gamedev-GDC web games report 2004-03-30 - By NoiseCrime
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-- -- Original Message -- --
From: "PsychicParrot" <jeff@(protected)>
> Amen to that! Now, if only the boys on the mothership would see it ...
>
> ;) Thanks for sharing that.
Np. I'm sure Gary might have more imput from the actual GDC sometime?
<uh oh, feel a bit of a rant coming on>
But regarding SW3D i have to say recently i find myself re-assesing its
place much more frequently in terms of a development tool. Rather ironic as
for the past year all my client work has actually moved over the sw3d, yet
in terms of personnal development in 3D its so sadly lacking that i've even
contenplated grabbing the (browserless) torque engine and seeing what it can
do. I have no problems with getting dirty with openGL, its really not that
far removed from the effort i tend to put in with dealing with sw3d these
days.
Its not that SW3D is bad, its just so lacking in features and functionailty
that you'd expect and require these days. Its also gone way past the point
of just trying to add transparancy sorting, additive blending, decent
exporters. The lack of rendertotexture along with the crazy workaround of
just grabbing a bitmap render (which works out faster than the inbuilt image
function) is rediculous. The lack of any dynamic shadows, support for
storing more than 1 layer of uv's, no chance of getting any level of pixel
or vertex shaders, poor performance as the model count increases, the list
is endless.
Personally I feel that just addressing the issues the community had 2 years
ago (and which have been covered to death) is no longer enough. For sw3d to
become the leader in web 3d and 3d in general a major overhual is now
needed, not least with opening it up in the form of a SDK to allow
developers to add their own features just like they do with Director
currently. I mean imagine how good Director would be if it had no xtra's?
Thats no buddyAPI, no Printomatic, no Propsave, no vlist, no SharpUtils etc
I can't imagine it would be half as useful as it is today.
My real concern though is perhaps where i'd like to see sw3d get to is never
going to happen. This I think depends on whether MM actual bought or just
licensed the engine from Intel. If licensed then I feel there will always be
servere issues for MM to actual update it all, having to presumably get
Intel to do it for them. This is a shame, becuase I spent an hour or so at
the weekend writing out a sw3d wish list, based on the post by neto (on
dirgames I think) However this was much more than a wish list, as it started
to break down where and how I feel new features should be added. For example
a new shader type (#advanced) that had all the access to properties for
depth comparision, depth read/write, alpha test, blending etc with old
shaders maintaining backwards compatiabilty. Another section dealt with the
issues and needs for renderToTexture, both an actual RTT (which we don't
have) and rendertobitmap/imageobject. However after writing out a fair
amount of stuff i realised that although simple to work into the current
structure of sw3d without access or permission to do so, would mean these
type of changes, ones that actually are meaningful and workable might never
happen. ;(
<end of rant>
Noisecrime 2004
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