Interviews

Thomas Oppl aka Ventilator is one of the advanced engine users. He kindly took the time to answer our questions.

Q: When and why did you start to use the Acknex engine?

A: I was working on an Unreal Tournament modification and didn't like the fact that only people who own Unreal Tournament would be able to play our game. So I started looking for an easy to use stand-alone 3d engine for future projects and somehow 3dgamestudio catched my attention. I liked the demo, bought the standard edition but didn't really use it until the beginning of this year because I was busy with a lot of other things.

Q: How did you learn C-Script?

A: I read the c-script tutorial which was in the printed manual and then I started experimenting. C-script wasn't the first scripting language I worked with so it was quite easy to get used to it.

Q: Why do you think that Conitec chose you as a winner in the physics contest?

A: Maybe because there wasn't much competition? :)

Q: How much time did it take you to create the crane simulator?

A: That's hard to say because I didn't work on it continuously. I guess all added up it took me about a week or maybe a bit longer, but probably I wouldn't have been able to do it all at once in one week, because sometimes if you encounter a problem, it isn't possible to enforce ideas about how to solve it. I think it's best to pause some days from a project then. :) I spent a lot of the time on physics parameter tweaking and solving some problems with the models, because of the normal table shading did look very annoying on some models (the usage of the normal table got abandoned with the current beta). It took some experimentation to find out how to reduce these shading flaws. The lack of support for hard model edges was a little bothersome too.

Q: Are you involved in a project? Maybe you would like to join a team?

A: I work on a skiing game. Currently I am not interested in joining a team.

Q: Can you name some of the 3rd party programs that you are using for your Acknex-related projects?

A: I do most of the modeling and animation in Maya. Some of the other tools I use are photoshop, the gimp, terragen, cooledit, wings3d, ...

Q: What would you like to see implemented in the engine in the near future?

A: What I would like to see implemented the most is polygon soup level geometry. Some improvements to the model format like support for hard edges or multiple materials per model would be nice too. Most of the other things I would like to see are mentioned in the forecast anyway.

Q: We all know your great shader scripts; can you give us the links to some of the sites with tutorials that were really helpful?

A: The directx 8.1 effect file reference can be found at Microsoft's msdn website. For learning the basics about shaders I found Wolfgang Engel's vertex and pixel shader introductions very helpful (www.direct3d.net). It's also interesting to look into shader sources which can be found at the Ati website for example. So far I have only been able to do rather simple effects. My problem is that I didn't have any prior directx experience and I have no in-depth understanding of some of the maths involved with shaders, but I am very interested in shader programming and definitely want to learn more about it.

Q: Please give us a few tips for the beginners out there...

A: It's important to be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of an engine. Use the first few small projects to get a feeling for A6 and then always design your games so that they take advantage of the engine and don't work against it.

Thank you a lot, Thomas.