x 256 size.

For anyone who dares to try out the URL, you will need Java 1.5 Runtime. up, down, left, and right works, Z = punch, X = kick, Z+X = float upwards, w = wireframe. Thanks in advance~!!!


Another question as well... I have been looking at a source code for Continuous Level Of Detail terrains and also Clothes Flowing algorithms... Just incase, clods are nice to have because you can have a lot of small maps that blend together seamlessly like in Grand Theft Auto or Oblivion. They can also appear lower in detail if you are far away from the target. The clothes algorithm, I think that many people can get the idea of it easily without an explanation... I wanted to know if JPCT would give me enough power to implement such features.. If so, I would be really happy!

Oh dear~!! After making my previous post, I read your comments and I felt that your solution for shifting and possibly flipping horizontally an image is awesome. I then took a look at the Object3D.getPolygonManager() and I did see the getTextureUV(int polyID, int vertexNumber) inside it...

I do not know why, but its kinda scary... Because I am using Primitives.getPlane(int quads, float scale), I know that I have two triangles to deal with therefore making polyID an integer between 0 and 1... I also know that I can get three SimpleVectors from it by specificing the vertexNumber in getTextureUV... The part that I find to be scary is that I guess that I do not understand how can I get all of that information to flip a texture horizontally based on the Object3D.getCenter().

For now, I am not worried about the shifting of textures, and am placing priority on flipping images horizontally...

Thanks a lot Egon Olsen again! I am using the ITextureEffects on load just as you said and its great! As usual, another issue came up... From the JPCT api, I know that Object3D.invert() is a very costly function but I think that I must have to use it.

As a recap, I basically wanted to use JPCT to make a sidescroller. I was planning to represent the player and enemies as a single polygon textured with a sprite and have them exist in a 3D world.

The problem with the idea is when I wanted to display a horizontally flipped image. I thought that it would have been easier to rotate the plane horizontally while having culling disabled. That resulted in the lighting being different on both sides. I then tried to use Object3D.invert, the end result is good however, for an extremely short period of time, the lighting will be bad.

Since I know that I suck at explaining things, I decided to upload the project. It can be downloaded at http://www.cs.uno.edu/~tvle/spritetest.zip for a very short time. When you first start the SpriteTest, you will have to move either all the right so that you can see the player. To experience the problem firsthand, after you can see the player, simply just press left and right a couple of times.... Oh, just to make sure, you will need Java 1.5 for it since I used generics all over...

A better solution is always appreciated~!!! Lastly, so sorry that the project is a modified car example from the JPCT... I suck at programming...

Ha ha ha~! I feel dumb now... I can now shift the textures by implementing my own ITextureEffect... It simply shifted the image by whatever x and y offset I tell it to.. Thanks again Egon Olsen for all of your help~! I really really want to make something with the engine despite my stupidity... I hope that something good happens soon!

If only I had your brains~~! The build() command works. I had forgotten to build() after assigning the texture. So here is another question~! I would like to have some control over the texture in such as way that I have can have multiple frames to animate. Each frame has a center axis in which it is okay to perform rotations on. I wanted to know how can I get that aligned with the Object3D's getCenter(). Thanks again~!!!

Major apologies for not having those screencaptures~! I also wanted to say thanks for the fast response~!

First off, here is a picture of the plane with no texture....


Then, here is a picture of the plane with the software renderer...


Here is the picture of the plane with the OpenGL renderer


Lastly, this is what I am trying to do~! As you can see, Strider 2 has 2d spirtes all over a 3d world... Its an interesting sight to see~!

Hihi~! I am trying to make a 2d/3d game like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Strider 2.

For my first approach on such a task, I tried to simply load the textures onto JPCT and blit the sprite over a drawn world. However those plans were quickly placed onto a halt because I do not know how to flip an image horizontally as well as scaling the sprite. Blitting also gave the sprites too much screen priority which was not favorable. A possible solution for flipping images was to load the sprites onto the TextureManager twice; one for facing left and one for right. That however does not seem like a good approach at all...

So my second attempt was to make a plane and have that moving about in the world. Object3D has transparencies and I can always use backculling on the plane, so that was fine. Everything went well until I noticed that both renderers applied the sprite onto the plane differently. One of them tiled the image onto the plane while the other just scaled. I also do not know how to place the sprite at a certain point on a plane. (some sprites will need some sort of offset to get the images aligned so that the animation looks nice)

Does anyone have any better solutions? Thank you in advance~!!!