Kambi Vrml Engine

[LA.Center]

I just tried almost all Lazarus compatible libs, and all of them have pro/contras, since I want to stick to cross, the only one that really worked like a charm was Sphinx (not cross) and ZenGL (very cross), all demos worked perfect and Spyinx has the most user friendly approach if you ask me.

I could not make ZenGL work in linux x64 though, linker complaint about missing GL, and GLU, where as other GL apps run just fine. Don't know why?

Anyhow, now I am sitting in front of a big decision, which one to use to create a Live Game Library??? Sometimes deciding is a b.... ain't it

[Carver413]

there is one other possible solution
http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/showthread.php?10731-My-game-engine
might be worth waiting around a bit to see if this engine is released. This is the one I would probably pick if it were actually released.

[michalis]

Hi everyone, a couple of notes about questions here about "Kambi VRML game engine":

Is there a step by step tutorial on how to use Kambi Vrml Engine with Lazarus?

A large tutorial is planned to be included with the next major engine version. Draft of it can be currently found in the SVN repository, see https://vrmlengine.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vrmlengine/trunk/kambi_vrml_game_engine/doc/DRAFT.engine_tutorial.txt

For now, see resources pointed out by lainz, in particular read the introduction in http://vrmlengine.sourceforge.net/apidoc/html/index.html and browse examples inside engine sources.

There are also nice examples in CodeOcean directory of Lazarus CT edition.

Quickly browsing them, these are just (a little random) subset of examples copied from my engine sources. I don't really know what's the purpose of that. The description of our engine on http://www.pilotlogic.com/codetyphon/help/kambiengine_samples.htm is just copied from our webpage, with the invalid URL added at the end...

I would advice to just use examples from my engine sources with regular Lazarus. These are complete and I guarantee they work 100%

I just found out that Kambi Vrml is not so good on Mac uses X11 which most of the users don't install.

I think you have been mislead by this page: http://vrmlengine.sourceforge.net/macosx_requirements.php Please note that you can use Lazarus components with Kambi VRML game engine, and then programs do not use X11, and look as good (as native) as Lazarus itself on Mac OS X. The only problem we have with Mac OS X is that our alternative (independent from Lazarus, in some areas slightly better) window implementation indeed requires X11 under Mac OS X, for now. With GLScene, you don't get this choice at all.

[Andru]

I could not make ZenGL work in linux x64 though, linker complaint about missing GL, and GLU, where as other GL apps run just fine. Don't know why?

Please, read this note:

Additional for compilation in some distributives(like Debian or Ubuntu) you will need following dev-packages:

    libgl1-mesa-dev
    libglu1-mesa-dev

But ZenGL isn't a 3D engine, so...

[lainz]

I could not make ZenGL work in linux x64 though, linker complaint about missing GL, and GLU, where as other GL apps run just fine. Don't know why?

Please, read this note:

Additional for compilation in some distributives(like Debian or Ubuntu) you will need following dev-packages:

    libgl1-mesa-dev
    libglu1-mesa-dev

But ZenGL isn't a 3D engine, so...

I've a question, if is possible to create different .lpk files, one for dll/so/dylib and other for static compilation, also if the files used by ZenGL differ under different OS's you can create something like:
* zengl_dinamic_win.lpk
* zengl_static_win.lpk
* zengl_dinamic_gtk.lpk
* zengl_static_gtk.lpk

And that can be a easy way to install the package in lazarus 

Maybe if some other has a better idea, .lpk is the best way to install things 

[LA.Center]

@michalis

Thank you for your very detailed information about VRML, to be honest I was looking at this engine at first, but the home page and other pages are very scrambled, you see I have trouble reading long text portions, the letters start to walk, so when I could not find a simple Download, Tutorial, etc, page I was very confused. Especially when I found a download it was the Viewer/Browser.

Please don't misunderstand me, I am not judging your site, it is a small problem I have with my eyes. If you can give me definite link where I can download the engine, I will give it a other try. The Text page that you posted has some very good step by step procedures.

[LA.Center]

@Andru

Thank you for this info, indeed it is working now, but this means the game.exe I am creating will depend on that too right? How could I implement a quick check and warn the user to download and install these packages? Is there maybe a function I can call within Lazarus?

[michalis]

Please don't misunderstand me, I am not judging your site, it is a small problem I have with my eyes. If you can give me definite link where I can download the engine, I will give it a other try. The Text page that you posted has some very good step by step procedures.

For the big button to download the engine click on http://vrmlengine.sourceforge.net/kambi_vrml_game_engine.php#section_download_src (from any page on my site: click "Engine" on the top tabs, and then choose "Download sources" from the table of contents). Near the download button you will find a short description of usage, for longer description see reference (http://vrmlengine.sourceforge.net/reference.php). Inside the downloaded tar.gz, you will find complete sources, examples, Lazarus packages etc.

For the various comments about libgl1-mesa-dev, libglu1-mesa-dev on Debian in this thread:
 - this is needed to compile any program using OpenGL. It's also required by "Kambi VRML game engine", GLScene, standard Lazarus OpenGL control, and *every* other OpenGL-based library in the world.
 - this is not Pascal specific; C programmers also have to do this.
 - note that you only need to install these packages to compile the programs (more precisely, link them; they install symlinks necessary for linking with libGL to work). Your end-users (the people that simply get your binary) never need to install them.

Maybe this will clear some confusion in some posts

[LA.Center]

Thank you michalis, I have the download and I am trying to work with it and will do some tests now. I really appreciate your help