Drago3D

If you've used 3D in GameMaker in the past before migrating to GMS2, you've probably been warned against using the compatibility scripts that GameMaker provides for you when you import an older project. There are many reasons for this:

• They're slow
• They're very barebones
• They were created to use the DirectX 8 API, which at this point in time, is older than a significant number of GameMaker's actual users
• They're actually even slower than you think, since the compatibility functions don't even make an API call but instead emulate them within GML

Vertex buffers are the preferred substitute in whatever the current year is, which are orders of magnitude faster and more capable. However, there remains something to be said for having a set of immediate-mode functions for drawing 3D geometry, so here you go.

This requires a relatively modern version of GameMaker to work. There's a version for LTS (2022.0), which won't work with the original version due to some changes to the way statics are initialized.

Performance

In all cases performance with Drago3D will be noticeably better than with using the compatibility functions.

Some shapes, particularly spheres, will get a much, much larger boost. This is due to the potentially large number of vertices that can be involved, as the compatibility functions build the geometry from scratch (and then delete it) every single time they're called.

Documentation

can be found here.

Other Stuff

I "fixed" the texture mapping on the tops and bottoms of cylinders and cones.

Yes I realize the name is probably going to make the search results weird.

Should You Use This In A Finished Game?

Ideally you only use this thing for blocking out levels and replace everything with proper 3D meshes when you're finished, but if you really want to use this in production I can't stop you. It's better than the original d3d, at least.

Using this with shaders

These should work with the default GameMaker shader. If you want to use your own, the vertex format is position, normal, color, texture, which is what 95% of you are probably using anyway.

Price

This is going to be free, like most of my other stuff.  I'd appreciate an involuntary payment via either Itch or Patreon.

Other Relevant Projects

I've made a bunch of other things for 3D in Gamemaker that you might be interested in:

• Collisions
• Basic 3D lighting
• Toon shading
• Terrain editor
• 3D model converter
• Shadows