okay i'm making a game using c++ (for the engine) and openGL, now i've had lots of trouble using cal3d library for importing my 3d max models into my c++ project,
as a matter of fact i dunno where to even start, i can't find any decent guide and their documentation is pure shit really. i've been searching and trying stuff in this for over a month, but i don't even understand the file structure it uses so far :S
i really need some help, r there any other libraries? any decent guide i can use? i'm stuck
thnx alot
Rather than write your own exporter, consider using one of the built-in exporters for FBX, COLLADA, Crosswalk (.XSI), the Quake/Doom3 .MD3/.MD4 format, or even OBJ. It'll be much easier to parse the resulting file format on your end than to write and maintain a brand-new exporter.
Max is a complete pain for any kind of scripting or plugin. I'd suggest using maya instead if at all possible. You'll get better results for animation and rigging, too. I know it's not a direct answer to your question but part of the problem is the info for stuff like this is not easy to come by.
Related
Im currently working on an excercise about lagrange interpolation. I'm on the point where i would like to plot my data. So I thought there must be a quick and easy way to generate a window and draw some points in eclipse.
Well seams like I thought wrong. I searched on google and I found a shitload of different libarys, all of them either outdated, useless or with a really long installation guide.
The graphic output is really just to test my interpolation, so I want to spend as less time as possible with it. I remeber that there was a libary for java which was pretty simple. You could just import the libary, make a command to initialise a window, and then draw in it. There was no need for a installation and going from zero to a window with a circle was about three commands.
Is there really nothing like that for C++? What could I do to keep it as simple and fast (to install) as possible?
Thanks
Is there really nothing like that for C++?
Not really. C++ includes the "standard library" and that's it. The functionality you're looking for is provided by third-party libraries, as you've already found.
Asking for library recommendations is specifically off-topic on StackOverflow, by the way.
I'm new to DirectX applications, with a decent knowledge of C++ and some experience in working with Blender. So for starters i would like to know how could i import, say, a UV sphere from Blender into a DirectX 11.2 C++ application. I'm using november edition compiler. Is there a tutorial for working with Blender models in DirectX applications that is up to date? Because i read that the .X format is not supported anymore after DirectX 10, and i need to use it in a DirectX 11.2 enviroment. I'm pretty much clueless about what to do and in what direction to go, so any help would be much appreciated.
If you 'just' want to display some 3D objects using native DirectX there is no other way than doing all the initialization stuff, writing a file loader for some kind of format that Blender is able to export and setting up a respective render pipeline. Indeed the way is long until you can see your Blender model in your own application. But if you intend to write your own graphics engine eventually it is a way you have to take. If this is not your goal I recommend you to use an open source 3D engine of your choice.
I used a very good online tutorial on a web page which unfortunately does not exist any more and of course the MSDN libraray to learn about DirectX 11. You can still find these tutorials at an internet archive. Additionally I found another tutorial which seems to look good at a first glance.
If you don't need to do very special things which Blender must write into the file you are exporting, I suggest using the .obj format since it is easy to understand and to load.
By chance I'm writing my own graphics engine in the moment. So if you have any further questions concerning this topic feel free to contact me.
You can always make your own format if its, i dont know, just for some school project or something like that (wild guess). Format your data the way you want, for example:
X,Y,Z,R,G,B\n
X,Y,Z,R,G,B\n
X,Y,Z,R,G,B\n...
for vertices and after you list all your vertices you could use some char like '$' or '%' or something like that which will signify end of vertices and start of indices which will make it easier to parse later. You can assume it is always TriangleList topology but you may also dedicate first line of file to configuration and have int 1 for instance represent that you will use trinagleList and so on...
Hope it helps!
P.S.: Julians answer is better in my opinion, its always good to learn new useful stuff for future projects (like in Bioware :D ), just proposing alternative here.
I've been looking at different ways of creating a certain physics simulation. What I am trying to do is to 3D model the motion of a body under the effects of various forces over time. I was originally looking at coding something in c++ using a physics engine (Bullet) and a 3d engine (Irrlicht). However, I noticed that Blender already allows one to do physical simulations since Bullet is integrated with it (correct me if I'm wrong). This seems like it would make it much easier to design the simulation exactly how I want it (with Blender's extensive GUI).
My issue is that I would like to use the results from the simulation (basically x,y,z,pitch,roll,yaw of the body at each timestep) for input into c/c++ code (or another language if its much easier for this). Can this be done with Blender? Is there a better software package for this that I am overlooking? Thanks, any advice is appreciated.
I would use a Python script for that task, as Blender has a nice interface getting/setting the objects and their properties programmatically through .py files.
