I have been using Love2D for over a year and a half now. I always wanted to make a game like Kerbal Space Program. I tested a lot if the physics on love2D and now want to move on to Codea. But this time I am making it in 3D, wich of course means, I’m going to need a lot of stuff loaded and a lot of stuff generated procedurally. I already know how to generate Sphere meshes, and how to basically use Codeas 3d parts. So my questions. How many meshes, strings, functions etc. can Codea have loaded without sucking up all FPS and not crashing. Also how many if statements are healthy when I have them in the draw function?
Thank you for answering theese questions.
Btw I’am new here, and looking forward to be active here. I just need to know if my Project is possible to achive in Codea. Thanks!
-GR00G0
@GR00G0 You may want to wait on making that Kerbal spinoff. (By the way, love that game) Codea is coming out with a big update soon (it’s in beta testing right now, but check the Codea Craft topic for info on it) and it’s bringing a whole new 3d library, voxels, and a 3d physics engine. If you wait for it to come out or even ask to be a beta tester, you’ll save a lot of time (and code). As for wether Codea can handle it… the limitation is more in your device than Codea. As long as you can optimize your code well enough, you can cram a very large amount of verticies onscreen. You probably won’t be able to run a complete copy of KSP (as it is on the pc) on your iPad as I’ve seen i3 computers that have trouble with it. However, if you strip it down enough and make sure to be careful with your iPad resources, I’m sure you could make a satisfactory KSP spinoff with Codea.
@GR00G0 Here’s a link to a five year old discussion. Codea has come a long way since then and as @Attila717 said, the next version of Codea will have even more.
https://codea.io/talk/discussion/658/3d-rendering-on-codea/p1
The challenges are less about Codea specifically and more the challenges you would face on any platform. When you make something very big then you have to optimize various things within the constraints of the system it’s running on.
This includes
- What do you draw, throwing everything to the GPU even if it’s out of range or off camera is expensive
- Complexity of what you are drawing, there are approaches like bump mapping etc which can keep the meshes simpler while still giving a “high polygon” finish to what it looks like
- Physics, this is something you see in KSP, ships outside the physics bubble are modelled to simply follow orbits rather than actually calculate physics, ships are only affected by the nearest celestial body etc. You could further optimize this to perhaps treat a ship as a whole object rather than modelling physics on each individual ship component…
From a coding perspective all of these are solvable problems, with lots of good info on google, in terms of Codea, it’s figuring out where you have to make these optimisations which you’ll only know when you get there.
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