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I've heard a lot of stuff about getting 3D modelling packages to pre-make 3D models for games but what I want to do is to create and manipulate 3D models on the fly from within DarkBASIC 1.1.2.

An example of what I'm looking at doing is creating my own program to generate animated evolving models in real time in response to the music being played on a CD. Like I've seen done professionally at some of the bigger night clubs. Or taking a pre-rendered character or piece of scenery, spraying it with concentrated acid and the object deforms and collapses in on itself until it's a pool of gloop!

Does this involve accessing and dynamically altering the memory area where polygon meshes for objects are stored? Or something else?

Please help!

If you just want basic shapes to do this yes DB should be abill to handle it. Now it you want a 3K model of a frog to jump a round and then explode, you're gonna need a modeling program. Also DB doesn't support mesh deformation, but DBPro does. In my opion you should slow down and start small. Try remaking pong or something so you can get a feel for DB.

A couple of suggestions...

1. Make a number of different animation sequences in a 3D package. What I mean is, frames 1 to 100 do one action, 101 to 200 do something else.

2. Select your animations from within DB, depending on what you want to do at any moment in time. Combine this with rotations, and you will hardly notice the repitition.

3. You can interpolate the animations. That means, you can seamlessly go from one to animation sequence to the other and get DB to work out what to move where.

4. Use the animation speed command to change according to the underlying beat.

5. More complex but even better...Make single frames of object positions, work out your beat, and simply interpolate from one position to the next - total control over animation speed, transition speed, and with small object files.

Hope this helps, I'd love to see the results. By the way, have you seen the DJ mix pro developer kit? It will calculate the beat for you on the fly, you can probably call the functions as well if you have the DB expansions.

First of all upgrade to 1.13, get enhancements and you'll be able to access memblocks, which like you say allow you to dynamically access mesh data, after a fashion. I'm still using 1.13/enhanced and my models are single mesh, so I had to look into this. The command is 'change mesh from memblock', but the process of warping the mesh while it's still in the memblock is quite involved. There is a demo in the help section called 'mesh data access' which shows a simple implementation of this technique.

Thanks everyone! I've managed to find a friend who'd let me go on his computer long enough to look through the help files and find the commands required. Now I just need to get the cash together for a computer of my own as I wanted DarkBASIC so badly I got a copy of DarkBASIC before I got a PC!