Post by Agent Williams in Blitz3D comments

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Hello guys! Thanks for the amazing program. It's what got me into game development and software engineering back in 2004-2005. Many years later I found myself struggling with unity's slow and heavy development cycle. Then I decided to return back to Blitz3D and I am glad I did so. I have been advancing this amazing piece of software to quite modern standards. But right now I am facing a problem with texture flags. Can anyone help me? I need some sort of a combined- or a special flag. Somebody mentioned a flag 49 for my case, but then the mesh disappears completely.. Let me explain. I want to create a low resolution cubemap, but it causes seam issues. I remember there was a edge seam fixup solution somewhere, but I don't remember if it was in Blitz3D or Unity. Anyhow, how to approach this problem? Do I have to modify the cubemap texture at runtime, or whats the complete set of texture flags? Thanks. And many thanks to you Mark, without your amazing program, my life would be completely different.
Note: my first project involved Tokamak physics and I have been working with physics ever since. I am mostly focused on realistic vehicle simulations. And I am once again playing around with tokamak and physx. Then I decided to upgrade the visuals to pbr standards, and this is where I got the edge seam problem.

Here are some screenshots of my pbr solution. It's using Xors3D for shadowing only, everything else is directly portable to original B3D DX7.

The issue is not very visible, but at certain angles the edge seam is very harsh. Take a look on the second image, front left tire, it has a very sharp edge, while it should be blurred instead.

-Ravel. The author of MoDyEn physics extension for Unity3D

X32E1 year ago

"Many years later I found myself struggling with unity's slow and heavy development cycle. Then I decided to return back to Blitz3D and I am glad I did so."

In my opinion, old Unity 5 was the most successful then it modern versions. Why you turn back to Blitz3D? It is interesting...

Agent Williams1 year ago(+3)

Yes, Sir, Unity 5.6 is great. It has all the features that you need. Most importantly I work offline, so Blitz3d is reliable, I can boot it up whenever I want to. Unity requires internet connection etc. to load the license and as soon as something changes in the services of your computer, it requires internet connection again. That is such a waste of talent... Secondly my technological knowhow is at a level where I can build my own world editors and integrated development environments. So I personally see Blitz3D more advanced. But it requires more effort. Thats the beauty of it.

X32E1 year ago (1 edit)

Thanks for the answer. That is why I liked Unity 5, it is enough to download the installer (but the truth is that it required registration online, which is of course a minus) and then it complete to work. Without any installations of modules and other settings.

P.S. And of course C# captivates ... somehow it is closer to real development than BASIC. Although this is a matter of taste.

Agent Williams1 year ago

I do understand your point of view sir. I do like Unity 5 and I have been using it ever since it released.

My personal preference right now is b3d because it is way faster in terms of prototyping. In unity yo often get lost in the editor environment and forget about the actual coding. This causes a major setback and it obviously generates automated code that is not always as effective as intended.

In basic you have the option to write your own advanced interpreter actually, with object oriented programming in mind. There are several C# like interpreters for b3d allready. The advantage of native C# is that you get access to the system .NET classses, which is great indeed.

Also with unity you have a closed asset system which is not ideal for my case. I prefer to manage my own files the way I want. The build prints are also way smaller with b3d. A Unity project usualy weights around 1-5 gb because of all the meta data. With b3d it only depends on how many files you have and how much they weight.

Blitz Research1 year ago

Wow, that looks fantastic!

I do remember the seamless cubemap texture problem, but only from the GL days. There was an extension to deal with it in GL...

https://developer.download.nvidia.com/opengl/specs/GL_ARB_seamless_cubemap_per_t...

...but according to a quick google, D3D didn't get a fix for this until D3D9-ish.

I can't think of a way you could fudge this by distorting cube faces either so sorry but I think you're stuck with it in B3D.

But it all looks pretty seamless from here anyway!

Agent Williams1 year ago

hmm interesting. Thank you for the paper. I will take a look at it. But in the meantime I actually figured out a small workaround for it. Just need to figure out whats the fastest way to solve this issue. After all I am drawing just 6 textures, I can play around with them hehehe... I am planning to use nearby pixels approach. it should actually work...

jfkEO1010etc1 year ago

Looks amazing! Did you try camerazoom?

Agent Williams1 year ago(+1)

Thanks! Camerazoom for edge seam fix? ...uhm, well right now I got a solution working with a baked static ambient cubemap. So it looks quite decent for static lighting. But have to figure out how to make the ambient cubemap smooth. Right now its just a 2x12 image with 2x2 sided cubemap. So the lower row is mostly black pixels and the upper row is the sky color. The front facing side is having brighter pixels to simulate the light direction. I used the ATI cubemap gen to generate the image from the skybox image. It works very good and it makes all the models look modern. I will post a small article about it, once I have finished some fun stuff with it.

itch.io

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