Firefly/ff engine
Firefly engine
The Firefly Engine object is the base of the entire Firefly system. It is the object that actually takes all of your various nodes and other Firefly objects and renders the 3d scene to the frame. You must have at least one in your project's frame in order for anything 3d to appear when you run it. The size and placement of the engine within your game's frame determines where in the frame the 3d scene is rendered.
Properties
todo:
- show examples to the right or underneath each sub-section as necessary?
- Better define what each individual option does, and specify what 'index' it is if set through an action
Start engine at start
This is a toggle that controls whether the Firefly engine itself will initialize immediately when the frame starts. If you have to configure certain engine settings, or manipulate the engine such as resizing the engine frame, then this should be toggled off, and use an action to trigger the engine to start when you are ready.
Device Driver
Allows you to select the rendering pipeline Firefly will run with. The available options and limitations of each are labeled below:
| Index | Driver | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Software | A very primitive rendering pipeline on the CPU with no support for shaders, lighting, and does not render any vertices outside of the camera's field of view. Available as a last-available-option renderer. |
| 1 | Software2 | A performance-poor rendering pipeline on the CPU with no support for shaders or lighting. Use only if DirectX or OpennGL are not available. |
| 2 | Direct3D8 | Does not load at all - possibly because Irrlicht (the 3d engine firefly is based on) dropped support for this pipeline? |
| 3 | Direct3D9 | Uses the DirectX standard pipeline for rendering on the GPU. Does not support the engine's lighting, but supports HLSL shaders and has good performance. |
| 4 | OpenGL | Uses the OpenGL standard pipeline for rendering on the GPU. Shaders do not have correct vertex information (Needs verification) but supports engine lighting and has good performance. |
Anti Alias
Controls how much anti-aliasing the engine uses globally. Antialiasing is a software technique for diminishing jagged edges that occur on objects not aligned with the pixels of a display - stairstep-like lines that should be smooth. These jagged edges occur because the monitor doesn't have a high enough resolution to represent a smooth line. Antialiasing reduces the prominence of these jagged edges by surrounding the stairsteps with intermediate shades of color. Although this reduces the jagged appearance of the lines, it also makes them blurry. You can decide whether the effect is off, x2, x4, x6 or x8.
Background color
This RGB selection controls the color for empty space regions in the final rendered image of the 3D environment.
Ambient Light Color
This RGB selection controls the global light source color. Set to full white to make everything in the scene fully lit. This is ignored in DirectX mode, where light sources are not functional.
Render speed
This percentage controls (effectively) the balance between the fusion engine and the firefly engine. If Fusion is running at 60fps, setting this to 50 will make Firefly run at 30fps. Firefly can "eat" control input when used with certain other objects on screen during a frame update, so adjusting this to near-zero or setting to completely zero when off screen can help minimize or prevent this issue.
Travel Distance
...to do.
Fog color
Materials that have fog rendering enabled will fade out based on the object distance and the fog start/end values. This is the color they will fade out to.
Fog start distance
this controls how many units of space before world fog starts to be rendered on supported materials.
Fog end distance
This controls how many units of space before world fog is rendered at 100% opacity on supported materials.
Cast Shadows toggle
...to do. Requires OpenGL and in-engine lighting nodes.
Shadow color
This RGB selection controls the color of the shadows that are rendered.
Actions
Start Engine
Start the rendering engine with its current settings.
Stop Engine
Stop the rendering engine so you can change settings.
Set Engine Resolution
Sets the internal resolution of the rendering engine.
- This should be set to match the size of the object, or certain rendering functionality may behave incorrectly (example: drawing 3d lines)
- This action has no effect if the engine is running (verify)
Engine Setup
These options control the rendering pipeline and cannot be used while the engine is running.
Device Driver
Sets the rendering pipeline to be used by the firefly object. If using the 'set' dialog option instead of a predefined selection, index starts at zero. See "Device Driver" properties above (todo: bookmark links to scroll page for user)
Anti Alias
Sets the global anti-aliasing level to be used by the engine. If using the 'set' dialog option instead of a predefined selection, index starts at zero.
- Set Engine Background Color
- Set Engine Fog Color
- Set Fog Start Distance
- Set Fog End Distance
- Load Resource Package
- Collisions
- Set required travel distance
- Manually detect collisions
- Scene collisions
- On Draw
- Render to texture
- Draw 3D Line
- Draw 3D Triangle
- Draw 3D Box
- Draw Pixel
- Draw Texture
Conditions
list - show conditions and define what triggers them
Expressions
list - show expressions and what they define
Additional notes
details on functionality and limitations
