[In Progress] Light Cycle Game + 3d engine

[Manticore-X]

Well, I've been pretty quiet for a while so I'm here to announce my new game. A friend and I got together to create a new engine to support this new game. He did most of the math behind the transformations and I did the programming/optimizations. What we ended up with is (what I believe) a true 3D engine for the zune. It is obviously hindered by the lack of textures, but for games that can exist in a wireframe environment it works well (I have one or two more in mind that I will work on when I am finished or at least further along with this one).

Anyways on to what I assume most care about, the game. It is rendition of the lightcycle game from tron on the zune. It is still very under progress, but I feel like it is coming along well. On the zune 30 it runs around 19-20fps under my tests. Others it runs around 15ish. Though they seem low, the people that have played the game agree that it still feels fluid. Anyways, here is a video to demonstrate gameplay....(This is a slightly previous version. In the current version there is a bot that runs in circles and some optimizations)

+ YouTube Video

Oh and the fps looks really low because of the camera

I would be happy to answer any questions people have about any of this.

Thanks to soccerfreak24 for making the video and testing after my zune died

Thanks to Ziggyware for providing the library I use to draw the lines and to some website that helped me with collision.

Also if anyone wants to see the code let me know. If I recognize your name I'll be happy to share.

+ YouTube Video

[soccerfreak24]

Woot! This game is gonna rock.

[Tiptup300]

You know Nick already made a raycasting engine that supports textures that run at about 50fps on the 30 and 25fps on the 60/8/10

[Manticore-X]

This is not raycasting. This is true 3d. You can angle/move the camera. Also raycasting does not support linear walls (at least to my knowledge) the walls must be blocks in a matrix. This the walls can be anywhere with data points

[Tiptup300]

Well still, this specific game isn't in need of true 3d, therefore the better choice would just be using raycasting for this game since it doesn't need it.

[Manticore-X]

I dont think you understand. This game is not possible in raycasting (ok to clarify, yes it might be, but it would difficult and more than likely have horrible performance). It needs to be able to create walls from any one point to any other point. And yes, it does need true 3d to support different camera views such as 1st person, 3rd person, and overhead. There might be some hacky way to get the walls working in the raycasting engine with sprites or maybe a huge matrix (making the block walls tiny) but these would serious decrease performance.

[Ricardo Dawkins]

The real question is:
Can Manticore and his friend get this engine to run at 25-30 fps on Zune 80, Zune 30, Zune 8/4 devices ?

[Manticore-X]

No, we cannot. The Library I am using to draw the lines runs at about 17 fps (iirc) when the screen is totally black and nothing is happening. The zune cannot natively draw lines which greatly hurts performance. But please, trust me on the fact that though the fps seems low, it is 100% playable on both

[Hey Mr Patch]

I think your doing a fantastic job. Keep up the good work and update us often!

[Tiptup300]

Yeah, I understand what you're talking about now. Raycasting as a technique could, but the raycasting engine made, currently cannot.

[soccerfreak24]

Whats up with the negativity... this is a huge achievement.

And btw, as far as fps is concerned... no one should be worried at all. I've tested this numerous times, and it runs extremely smoothly. There is just about no noticeable lag at all, being that the most you ever drop is 1-2 fps.

[ShotgunSnipist]

Yeah,
I have tested this game and the game play is very fluid.
Looks nice and doesn't lag even when many line have been drawn.
Good Work Manticore-X.

[Ricardo Dawkins]

Whats up with the negativity... this is a huge achievement.

yeah, you are right. in fact if id, Valve, Crytek and everyone else can use different 3D engines for their games... so, why not the Zune XNA programmers can develop their unique engines for games ?

Manticore, good luck. Hope you finish that game promptly to show it on my Zune.

[ShotgunSnipist]

Originally Posted by Tiptup300

You know Nick already made a raycasting engine that supports textures that run at about 50fps on the 30 and 25fps on the 60/8/10

30!? I BARELY manage 15! And then you look though a window and your getting 2 fps! Maybe, I need to delete some of the game I have...

[Tiptup300]

Originally Posted by Ricardo Dawkins

yeah, you are right. in fact if id, Valve, Crytek and everyone else can use different 3D engines for their games... so, why not the Zune XNA programmers can develop their unique engines for games ?

Manticore, good luck. Hope you finish that game promptly to show it on my Zune.

I wasn't being negative I was making a suggestion.

[tenritsu]

This looks real nice, not to mention it's a pretty awesome feat to have an actual 3d engine. Good job!

[ShotgunSnipist]

Yeah the 3d-ness is awesome!
+Rep

[ZeroCool2021]

Is this really REAL 3D ?
and...
This game looks like it might work for an idea I had for a zune game, Tron "The racing part"

How about a demo release?
looks like a very nice start

[SimReality]

It technically is 3D but before we all jump out of chairs from excitement, let's realize what this is. It's doing what a GPU is doing (you know, those beasts of processing power that churn out millions of shaded polygons in fractions of seconds) on a low-end CPU. Hence his 17 frames per second. Not to say it isn't an achievement (it's pretty cool), but this doesn't mean tomorrow (or ever) we'll be playing fully 3D rendered games on the Zune.

I actually did something similar myself. I rendered a 3D cube on the Zune in software. It did free rotations and everything. Only wireframe, but it ran rather quickly. One thing I noticed when I was working on it was that clearing the screen at that point was expensive since I was directly drawing to the "backbuffer" (in quotes because I simply used SetData on a Texture2D which filled the screen). What I did to optimize was track which pixels actually had been drawn to last frame and reset those to black. This massively cut down the number of pixels I had to change and gave me a little boost.

Another solution would be to blend the raycasting engine with what you have. You could use raycasting for all of the exterior walls since you play in one big box and then use your line rendering for all of the cycle trails. Then you get to save some of your more expensive calculations from rendering those walls which could provide a little boost in speed for you.

Good luck with this. I know 17fps is playable, but once you get over 20, that's when things start looking nice and smooth.

[Manticore-X]

Thanks for the comments everyone

ZeroCool, a demo release will come when it is ready. After posting this vid I began to rework a lot of my code to make it cleaner, and to also add much better effects with the camera. If someone really wants to test out the game (I might regret saying this) PM me and I will put you in a group that I will send out a release to before I am ready to make public. Thanks for the interest

SimReality, you are correct about it being a software renderer and I do not believe we will ever be playing true 3d games that use textures, etc on the zune. This is a 3d engine with very few features graphically, but otherwise it is (at least in my opinion) pretty functional rendering wireframes using a camera.

I was directly drawing to the "backbuffer" (in quotes because I simply used SetData on a Texture2D which filled the screen). What I did to optimize was track which pixels actually had been drawn to last frame and reset those to black. This massively cut down the number of pixels I had to change and gave me a little boost.

The library I am using does basically the same thing to draw the lines, but with some variation I believe. How significant of an optimization was that? I'm wondering if it would help at all with this game (and something similar might already be in the drawing library), but if you could give some more info that would be great. Most of the fps hit is from (at least I believe) the iteration of the loops for each line to change the pixels as apposed to the actual setting of the texture.

Also with the mixture of both raycasting and my engine, I am hesitant because it seems like it could instead hurt performance (could be totally wrong, it is more of a gut feeling than anything else), and it would reduce some functionality. I've been working, as I said, on the camera some and think I'm going to post some videos from it running on my computer to show it working. But once again, if you think this might help please elaborate some if you have the chance, Frankenstien engines are always fun :P