If the 3D Sprite object is the most obvious way to add 3D to MMF, then the numerous third-party extensions are a close second. There are several third-party extensions written exclusively for MMF, and because MMF allows some functionality with ActiveX controls written for languages such as Visual Basic, you can take advantage of some solutions developed for other environments. We’ll limit our brief look at a couple of the MMF specific extensions.
Mode 7 ex was developed by Cellosoft (www.cellosoft.com) and is undoubtedly one of the best of the third-party 3D objects available for MMF. If you have been a game player, you may have already heard of Mode 7, a hardware graphics mode popularized by the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) for rotating and scaling images. It was used mainly for special effects and to add perspective to maps that would normally be 2D.
According to the Mode 7 ex documentation, it offers numerous new features over the original Mode 7, including:
Heightmap for voxel terrains
DirectDraw compatibility
Internal image support
Auto-redraw handling
New render settings: fog, interpolation, mip-mapping, wrapping
Secondary layer
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We’re not going to go through the process of creating a project with the Mode 7 object as several excellent examples are available for download from the Cellosoft Web site. You can see a screen shot from one of these examples in Figure 16.18.
Figure 16.18: An example of the power of Mode 7.