3D games

[rEaL iGoR]

Hello, people.
As some of you might not know, I'm what you may call a freshman in VB. Not a beginner nor an adept programmer. After all, I'm just 16 years old. However, I've seen a lot of posts about 3D and stuff and Direct Draw and blabla, but is it actually possible to create a game similar to Quake and Half Life with only Visual Basic and 3D Studio MAX? I'm just trying to realize how far you can go with only VB.

[Sastraxi]

Thank god it is.

You can use D3D and OGL to make a great game; it also helps if you use a DLL, which you can change render state (OGL/D3D) so that you can use the same calls on that DLL and it will translate them into OGL/D3D calls.

Zaei will have more to say to you.

[kedaman]

It's theoretically possible, with the available api's. I've never seen an accomplished one though, you'll find it easy to get started with almost everything but thats usually as far as you can go. It takes some experience to get do decent games, but Quake/Halflife are very well structured and featured, so i'd say you would need at least ten years.

[rEaL iGoR]

Sorry, but to me, you're talking greek. OGL...? Nevertheless, is there a place on the net or anything where they've written a whole bounch of interresting things on this subject? Like 'words for a beginner in 3D games and Visual Basic'. That way, I might figure out what to do, cause right now, I'm in the corner of unknowledge.

By the way, Is there anyone who knows how to convert midi files to Wave format which works. I have written a song which I'm going to put on an opening scene, which I've also created. I use Cakewalk Pro Audio 8.0...

[HarryW]

OGL is OpenGL. D3D is Direct3D. They are the two major 3D graphics APIs available, although there are others.

There is a lot of stuff on that at www.gamedev.net but it's maily in C/C++. There is some VB content though. A great site for learning OpenGL, in C/C++ at least, is http://nehe.gamedev.net .

I'm sure someone will know some VB-specific stuff, I'm not that well clued up on it since I use C/C++ for this kinda thing.

[Stef]

If you want to learn direct 3d in vb, go to www.vbexplorer.com or www.vbexplorer.com/directx4vb
There are quite a few good tutorials there. As for converting midi to wav, you can try modplug tracker to convert the midi file to a 'module' format and from there to wav. Download the 'quickstart' kit from www.modplug.com this one includes samples for all the midi instruments.

[Zaei]

Stef gave you the right site to go to to learn DirectX in VB(its the second address). Other sites are http://www.flipcode.com, and http://www.gamedev.net . They arent geared toward VB developers though, but you can look over the forums, and stuff. It will most definately help if you learn to at least read C++ code. I recommend downloading the DirectX8 SDK from the microsoft web site, but its big(100+ megs).

Probably the best advice that i can give you is to start slowly, and keep trying. If you try to juse jump in, and go after advanced particle effects, lightmapping, skinned meshes, etc, you WILL get discouraged, you wont have any fun, and you will eventually lose interest. So, start at the beginning, build up your programming skills, etc, and work at a reasonable pace.

Z.

[Exta-C]

There's a REALLY awesome, full, open source Direct3D8 Engine called Revolution3D; it's AWESOME and easy use, they have tutorials and examples and everything; www.revolution3d.org
There's even a Revolution 3D SDK~

[Exta-C]

[Zaei]

That looks quite a bit like a landscape engine, which is most definately not for games. Besides, using other people's engines is boring (not to mention, you dont get exactly what you want).

Z.

[Exta-C]

It's not a landscape engine, that's an example of the PixVox2 function or something. It also has NetEngine [TCP/IP]; SoundEngine; Movie Engine; BSP Engine and a few others