3Impact is now free

[James Klutho]

The developer of the 3Impact game engine has just made the SDK freeware.  I bought it some years ago and never did much with it.  At the time I updated the Powerbasic headers translated by Rav Singh to work with the DLL version of the game engine.  The latest version of 3Impact can be gotten here:

http://www.3impact.com

Attached are a couple of demos for Powerbasic in an older version.

Note: Attachment removed after becoming corrupted by the FTP client.- José Roca

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi James,

thanks for letting us know about this.
I remember downloading the demos of yours a years ago.
At the time they didn't went well for me, but with current card they work ok.


Petr

[James Klutho]

Petr
Thanks for the response.  I could never really get into this SDK.  I always wanted to make a pinball simulation but could never find the time.  I thought this engine might be the ticket since physics was built in but in the end I do more dreaming than programming.  The version in the attached zip file is 4.4 which I believe will work with DX7.  I think the current version is 5.8 which requires DX9c and is capable of shaders.  Maybe one of these days I will sit down and actually try to learn this engine.

Jim

[Petr Schreiber]

I tried to use ODE with PB, but I always run into some problems (GPF, not colliding when version changed).

For this reason I think the physics are the nice part of 3impact. The only problem for someone could be the collision of dynamic bodies is always based on sphere cloud substitution (based on info from website), but at least it is fast.

If you are interested in rendering things yourself, I recommend to get DirectX 9/10 or OpenGL headers from José and learn the CG shading language, for which the header is translated as well.

CG allows writing shaders, and compiling them for both Direct3D/OpenGL, and what is more important, it allows to run them on Nvidia, ATi and also Intel. There is free book on CG available.

This approach means more work, but when something goes wrong, you have the full control over what happens, instead of waiting for support to fix it.


Petr

[Jeff Blakeney]

I downloaded 3Impact after seeing this thread and it looks like something I'd like to use.  The documentation seems a little skimpy.  It seems that the current version is set up so that you write a DLL and run the 3Impact.exe file with your DLL in the same directory but looking through the directory of files that get installed I see there are DLL files as well but I'm not sure why there are four of them.  There is dll3impact.dll and dlls3impact.dll and debug versions of both of those as well.  The 3impactDLL_defs.h seems to be setting pointers to the functions and setting up prototypes of the calls that would be used by something like PB's CALL DWORD statement.  I'd rather be able to just do PB DECLARE's if possible.

I also downloaded James Klutho's PB_3Impact.zip file and looked through it.  He did a translation of 3impactDLL_defs.h to PB but it is for an older version of 3Impact.  Also, when I tried to compile and execute his sample using PBWin v9.03, it compiled okay but GPF'd right after displaying an empty window and putting up the dialog asking if I wanted to run in windowed or full screen mode.

Does anyone know of a simpler header file that can be used with one of the DLLs so that I can translate it to PB?  [Addendum:  I may have found my answer.  Before posting this reply I did a search on the 3Impact directory for .h files and found a dll3impact.h file in the 3Impact_as_a_DLL\DEVCPP directory that may work.]

Another related question.  Does anyone know of a decent 3D modelling program that supports the DirectX .x format used by 3Impact?  I downloaded Blender and it won't import any of the sample.x files from 3Impact that I tried.
*-

[James Klutho]

Jeff

Interesting the source would crash on PB9.03.  The samples were all compiled on PB8.04 (That is the directory where all my "not used for a while" 3Impact stuff lived).  I did recompile them with PB8.04 before I uploaded them to this forum.  You might want to comment out lines until you find the problem.  I will bet it is how I handle strings in the translation of the headers.

On the 3Impact site (forum I think) there is an area for tools which if my memory serves me right there is a blender conversion tool.

Sorry I can not help you more since I have never really used this game engine.  I just bought it and tried a few examples.

Jim

[James Klutho]

Jeff

I did fire up PB9.03 and tried to run the Sprite example.  The app crashes on the i3ImpactOpen(BYVAL hWnd as DWORD,BYVAL hWnd as DWORD) function.  I have no clue why that should be since it runs fine on PB8.04.  I played with it for about an hour to track this down problem.

Jim

[José Roca]

 
There are parameters and return types declared as BYTE that should be declared as LONG. BOOL = LONG, BOOLEAN/Boolean/boolean = BYTE.

[James Klutho]

Jose

I saw that BYTE return and tried changing it to a LONG return with no luck on PB9.03.  I will keeping playing with it tomorrow but I am stumped at this point.  If I change the first parameter in the i3ImpactOpen function to 0 (NULL) instead of hWnd (I did check and hWnd is a valid non-zero value), I can get by that statement but it GPFs on a later call to the DLL.  The GPF is caused by an overwrite to an illegal area.   

I know that PB9 can anticipate return values in DLLs differently than PB8 (can handle int64 this way).  I was wondering if this is somehow an issue.  I played around with returning i3ImpactOpen to a QUAD variable to leave myself plenty of room but to no avail.

Jim

[James Klutho]

I more I play around with PB9.03 and the 3Impact 4.4 DLL the more I think the DLL is simply not compatible with this version of the Powerbasic compiler.  O well, I never cared much for this game engine anyway. The first call to the DLL bombs it in 9.03 but is fine in 8.04.

Jim

[Theo Gottwald]

Does anybody have these DLL's?
The original Link doies not more work.
Else the complete Post may be deleted.