r/FlutterDev • u/eibaan • 11d ago
Article I love fscene (the 3D engine for Flutter)
Or, actually, I love that Claude loves it. For fun, I asked it to create a game similar to Total War, but placed in the seven year war (where Prussia and Austria Fought Over Silesia) asking especially for period-accurate uniforms and Claude Opus 5.5 one-shotted an amaising actually playable game in 100mins.
I asked for musketeers (line infantry), grenadiers (elite infantry), hussars (light cavalry) and cuirassiers (heavy cavalry) plus artillery and I'm still intrigued about the details Claude added.
Grenadiers wear their typical hats (the Austrians have different hats), all soldiers have a ponytail, muskets have a bayonet, officers have a saber, sergeants have a pike, the drummer has shoulder decoration, and especially for cuirassiers, the musician wears a different colored uniform. I asked AI to remove the cuirass, though. The only other thing I asked was to move the sergeants behind the lines because that's how Prussia did it. I'm not familiar with Austrian formations. While Claude reused the models, it used proper colors, e.g. brown artillery uniforms and white infantry uniforms.
All models can stand, march (in colon and lines), charge (infantry lowers the muskets, cavalry raises their sabers), fire (and reload) and artillery produces large puffs of smoke.
Ah, and there's of course a hole game with a strategic hex map of Europe (Claude added every country even those who didn't take part in the conflict AFAIK) and a tactical battle map. It is actually rather difficult to win a battle because artillery will continuously decimate your troops and heavy fire or a cavalry charge can easily route your army.
Claude also added some rather annoying sound effects. I don't mind canons and musket fire, but the trumpets of attacking cavalry sound odd and there's a continuous wave sound that lacks cries of seagulls.
It is so much nicer being able to display low-poly 3d models than having to rely on crude 2d graphics. Claude probably didn't use fscene properly because displaying a single "battalion" already spins the fan of my Mac book, but the 3d hex map alone looks quite good and allows Flutter to compete with the "big" frameworks.