C#, DirectX - 3D programming (500 points)

Hey dave,

I'm not really looking for an engine.  I'm under the impression that it would be more difficulty to go from using an engine to creating a full fledge 3D game/world on your own.  Am I wrong with this?  In any case, I did take a brief look awhile ago for some C# engines, but the few I found were for 2D games.

I've completed several 2D game tutorials (for example, a tennis game), but I'm mosting have difficulties with creating and nagivating a 3D world.  For the tennis example I mentioned, the "world" was just a form though Visual C# and the characters were just sprites.  Unfortunatly, this doesn't help me much on 3D game programming (at least, not as far as I can tell).

From the few tutorials that I could find that were actually for C# (and not C++), none detailed how to create a 3D room, let alone use a room you built through a program like 3D studio max (ie, instead of drawing the 'room' manually through the C# code).

With that said, there were several times that I came away from a tutorial (after finishing it) and learnt nothing new.  Maybe I'm jumping ahead too far, but I also couldn't find anywhere that mentioned abit more informatoin about how 3D games work.  By this, I mean, 2D games use tiles and flipping (?), but what about 3D?

What I'm basically looking for is how to use a room that I have created in 3D studio Max as the world, then to put a character into that world, and then move him around.

If you do know of some existing code/tutorial that can do this, it would be appreciated.  You mention that the movement of a character is pretty simple;  can I get some code (or a website with some) for moving a 3D character around both the X and Z axis (lets ignore the Y axis for now).

It just seems that the more I try and do research into this, the less I learn :(

davebytes, are you still there?  You mentioned that you could point me towards some sample code/tutorial that already does exactly what I am looking for, and I was wondering if you could provide those links.

I'm still here, just busy with things.

I said I might be able to point you to some links... let me think about what might be useful given what you've described (and with C# in the equation, the potential sites shrinks dramatically...).

Let me quickly also try to make you feel like you ARE learning something about all this.

You've made a 2D game.  I assume you had user input of some sort?  That translated into moving a sprite around?  Did you use velocities to move the sprites?

If so, you've got all the basis you need for the move to 3D.  Imagine if you will you are looking DOWN on your room from the top, and instead of perspective we use a orthogonal view.  Hmmm, all of a sudden, we're really kinda talking about a 2D view.  Translating keyboard input to move the player around?  Well, up/down arrow could be forward/backward velocity, right/left turns the 'front' orientation or angle of movement for the velocity, and angle * velocity = motion vector.  That make some sense?  If you were animating a tennis ball moving around the screen, you've got some similar things to pull from your experience there as well.

I'll try to think a bit about potential tutorial sources... If I can't come up with some, I'll try to feed you some more useful pseudo code.  But I generally like to help people 'take the next logic jump' when I can... ;)

-d

I know that there isn't many C# tutorial sites, which is the main reason I've posted this question, because I've been looking around for awhile now :)  A tutorial would be great, even if it just showed me how to load up a 3D area (even if I only get a single perspective view of it, but can't move around), it would be a nice start.

In the 2D table tennis game that I created, sprites were moved by incrementing and decrementing the y and x position.  Basically, I had to unload the sprite, and re-load it at it's new position depending on which key the user pressed (pretty basic game, I know).  The main problem I have with this, is I don't know if this is used in 3D programming.  I mean, presuming I could get a 3D room loaded, would I be unloading the 3D character and reload it for each animation, or is it handled differently than in 2D?  I thought I heard somewhere that the animation was done in the 3D modelling program (in this case, 3D studio max), and that it was just 'played' in the 3D game each time it was needed.

Also, in the 2D game, the background was an image loaded onto the form.  I didn't need to do any manipulation of the image (as the "tennis court" in the game was static), but in a 3D environment, how would you go about loading up each room as a character walked from one area to the next?  Also, alot of the tutorials I've found don't really give any information on what I need to do if I want to use my own 3D environment created through another program.  Is it that you can't do this, and that you need to re-draw the areas through the C#?

As a note, I did a little searching around for some other books.  What do you think of "Introduction to 3D Game Engine Design Using DirectX 9 and C#", by Lynn Thomas Harrison?  It seems to be one of the few that come up for me :/

I did find what looks like a pretty useful tutorial that could start me off abit, though it doesn't seem to indicate anything about loading my own environment (it looks like it draws the areas manually)

If you wanna check it out and let me know what you think, it's http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:6M33MRM6f_wJ:www.exocortex.org/ben/IntroTo3DGraphcsWithDirect3D.ppt+%22C%23%22+%22managed+direct+X%22+%223d%22+%22tutorial%22&hl=en

(it's the HTML version of IntroTo3DGraphcsWithDirect3D.ppt)

davebytes, I haven't heard back from you in awhile.  How are things coming along?

You mentioned that some of the stuff I need are pretty simple and that you could find a tutorial.  I was wondering if you've found some yet.

Although I've finally managed to make a 3D cube rotate in a window with one of the tutorials I found, I'm still unable to locate anything relating to importing a *.x file into a scene.

