Introduction to Ultimate 3D

The fact that you are reading this text makes me assume that you have decided to try out Ultimate 3D. This is a good choice. If you have been trying to make 3D games with the 3D functions of Game Maker before, you will have noticed that it's incredibly difficult to make really good-looking 3D graphics with it. And if you have succeeded to make pretty good graphics with it (which took a lot of time for sure) you may have noticed that they require a PC that could run high end games.

Game Maker is a great program to make games easily, but its 3D drawing functions are very basic. They aren't meant to be used for making really complex 3D graphics. And if people try to use them for this purpose they will have difficulties reaching this aim. So if you want to make complex 3D graphics with Game Maker you will need some extension. You may have tried some other 3D extension for Game Maker before. But most of them are pretty difficult to use, aren't they?

That's why there's Ultimate 3D. It's an attempt to make an easy to use extension for Game Maker that can be used to make extremely complex 3D graphics. With the old versions of Ultimate 3D (v. 1.0 to 1.31) you could make quite nice 3D graphics, but there weren't many possibilities to make special effects and not enough possibilities to optimize games that use really big levels. For that reason I've spent more than one year on developing Ultimate 3D v. 2.0. It has tons of new features that give you the ability to make great special effects and to build giant levels without getting a bad performance. Actually it's a complete remake. Ultimate 3D 2.0 has become what it was meant to be. And Ultimate 3D 2.1 makes it complete with basically new functions for collision detection and collision response and many small, but useful, new features.

Since one of the most basic principles of Ultimate 3D is that it's meant to be extremely user-friendly, the tutorials are very detailed. They are divided into a part for novice users and a part for advanced users. This subdivision is meant to make it easier for you to get started with Ultimate 3D. The features described in the part for novice users are really easy to use. It will not take you long to understand how they work but they'll already give you the possibility to make pretty cool games. But when you go on learning the features described in the part for advanced users it will give you the possibility to make really amazing graphics. Using the Ultimate 3D shader effects management you can create very advanced special effects. Also the built-in features such as the bump mapping and parallax mapping or the terrain renderer are really impressive but not difficult to use.

But well, you will see for yourself. Have fun while learning how to make 3D games :D .


Credits

Special thanks go to Matthew Unrath (Harkathmaker), who has helped to improve the grammatical correctness of this help file and to MysteriXYZ, who has improved this help file in terms of formatting and content and wrote a nice epilogue. Also I want to thank everybody who has helped to find mistakes in this help file. Your continuous feedback improves the quality of the documentation of Ultimate 3D.



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