Firefly/ff engine

Firefly 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

• "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:

Driver	Description
Software	A very primitive rendering pipeline 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.
Software2	A performance-poor rendering pipeline with no support for shaders or lighting. Use only if DirectX or OpennGL are not available.
Direct3D8	Does not load at all - possibly because Irrlicht (the 3d engine firefly is based on) dropped support for this pipeline?
Direct3D9	Uses the DirectX standard pipeline for rendering. Does not support the engine's lighting, but supports HLSL shaders and has good performance.
OpenGL	Uses the OpenGL standard pipeline for rendering. 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.
• Background color: This RGB selection controls the color for regions in the rendered 3d environment that have no objects.
• Ambient Light Color: This RGB selection controls the global light source color. Set to full white to make everything in the scene fully lit.
• 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: ...to do.
• Fog start distance: this controls how many units of space before world fog starts to be rendered
• Fog end distance: This controls how many units of space before world fog is rendered at 100% opacity.
• Cast Shadows toggle: ...to do. Requires OpenGL and in-engine lighting.
• Shadow color: This RGB selection controls the color of the shadows that are rendered.

To do: show examples to the right side of this area? Maybe place these in a table to achieve that effect?

Actions

• Start Engine
• Stop Engine
• Set Engine Resolution
• Engine Setup
  • Device Driver
  • Anti Aliasing
• 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