#3dpe

So, in the 5 years since that post, I’ve learned a lot of useless information, and some of that is how to track footage in 3D, using Blender.

Since I never had any luck getting the battle scene geometry out, and I really wanted to know some more intimate details like the camera’s field of view and positioning, I thought I’d try some reverse-engineering. As usual with my grand ideas, the line between genius and lunacy is fuzzy.

I started to track some normal old emulator footage, but sub-pixel fuzz was making accuracy impossible. You need 8 perfectly tracked points for blender to calculate the camera angle, and I barely managed 4 wobbly ones.

I soon lost patience and decided to look into uprezzing DesMuMe. I did some research and found an old, Japanese, windows-only 2014 build that someone had hacked to increase the resolution for models. Perfect!

I tried to record some more footage in OBS... but it was compressed to hell, and the big blobs of colour that endeared me to this generation were not getting me any sort of precision to track anyway. Another bust.

I realised my best chance at accurate tracking was going to be to make it render in wireframe. This is a pretty easy switch for OpenGL - you can just add a single line of code. Maybe I could get the source code and recompile it?

After a lot of searching, I did find the source code - but it was relying on libraries compiled in 2012, and would not compile at all. I also got very upset with Windows and Visual Studio, and had to steam off for a few days before trying anything else lol.

Of course... when I came back, I discovered the Mac version of DesMuMe has a setting called “GPU Scaling Factor”...

I felt very stupid.

DesMuMe is actually very easy to download and compile on Mac. After a bit of fiddling, I got my 4x scale precision wireframes! Some tracking in blender, and bam! Accurate camera positions, angles, and FOV.

Then I spent three days getting very upset, until a passing stranger explained to me the difference between left-handed and right-handed coordinates, and the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.

At some point in the future, as part of the engine’s Help docs, I’ll post the .blend file publicly so that anyone can model custom battle backgrounds and plinths.

The Immediate Future: Bad News

So after working on the demo for two months solid, I'm kind of burnt out. Also, I need money to live, which is upsetting. So there's going to be a bit of a break in development for a while.

It probably won't be for long, though. I have a lot of ideas I'm excited to try out, and ideas for a winter holiday demo that has never yet come to fruition. We'll see!

However, I tried to record some of the process of making the maps, so I'll edit together and post a video of that. I'm also going to get the current tools into the hands of alpha testers, so if you want to play with them, come join Discord! It might include the Halloween maps :)

Next Up: Dates. Updates.

Currently the engine is running in python 2.7. Python recently ended support for v2, and by recently I mean January 2020. So the next thing I want to tackle is updating the codebase to python 3.

Along with that, all of the various libraries will need updating too. We're running old pygame, old pyopengl... you name it, we're struggling with bugs that have been fixed for several years in it.

All this should result in a slight bump in performance, too.

There have been one or two crash problems from the demo too, so I'd like to get those ironed out.

Tools Beta and Clean-Up

The work on the demo, particularly towards the end, resulted in some fast and loose work. I'm not going to say *shoddy*, but... perhaps sub-optimal.

There's also the other slight problem, which is that you can only download and use the game creation tools if you're me, or jac who runs the server. In terms of a game engine, I would also call this sub-optimal.

So, when everything is stable in python 3, I'll be creating and releasing the Core app. This app will connect to the 3dPE website, where user accounts and projects are stored. It'll handle syncing project data with your collaborators, and it'll be the gateway for creating with the 3dPE tools.

We'll then go into some kind of beta. And maybe open source?? Note to jac if you read this: if I die, please make it open source.

Overworld 2.5D Completion

The Overworld plugin is, let's say, baseline functional. But there is more to come. This is the stuff I'm actually excited about coding.

Lights - the lighting system should support point lights, as well as the current environment system. Should make a lot of cool effects!

Model Entities - Animated models (skeletal or UV) are a must.

Sprite refinements - sprites are way too cpu-heavy right now.

Texture creation - Scripting can create textures, but there's no way to apply them yet. It'd be cool if you could use tiles in as prop textures too...

Prop variants - like the variant system for tiles, props should also change with the seasons.

Post-processing - game creates should be able to make their own shaders. Could be used for effects like black and white, or colour correction, or depth of field blurring.

(Even) More efficient terrain - some of the terrain chunking algorithms need work, and it would be nice to introduce LODs for terrain.

And more - skybox models, better threading support and progress bars, more import/export stuff...

Attending the Other Plugins

UI2D

UI2D is really the unsung hero of the whole system. It ties the other plugins together. But right now, you have to code everything in python manually. So I'll be staring on a UI Builder, like the Map Builder, that will let you make a UI with little to no coding knowledge.

TitanBattle and Battle 2.5D

The TitanBattle plugin by jac has been ready for action for some years now - it's a flexible core system for turn based battling. But the Battle 2.5D plugin has been lagging behind while I worked on other things. It would be good to get it up to date with the rest of the engine... and into the next demo...

Conclusion

Its a pretty exciting time for 3dPE right now. The final final thing is that the engine’s stable enough now for me to start my own fangame project (which is kind of the reason this whole crazy edifice even exists). Even if you’re not a game maker or coder, there will be games to play, and lots of screenshots and gifs and videos.

Thanks for following. See you soon :)