On the days before IRX, i been looking for someone to see if they are willing to do the programming side of things for me. I know a fair bit of programming but someone had to put the animation onto the models.  Anyway, with no programmers, i thought about making my own 3D game, a sort of "Shopping experience" simulation of how malls used to be fore it become uncool. Many unseen problems arise with the developers of these engines knowingly causing problems.

Coppercube

The very first 3D engine i went to was Coppercube, it works just fine and it is the final engine i went to get a working engine. The problem? Well, bad documentation. There's lots of videos that help you do things like make FPS or 3D simulator, etc. What it doesn't tell you is how models materials are placed. The model, a default Vroid you can make, has multilayered with individual transparent images. This was a problem with Coppercube but I found the answer to such problem. I will tell you about it later but when my answers can't be found or answered by developers, i went on to move to the next game engine.

Cryengine

After having problems with Coppercube materials, I thought Cryengine would be ok. I was wrong. I'm about to program the land to have you know land until the same material problem happen but this time in a much larger problem. You see, Cryengine developers were dumb enough to make it require TIFF picture format, no one does this. Maya and other 3D engines don't make your models from PNG to TIFF format, you can take pictures in TIFF for Photoshop and that is where Cryengine made their stand. You see, while yes there is a converter to make PNG to TIFF, the data for alpha (the thing to tell it how transparent works) isn't transfer. The plugin for Cryengine absolutely needs Photoshop because only Photoshop supports (.8bf.) an ancient plugin that Adobe abandoned 10 years ago. Confirm directly by Affinity developers.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/197409-how-to-install-plugin-i...

I left Cryengine knowing, I can't fix anything on it, the engine itself is dead by the developers too as they are aware of the problem and have yet to fix anything. Now you understand why Cryengine isn't used in games anymore or why people left Cryengine. Also, it only exports to Windows so, unless you have someone with a very licensed copy of all required Xbox, Playstation and Apple stuff, you can not export it outside of Windows.

Game Guru and GDevelop false advertisement

Just a little side note, I tried Game Guru and other "no coding" 3d engines like GDevelop, they clearly falsely advertise things. Game Guru only exports to windows, ONLY windows, even if you got a Mac, it's only playable in windows computers. Game Guru also has no camera following the model or the player. This is confirm by the developer of Game Guru who claims, he would added it, that post was 5 years ago and MAX version got released. The MAX version had a worst experience because now, instead of tricking the game engine either by coding or glitch, you are force to be in first person. Don't buy Game Guru if you do not intent to use it outside the the FPS. GDevelop falsely claims how 3D works, yes you can put 3D models. However, you can not put animated models, this is confirm by their own documentation and such future is said to be out soon, the last edit was 2 years ago.

The Animation Problem for 3D engines

I found another game engine that seem to work and claim a lot of things that weren't true but that's not it. This is another completely problem, I have never seen in my days being an animator. As you know, most people would use FBX, Collada and DAE. Never had in my life used glTF as a way to animate something. As I remember, glTF is a file format to send and receive data of 3d model, it is not used for animation. The creator also, never intended it to be for animation: https://www.khronos.org/gltf/

It's impressive how game engine developers did it but at the same time there was a problem. My Maya software for students was what i used for animation, Autodesk has yet to give to demand to glTF. The plugin for the only glTF isn't great as Maya refuse to give blendshape to the developers. Meaning the face you see will be static and lifeless. Yes, I could use Blender to export to glTF, however do understand the one and only character I had been working on was from Vroid, the file VRM had blendshape for faces, the VRM file is glTF rename (as people found out). So what I had to do is ONLY use Blender if I wanted to export to glTF otherwise I had to convert it into 3 different programs. Blender isn't bad but with no controls and loosely bones, the animation itself would look like this:

Did I mention, the skirt has it's own bones, kinda important to the story.

