Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Papervision vs Sandy

After reading Sandy 3D's code and tutorials I found that I liked the organization of the code leagues better than Papervision 3D (which I have more experience in at this point). So I decided to do a little test.

In the past hour I wrote the same basic thing in both engines. Other than some features that one had and the other didn't (neither seemed to have a useful concept of 'lighting' - but in the Papervision case I'd already written my own primitive Lambertian reflectance shader so I just reused that), one thing I noticed was that both of them had problems with z-index culling - putting one triangle on top of another that shouldn't be.

I did a lot of reading on Sandy and tried all combinations of their culling and didn't manage to solve it. Only thing I could find in Papervision is an arbitrary z-depth sort for objects for the camera.

P.S. If this example looks familiar to you it's no mistake - I'm actively dreaming these days of making a Final Fantasy Tactics style game in full 3D (not just iso) in flash.

Sandy Example
Papervision Example

Also, the Papervision performs notably better. So as much as I like the structure of Sandy better I may not be using it as soon as I'd like.

1 comment:

Thomas said...

Hi,

Have you tried useSingleContainer = false; ?

Oherwise, a classic problem like this can be fixed by adding more polygons to your buildings.

About light, can you say more about what you didn't like?
Do not hesitate to share your feelings on our forum ;)

Thomas