3Impact ActiveX Control

I’ve created an ActiveX control to embed the 3Impact 3D game engine into Internet Explorer. I’ve wanted to do this for a while and finally whacked it out Thursday morning at Starbucks. I used to work full time at Microsoft on the Internet Explorer team and also have quite a bit of COM/ActiveX experience so it wasn’t all that difficult.

I’ve taken the 3Impact game engine and created an ActiveX control that will allow you to play 3D games in your browser.

The plan is to not only embed the engine but to also allow you to use browser JavaScript to control the engine and create and control game entities. For simple games, you should be able to do the whole thing in JavaScript as long as your logic isn’t to heavy. The Microsoft JScript engine used by Internet Explorer is really fast, especially when you compare it to Spider Monkey used by FireFox. Not dinging FireFox mind you, just the script engine speed differences are pretty substantial.

My goal is to have all the original game engine demos running over the web.

All of the assets like 3D models, textures, sound, music and code will be streamed into the ActiveX control over the web via HTTP. The game code will be able to interact with the JavaScript engine and the browser so you can do things like keep score in the HTML document or interact with a Flash movie.

I was getting almost 70 frames per second when I shot the video but it appears Windows Media Encoder chokes when recording a DirectX window so the video looks pretty chunky. It also only seemed to capture it in 256 colors. Oh well, you get the point. In person, the demo runs buttery smooth and is gorgeous!

I’ve had a hell of a time getting this video to show up. Sometimes it works for me and I think I’ve nailed it and sometimes it doesn’t. UGH! If it doesn’t show up for you, try downloading the wmv version.

Also, I should note that if you want to make a game that will run in this control, you will have to purchase a license for 3Impact.