That is why no one in the industry is using Open Source, glTF isn't supposed to support animation for game engine, many open sorce developers using glTF in unintended way. Even when someone wants to use Open Source, the programs like Maya can't support glTF for demanding stuff. Blender itself lacks Maya features that many game engines would need to give up. The whole problem just leads to ONLY 2 game engines in existence that work both for industry and Open Source community, Unity and Unreal. More about this later.

Titan Engine

My next adventure in discovering game engines, Titan Engine, their website claim you could do it code free. No, you need to code it, not in a Notepad++, it actually requires Microsoft Visual (insert newest version here) just to test your game. Still it doesn't matter because even if you replace their model name in C++ and replace the world with your own, make the character work in Pong shading, you'll get an unexplained error known as (Character.exe), what is "Character.exe"? I DONT KNOW! No search engine can find it, it wasn't a google problem this time, it simply doesn't exist. The creator for Titan Engine is long gone as far as I'm ware so only he would know. The forums for Titan Engine never had such problem, Microsoft doesn't have such problem because it's looking for something that doesn't exist. So with only 3 hours i just decided to throw the messed up character into Coppercube and Sweet home 3D model into what you would see today but something happen.

Sweet Home 3D problem

I worked 3 days! On what I believed was going to be a simple ground level shopping mall. Unfortunately, no one told me anything about the export becoming real life models! The documentation also had no such warnings. Sweet Home is a simple CAD without the machines, a house builder. I though it was going to be so simple to just add models and export it. No, that's not what happen, the one you see in Coppercube today is scale down to 0.05 of the original size. No such engine even Titan could render the skyscraper walls. This doesn't translate to the original design either where it's 15'' by 2'' depth of 3''. Yet that's only easy fix, the worst part of it, all the models  i place could not be place. Even if i just remove the land and wall, the models itself would not load to the engine. The tree wasn't the problem as it was just a simple shape. The problem is bad 3D artist adding very very small unnecessary details like very tiny keys instead of normal texture, very tiny shiny mirror that does nothing, etc. So if you going to download Sweet Home 3D, don't use any models from them or face the same problem like me.

That's why I decided to just throw away all those models, wasting all those days. Scale down the model to 0.05 and get the one and only character ready. After it was done, only 2 hours left with no way to do anything else. That's when the player character materials now suddenly work!

Coppercube maternal problem and documentation

Guys i swear i'm a good 3D artist, i even used Coppercube before and other 3D game engines (as seen in my profile). Yet, I never thought why such dumb things like different shader would effect Coppercube materal. Take a look, the same model in Phong shade.

Coppercube

Maya

Metasequoia 4

This is the original with toon shader

This is Maya's toon shader (effects not altered)

So, can you ready blame me for not knowing Coppercube having some sort of special shading that makes Phong into anime. You can read how Phong became what is today at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phong_shading as to why i didn't think of using it. The shader was the default, it shouldn't have any special lighting or effects. Yet, only Coppercube would alter the original Phong it been given to look more anime. I swear i did not change the shader, it's Phong in Copercube, you can test it out as the copy of my work is in it. Anyway, after the shocking revelations of Coppercube undocumented rending, i quickly added the model and quickly added the mall with no items because it only works without it. Put 3rd person camera and publish it.

The lessons and Unity and Unreal monopoly

If there's one thing we can take away from this is, how poorly everything in 3D is documented. Cryengine is dead, Open Source very anti-friendly with artist and too much reliance on Blender. As for Unity and Unreal, those are the only engines i refuse to use just because I hate Unity cash grab and Unreal's privacy collection. Only those two engines offer the jack of all trades, they both export to consoles. Linux is falling behind in native games, as my search for Linux export is low. Coppercube can't export to Linux, it's magical that it can still export Android games.

I hope this will help someone, my simple Mall Game got ruin it because of how bad the 3D engine landscape became, if you want to do any Open Source, i highly recommend asking if animation is supported, you'll get answers like "FBX only" or "glTF supported" with very hard rules like "unsupported image", "Unsupported programs", etc. If any developers from the game engines see this, i highly suggest spending 3 days like me looking at your documentation and updating, not become lazy and expect me to find it somewhere in the forums or discord.

The end.