dim3 Forum

Hello everyone

I just wanna ask those experienced in Dim3. Would the following games be possible in Dim3

1. Point and Click games similar to Clock Tower in PS or those old Lucas Art games.

2. Simple 1v1 3D fighting game similar to Street Fighter EX or old Tekken 1, no matter how simple

3. 2.5D games. The ones with pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D Characters. Examples include Resident Evil 1, 2 and 3 as well as Final Fantasy 7, 8 and 9.

4. Survival Horror style controls. With fixed 3rd person camera angles. Examples include Resident Evil, Galerians, Silent Hill, Dino Crisis...

BTW, if they are indeed possible, would they still be with Javascript alone? I'm asking this because I want to ensure portability across PC and MAC..
I'm currently looking into Wintermute Engine as well. It is free and seems really great with 2.5D Resident Evil style games. However, it isn't cross platform. TGB also seem to be a nice option but doesn't have that much 3D features.

Hope you can help me decide. Thanks in advance.

1. A point and click might be possible. You'd have to use fixed cameras in a 3d world, and scripted objects for the things you click on. I'm not sure how to handle the player part though, dim3 is intended for games with a player that exists in 3d space.

2. That probably wouldn't be hard at all. The only difficult part would be AI. There's no AI for dim3, you have to script enemies manually.

3. I'm not really sure what you mean. You can do a sidescrolling type game with 3d backgrounds and foregrounds, but where the player only moves side to side and up and down.

4. Again, I'm not sure quite what you mean. It is possible to do a game where the camera is at a fixed point, for instance the corner of a room. The camera could track the player, or just face one angle all the time. You'd have to set up a system for switching between cameras when the player moves between areas though.


I'm sure more experienced scripters on this forum can tell you more.

Hi Durandalski :D Thanks for the quick reply...

2.5D most commonly refers to games that use 3D only for the dynamic objects (the player, movable stuff like boxes and crates, enemies) but use pre-rendered images for the environment. A good example would be Resident Evil in Playstation. Because PSX resources was very limited, they decided it best to prerender an entire 3D scene, display it as a bitmap and then display the player controlled character on top of it. There are invisible collision boxes that determine where the character can/can't go. This technique sort of "fakes" the 3d scene so that highly detailed rooms can still be displayed despite the psx's limited resources.

Moving forward though, would this be possible in Dim3? What I'm looking for in particular are ways for one to render a 3D object on a layer above where a bitmap is displayed.

Hope you can help me out...

A quick note -- while dim3 is cross-platform (all projects should play exactly the same across platforms), the editors are OS X only. Since you were looking at some windows software, if that's your main OS then you won't be able to run the tools.

[>] Brian

For #1:
I don't believe point and click is currently possible, as the mouse (if used) is always tied to the player rotation. You could still fake it, except that the cursor can move out of the field of view... and too bad, I was trying to do one of these myself originally.

Point and click is partially possible, and hopefully Brian will add some more functionality to the mouse in-game in the up-coming versions. (people have been asking for this for a while)

Everything else that you asked is possible, but as Brian said, the tools are mac only-so you can play on a winbows, but not dev.