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 projects frame in order for anything 3d to appear when you run it. The size of the object “drag space” determines where in the frame the 3d scene is rendered.

Take a look at some of its specialized functions

Actions

• Start Engine - Allows the engine to start rendering the 3d scene to the frame

• Stop Engine - Stops the engine from rendering the 3d scene to the frame

• Set Engine Resolution - You can with this Action change at runtime the Engine’s render space in the frame, but passing two values one for width and another for height in the expression editor.

• Setup Settings

  • Device Driver - Using this action you can select at runtime the driver used by firefly to render the 3d scene, options like OpenGL and Direct3d are here.

  • Anti Alias - antialiasing is a software technique for diminishing jaggies - stairstep-like lines that should be smooth. Jaggies occur because the the monitor doesn't have a high enough resolution to represent a smooth line. Antialiasing reduces the prominence of jaggies by surrounding the stairsteps with intermediate shades of colour. 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.

• Set Background Colour - Select the empty space background color used by the engine

• Set Ambient Light Colour - Select the default ambient light colour used in engine

• Set Render Speed - Controls how often the Firefly Engine renders everything. Works the same as and Active’s animation speed.

• Set Fog Colour - Colour of the rendered fog. Fog is applied to materials with the fog flag on.

• Fog Start Distance - The distance to when fog starts

• Fog End Distance - The distance where fog melds into the background. “100% thick”

• Load Resource Package - Point to a ZIP file that can contain all your model resources like Models, maps or textures. Then from the expression editor when needing to access one of these resource for any of your relevant nodes, simply type the resource name in. EX: “mymodel.obj” NOTE: If you load a model that has textures defined within it, they will automagically be loaded and assigned.

• Collisions

  • Set Travel Distance -

  • Manually Detect Collisions -

  • Scene’s Collisions -

• On Draw

  • Render to Texture - Saves the camera’s view onto a material’s texture.

  • Draw 3D Line - Using the expression editor create a line by feeding 2 sets of 3d coordinates, and selecting a texture from Materials Object

  • Draw 3d Triangle - Using the expression editor create a triangle by feeding 3 sets of 3d coordinates, and selecting a texture from Materials Object

  • Draw 3d Box - Using the expression editor create a box by feeding 2 sets of 3d coordinates representing opposite corners , and selecting a texture from Materials Object

  • Draw Pixel - Draw a single pixel in 2d space by feeding the expression editor X and Y values and select color and alpha channel color.

  • Draw Texture - Draw a material’s texture onto the camera’s view.

Conditions

• Is Firefly Engine running - Triggers when the engine is running each frame

• Is Checking for Collisions -

• On Pre 3D Scene draw - Triggers before anything has been drawn

• On Post 3D Scene Draw / Pre 2D Scene draw - Triggers after every 3D object has been drawn

• Post 2D Scene draw - Triggers after everything has been drawn

Expressions

• Get Engine Width - Returns the width of the engine

• Get Engine Height - Returns the height of the engine

• Setup Settings:

  • Get Device Driver - Returns the device driver renders the engine.

  • Get Anti Alias Mode - Returns the type of anti aliasing type of the Engine.

• Get Background Color - Returns the color of Engine’s background

• Get Ambient Light Color

• Get Render Speed

• Get Fog Color

• Get Fog Start Distance

• Get Fog End Distance

• Override Material

• Get Current Time

• Get Current Camera’s Fixed Value

• Collisions

• Screen

• Matrices

• Get last debug message