What kind of game can we built with babylon?

[Adrian]

Hello there,

 

I was asking my self what are babylon's limits ? Can i imagine to build an fps open world game with forest, mountains etc ... or is it impossible ?

[davrous]

Sky is the limit!

More seriously, it really depends on lot of factors (as usual):

- CPU & GPU power

- Number of triangles you'd like to display

- Textures

- Effects

Still, for this specific open world scenario we've implemented 2 features to maintain good performance:

- very good optimized octree

- incremental loader

- frustrum

David

[Adrian]

I like your answer !

 

so if i want to create a forest for example, something big, what would be the process ? i'm not asking you to do the job for me, but i want to understand the process. Should i create the field in a 3D software like Vue, blender etc ... Or simply create ground with maybe height map directly in babylon ? Where should i start looking for ?

[Adrian]

And for information it seems like the babylon converter doesn't work here is the error message :

There was no endpoint listening at net.pipe://localhost/exportservice that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more details.

Any solution for that ?

[PickPacket]

...so if i want to create a forest for example, something big, what would be the process ? i'm not asking you to do the job for me, but i want to understand the process. Should i create the field in a 3D software like Vue, blender etc ... Or simply create ground with maybe height map directly in babylon ? Where should i start looking for ?

 

So, a few thoughts drawing on my experience as a game artist:

 

Creating a forest is more ambiguous than it may seem. Presumably, you want an environment where a player is navigating *through* a forest, correct? There are many sources of free textured models of trees, but they generally fall into one of two categories:

1. Fully detailed trees with alpha-textured boughs of leaves & individual branches, etc. These usually look best, but they are expensive.
2. Billboard trees, merely a picture of a tree mapped to a flat plane. These are much faster to render, & (in many cases,) they look just fine.

In order to pull off the illusion, you're probably going to want to use a combination of both. Do you have a limited area where the player can move? Use fully-meshed trees there. Fill in the borders with some billboard trees. Most packages will generate a terrain grid for you. Download one you like, or generate one using a "noise"-image as a displacement map.

 

There's really no limit to how much you can embellish your forest. Tufts of grass using alpha transparency will add a lot to the ground, & a sound loop of wind & birds chirping will go a long ways towards making your forest feel realistic. Experiment and have fun!

[davrous]

You should have a look to our instances demo: http://www.babylonjs.com/index.html?INSTANCES

 

It contains a lot of what you're looking for: heightmap for the ground generation, hardware instancing and an optimized octree for the trees & env to let you navigate into the 3D world with great performance.

[joshcamas]

I'm looking forward to making a RPG game with Babylon Which will have forests and mountains and such.... We'll see if it works! XD

 

To create my world I may download that sweet little babylon editor thingy, and edit it to my liking. IDK!

[Adrian]

Thanks all !

 

I will take a look at this instances demo.

 

PickPacket, thanks for sharing your experience ! i'm not in an esthetic process, i have a tree modeled in google sketchup and plan to use it for now (if the online converter works again I'll do some test to "populate" a heightmapped ground with thousands of trees !

 

Joshcamas, wish you good luck for your project ! Let us know about your progress !