Transformers

Probably you think that I've forgotten "City Racing", but that's not true. Now I spend my spare time in the development of "SOCCER TACTYX" because this is the right period to take useful inspirations from the matches of UEFA Euro2008, but "City Racing" is always the next demo that I'm going to develop.

For what regards the car models performed in that demo, I've already chosen those shown in this old post, but I've recently found also these nice models in the "Transformers Q2" MOD for Quake2.

It's surprising to see these running cars or flying airplanes tranform seamlessly to fighting robots, so it's not a bad idea to archive these models and take them in consideration for a future demo.
Imagine a slow running robot that becomes a fast racing car: I don't know yet what it has to do with with a race in the streets of a towm, but at least it's amusing!

Models formats (POLL)

I have no news about the projects that I started in the past days. The scheduled activities are delayed, but I hope to find more time for their development soon.
Anyway, now it's the time for a new poll. Since the available time is limited and I want to improve the engine especially for what regards features really used, I want to ask about the animated models formats that are going to be used in your projects.

As you know, the model format currently supported are: Cal3D (the well known library), MD2 (Quake2 format), MD3 (Quake3 format), MDL (Half-Life 1 format) and MS3D (MilkShape3D format). There are also 3DS and OBJ, but they are not animated (at least not in the flavor that the engine supports). If you want that some of them are the one improved first (I mean higher rendering speeds and better final results), vote them. Then I add also to the list the X (DirectX) and MD5 (Doom3) formats, that are not supported yet, but I have found in the past source code that can help in their implementation. If you think that also the last two are important in your project, vote for them, too. You can also suggest other formats, but in that case you must also suggest some free source code that explains how to load and render that format using OpenGL.
You can vote at will any number of formats, but choose only the ones you absolutely need, so I can focus my efforts (and my spare time) in a useful direction.

Improving MD2 support

Yesterday I asked why MDL models show almost the same performances of MD2 models, the latter being of worse quality. There were several answers, but the right one was the following: the code of the MD2 animator was very poor, of course.
Tweaking the code, the demo showing 32 MDL models now give roughly the same frame rate of a square of 64 MD2 models with weapons and shadows.
In conclusion, in the next release of APOCALYX you are going to double the number of rendered MD2 models at the same time, keeping the frame rate the same: a nice achievement.

USA and German soldiers (MD2 format)

MDL vs MD2 performaces

I was still evaluating good animated models for GUN-TACTYX-2, my QUAKE3-style CROBOTS-like game. This time my idea was to develop a more realistic game. The first GUN-TACTYX performed a very original MD3 model (the Wrokdam model by Grant Struthers) that gave a suggestive background to the game, but also little emotive involvment in the fights among cyborgs. Instead realistic models add more atmosphere and an improved player's attachment to his team of bots. That's why I am evaluating several kind of models available on the internet.

Since I'm oriented towards the usual, inflated WW2 background, my choice falls between the models of "The Trenches" MOD for Half-Life 1 and the models of the "DDay" MOD for Quake2. The models of the latter are worse, if seen at short distances, because of the limitations of the MD2 model format, but I thought that they were going to be better to keep frame rates high. In fact, an MD2 model is very simple: one need to attach only a single texture and render only triangle strips or fans already optimized for OpenGL strips and fans. On the contrary, MDL models are more complex and better seen at short distances: they need several textures, lots of triangles and the animations based on skeletons require chains of matrices multiplications.

Because I need a lot of models around of the battleground, I thought that MD2 models were lighter, but I was wrong. In the pictures below you can see a square of 36 WW2 USA soldier in MD2 format (from "DDay" MOD) against 32 british and german WW1 soldiers in two rows (from "The Trenches" MOD). Surprisingly the frame rate is roughly the same. I don't know yet which is the cause: the poor code of the MD2 animator, the good code of the MDL animator, or the relative heaviness in triangles count of the two kind of models.
However, this first test gives more points to the better looking, more versatile MDL models.

32 WW1 british and german soldiers in two rows (MDL format)

A square of 36 WW2 USA soldiers (MD2 format)