Posts Tagged ‘3D’

  • Cubes of Babylon – Molehill powered Assembly 2011 demo by Evoflash

    Evoflash are probably the only group in the world making demoscene productions in Flash. But wow, are they good! I’ve blogged about them several times in the past, and tonight they released their latest demo: Cubes of Babylon at the Assembly 2011 party in Finland. It’s a lovely piece of work – perfectly synced to the music as you’d expect, with nice shaders, smart visuals and quality design to boot.

    It’s based on Away3D FP11 with their own modifications, running on evoengine2. In their words:

    “It’s basically just cubes and few textures with post processing stack of bloom, godrays, motion blur, depth of field, rgb chroma distrortion, noise vignette and in some parts brightness to palette mapping to create night vision, heat signature etc effects. Runs 60fps on X6 II 1075T & ATI HD6970 with 1280×720 back buffer size (actually because textures need power of two, we got 2048×1024 textures for post processing stack). This was just quick tech demo to see what we could push it initially, I think we got lots to go still. ”

    View it here (FP11 + compatible GPU required) or here it is on YouTube if your machine can’t cope.

  • The Polynomial : Space of the Music

    I found The Polynomial : Space of the Music while browsing Steam today, I had been working hard and decided to treat myself to a little slice of indie game fun, and this was top of the list. The beautiful visuals caught my eye instantly, looking a playable Apple OS X wallpaper. Then I watched the video in motion and was transfixed. £5.99 down and a few minutes later and I was having a gleeful time. Dipping in and out of 3d fractal flowers, diving around colourful spiralling rainbow twists, and trying my hardest to work out what the game was all about.

    In essence it appears to be a simple shooter, but while it starts out sedate enough there comes a point where you seem to be frantically fighting for your life. Your whole room glowing from the chunks of vivid exploding debris flying past. It reminded me a lot of the 16-bit classic Interphase (although without as much puzzle solving depth!) but this is really something you play for the visuals. I admit it looks like something that should have fallen out of Jeff Minters hard drive, but that isn’t the case, and it’s all the better for it.

    You can throw your own soundtrack into it, and the whole game will draw itself around that. Pulsating and winding in time to the beat. There are masses of beautiful screen grabs up in the Polynomial gallery, and I’d urge anyone who has an interest in beautiful playful environments, or fractal / mathematical art, to check it out. It’s as much about the easy creation of stunning images as it is a game, but that’s no bad thing.

    Available now on Steam for both PC and Mac, there’s a demo available too.

  • 3D Ninja Test 2 – Fists of 30 fps Fury

    A few weeks ago I posted my first demo of an animated 3D ninja. At the time I had high hopes of creating a primitive Virtua Fighter styled game. But there were several obstacles to overcome. The poly count was a bit too high, the scene only had one model in it, and it took Away3D a fair time to parse the MD2 data for the key frames.

    So last night I decided to revisit the code and see what could be improved. Here is the result – I dropped Away3D and decided to run a test with ND3D instead. It’s a much more light-weight 3D library, and doesn’t include features like lights or shaders. But what it does do, it does very well, and very fast. The MD2 parser in particular kicked several bails out of the Away3D one.

    This, combined with an optimised MD2 model (many thanks to Adam Biles for help) allowed me to get two fighters in the scene, each independantly animated and textured, with a ground plane and free roaming camera. I did have a skybox in as well, but the camera perspective didn’t look right and made the fighters seem as if they were floating in space. So I’ll save that for a different project.

    Feel free to have a play with the demo.

  • Ninja 3D Test 1

    I had a desire to see if it was possible to create a simplistic “Virtua Fighter” or Tekken style game in Flash 10. The biggest initial hurdle was getting a convincing model displayed and animating it. And then seeing if the frame rate shot through the floor like a dead weight, or was actually playable.

    After a lot of messing around with Milkshape, md2.qc custom files and the Away3D MD2 parser doing some really weird shit, I finally managed to assemble this tech test (click the picture to launch, FP10 required):

    Ok so it’s not going to set the world on fire, but I was genuinely surprised at the speed, even when running a full animation sequence. And the model could be optimised significantly too.

    More tests will follow as time permits, but this is very encouraging at least.

  • Garden Box live on BigFishGames

    This one slipped under the radar a bit, but I released a new game “Garden Box”  a few months ago. It was a “casual friendly” update of my game Dark Cubes. With the hardcore techno and demoscene vibe replaced with flowers, birds and gardening paraphenalia 🙂

    Anyway the game went live on BigFishGames today, so hop on over and have a play if you feel like a cerebral 3D challenge!