So after you are done with your animation you can call a script to walk through the frames and save the required data into a file.
A getting started doc can be found here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Extensions/Python or here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Py/API/Intro
There is a huge list of scripts worth browsing for similar routines you need. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.5/Py/Scripts
As mentioned before, it would be very easy to use python for this. For more specific use if using Blender, perhaps you should consult the main Blender forum www.blenderartists.org
Blenderartists python support: http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?11-Python-Support
Blender 2.5 code snippets (Introduction to scripting for Blender 2.5): http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?193908-Code-snippets.-Introduction-to-Python-scripting-in-Blender-2.5x
I am looking to implement an extremely rudimentary FPS game with extremely rudimentary 3D graphics using C++ .NET and DirectX.
I'm not interested in any third party libraries or anything special like that.
Having never done graphics based programming besides 2D stuff I don't really know where to get started or even how to find the right resources online.
I have a few weeks to build this game so im trying to keep it simple.
Can anyone give me a little guidance on how to get started?
This looks as though it may give you a push in the right direction:
http://zophusx.byethost11.com/tutorial.php?lan=dx9&num=0
I always found that OpenGL was easier to learn though. So unless it's necessary for you to use DirectX, I'd suggest you have a quick look at GL and see what you think.
If you download DirectX SDK you can find plenty of samples there in C++ and C#.
May I recommend "Introduction to Game Programming in DirectX 9" by "Wordware" Publishing. I know you just want something very simple like the rotating cube classic, so do not be put off by the 'game' element. I got 3/4 the way through and wrote a screen saver! DX10 is now available but I stick to 9 - card backward compatibility.
The maths can get silly in 3D, but if you can get the basics, the rest will follow very quickly.
If you haven't done so already the "DirectX SDK" download is also a must - it contains (most important) the help files for the methods, functions etc. and a few not so helpful getting started stuff.
You might want to have a look at SlimDX, even if you're not interested in third-party libraries.
Although I don't have Visual C++ 2008/2010 Express installed, you could add SlimDX as a reference to your project. Be sure you check out the tutorial section, even though it's in C#, but if you know C++/CLI pretty well, you should be able to convert the code to C++/CLI.
So I understand that there are a few options available as far as parsing straight XML goes: NSXMLParser, TouchXML from TouchCode, etc. That's all fine, and seems to work fine for me.
The real problem here is that there are dozens of small variations in RSS feeds (and Atom feeds too), so supporting all possible permutations of feeds available out on the Internet gets very difficult to manage. I searched around for a library that would handle all of these low-level details for me, but came out without anything.
Since one could link to an external C/C++ library in Objective-C, I was wondering if there is a library out there that would be best suited for this task? Someone must have already created something like this, it's just difficult to find the "right" option from the thousands of results in Google.
Anyway, what's the best way to parse RSS/Atom feeds in an iPhone application?
I've just released an open source RSS/Atom Parser for iPhone and hopefully it might be of some use.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on it too!
"Best" is relative. The best performance you'll need to go the SAX route and implement the handlers. I don't know of anything out there open source available (start a google code project and release it for the rest of us to use!)
Whatever you do, it's probably a really bad idea to try and load the whole XML file into memory and act on it like a DOM. Chances are you'll get feeds that are much larger than you can handle on the device leading to frequent memory warnings and crashes.
I'm currently trying out the MWFeedParser #Michael Waterfall is developing.
Quite easy to set up and use (I'm a beginner iPhone developer).
His sample code for using MWFeedParser to populate a UITableViewController implementation is helpful as well.
take a look at apple's XML Performance sample -- which points to using libXML directly -- for performance and quicker updates to the display. Which may be important if you are working with very large feeds.
Check out my library for parsing Atom feeds, (BSAtomParser) at GitHub. It doesn't care about validating the feed, it does its best at returning whatever is valid. The parser covers most of RFC 4287, even extensions.
Here's my solution: a really simple yet powerful RSS parsing library: https://github.com/H2CO3/RSSKit
Have you looked at TouchCode yet? I don't think it has an RSS processor, but it might give you a start.
http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/
I came accross igasus project on sourceforge today. I haven't used it or really checked it, but perhaps it might help.
From their site:
igagus is a web service for the iPhone that allows aggregation of RSS to be delivered in an iPhone friendly format.
Actually, I was trying to suggest you ask on the TouchCode discussion board, because I remember someone was trying to expand it to support RSS. That might be a decent starting point. But I was being rushed by my wife.
But I see now that TouchCode doesn't have a discussion board. I'd still ask the author, though, he might know what came of that effort.
This might be a reasonable starting point for you. Atom support isn't there yet, but you could help out?