OpenEuphoria

Re: 3D RPG Engine In Euphoria

• Posted by Derek Parnell <ddparnell at bigpond.com> Nov 14, 2004
• 506 views

Andy wrote:
> 
> Andy wrote:
> > 
> > I was thinking about writing a 3d rpg engine in euphoria. I would probaly
> > make a editor to go along with it and it would probaly use the win32lib to
> > make it windows based. It would also probaly be open source and free. I
> > was basiclly looking for suggestions and some features that would make it
> > a good 3d engine. I would also like to allow for 2d games as well.
> > 
> 
> Here are some other things I forgot to add. The engine would allow for more
> then just rpg games to be made with it, and it would be real-time and have
> partical effects such as fog,smoke,fire,etc. It would also have rendering
> and meshing,shading,texturing,skelton,lighting, and whole bunch of other
> features, anyways these are just some ideas, and I am still planning on
> this engine.

Sorry to dampen your enthusism, but I doubt if Euphoria will be fast enough
on any current hardware platforms to be useful for this project.

Most of the algorithms that implement this sort of things today are written
in assembler (for speed critical things) or C. Currently Euphoria runs
anywhere between 5 and 10 times slower than average C code. And against
optimised assembler code, it must be at least 10 to 100 times slower.

At best, you can use Euphoria to create a high-level wrapper for existing
3D graphics engines. However, you might get away with using Euphoria for
other aspects of a RPG engine, such as AI scripting for bots, and level
designing.

For example, try implementing a simple phong shader algorithm 
( http://www.whisqu.se/per/docs/graphics11.htm ) 

or a bump mapping algorithm that renders a 320x200 image at 20 fps 
( http://www.flipcode.com/articles/article_3dbumpmap.shtml ) 

Euphoria just can't handle that rate of FP calculations and pixel drawing.

There are a number of decent graphic engines out there that are implemented
as DLLs. It might be better to work out how to utilize those rather than
be disappointed at Euphoria's performance in this area.

-- 
Derek Parnell
Melbourne, Australia