Thanks in advance

Sorry, I'm just EXTREMELY busy!  Haven't been able to keep up with EE stuff.  Lemme give this a quick shot.

MSDN is my usual place when trying to find tutorials on DirectX.  A DX9 tutorial dealing simply with .X loading and rendering is in the SDK, and referenced at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/directx9_c/directx/graphics/tutorialsandsamples/tutorials/direct3dtutorials/6/tutorial6.asp

That shows how to load a Mesh, parse through and load textures, etc., and how to call to render the mesh object.

Now loading 'into a scene' is a confusing statement... If you have the concept of a 'world', you can load 'objects' that are IN the world, or pieces that ARE the world (i.e., the character versus the room).  In the long run, room geometry might be best stored and loaded in formats other than .X, but I'll leave that for a later discussion.  For the moment, you should be able to load both room and character as separate .X objects, and only apply movement to the 'player' object (the 'room' object remains static).

-d

Sounds good, I'll give it a go this weekend and let you know how I end up.

If you get time, could you list a few formats that room geometry would be better stored as?  You don't need to really talk about then, I can do a search through google and see how they operate, I just need some 'good' format name :).  I presume characters/monsters are fine in .X format?

Generally, I use custom formats when it comes to more static geometry.  Every engine I've worked on has used something different.

You may want to look at Quake, Torque, Unreal, etc. for the types of file formats they use.  Each is very different.  The Quake BSP format was popular for a while -- I never used it, so don't know its limitations.

In theory, everything could be stored in .X -- it's just that you might eventually find it limiting, not storing all the data you want, not allowing the extra features you want, platform/dx dependence, etc.

-d

Yo sebastion,

depending on your version of 3ds check out a plugin called Panda, it converts to .x file format.  There are a few other options out there.  I currently use conv3ds comandline app from an old dx sdk.  I don't think they have included it in the newer sdks.  I would say that it is good to start working with the x file format. I havn't found it limiting yet although i'm sure it is in other aspects, but once you get a bit of code up and running to load a mesh you can put in a different model, or add more etc. with relative ease.  But I would say you are right on about staying in 2d for the movement aound your room.  It is good to get 2d computational geometry and physics(or psuedo physics) down before moving into 3d.
skeid

skeid21,

I actually have the conv3ds that came with Direct X 8 (if I remember correctly).  Someone linked to it in another question, and I'll be using that to convert the 3D Studio max models to .x format.  So no hassles there :)


davebytes,

I didn't have much time recently to check out the link you gave (because of a annual conference, which is now over), but I took a look at it on the weekend.  It seems to be for C++, not C#.  I'm not sure if that's what I'm looking for, since I was under the impression that because C# uses Managed Direct X, it would be different to what you would do in C++.

I did, however, attempt to navigate to the C# section (which I had previous looked at before posting this question), but had trouble finding a tutorial relation to what I needed.

It would be greatly appreciated if I could get a hold of some code that would allow me to load a 3D mesh in a window.  

I think I would prefer something other than pseudo code, as (in my opinion) I learn alot faster if I actually watch what a program does, based on it's code, rather than imagining how it works.

Thanks

sebastion -

You looking for something like this?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/directx9_m/directx/direct3d/tutorials/tutorial6.asp

(Hint on how I found it, go to msdn site, typed in "managed directx tutorial", and it was in the top few results... ;) )

-d

davebytes:

Sorry for the late reply, I've been really caught up with work which doesn't look like it's going to end sometime soon.

As mentioned above, I've already been to that tutorial (as I did navigate to the "managed" part), however it seems that the only way I'll get that code compiled is to go through all the previous tutorials to make sure I have all the required parts.  This is what I didn't want to do and why I started this question.

I've noticed that in the past I have learnt better by watching the program compile, setting breakpoints, commenting out lines and basically just experimenting with and expanding on the code.

I was hoping for a someone to post some code from start to finish that compiles and loads a room, as opposed to linking to tutorials (see the problem mentioned above).  I guess I was expecting a little bit more for 500 points (max available per question) than simply "go here".

When I first started this question, I only expected it to last about a week or so.  Unfortunately though, if this keeps up I'll probably need to close the question as I'll run out of time.

davebytes:
I guess I should give you a little bit more information.  I never intended to become a professional game designer.  In fact, I never intended to make a full game.  Beyond the project mentioned below, its highly unlikely that I'll be using this code (or knowledge) for any future projects.

My aim with this question was to quickly take a 3d modeled building (our office, which I've already created) and allow the user to move around it.  The initial plan was to make a movie, but I started thinking about something a little more interactive.  This was going to be used with our franchises and clients inter-state.

Regardless, this is taking longer then I originally planned and it looks as though I won't have enough time as needed to finish this idea.

skeid21:
I appreciate the effort, but as requested I would have preferred complete code without me having to fill in the gaps.



I'm going to close the question as I don't think I'll have the time to explore this any further.  I have posted in the community forum asking that the points be dropped to 300, with 200 going to davebytes and 100 going to skeid21 for their efforts (I appreciate the intent).