Adventure Gamers - Forums

Becky - 13 January 2015 02:57 PM

I’d be interested in following development updates as well.

Me too!

Simon_ASA’s Catyph thread is a goldmine. And I’ve been following Christopher Bischoff’s Stasis blog for years.

Wow, great to hear so many of you cheering the idea on! I’ll get a TJD3 thread running some time soon, I promise!

Wilco: Well, in some sense spoilers will inevitably wind up there. I’ll try to keep major plot points out of it however. But you have been warned!

Menschmaschine:

Realtime 3d comes with a bunch of downsides. Lemme try to summarize a few of the points that I believe I would wind up calling a blocker or potential issue.

* Performance. When building a mesh for prerendering we don’t have to worry about amount of polys or amount of bones. We can make the mesh and rig exactly as advanced as we want to. This makes the actual asset-production phase a lot less restricted, and makes our toolset way less limited. Also, no fuss with normal maps or limitations in our materials whatsoever.

* Fragmentation. TJD runs on Pc, Mac, Linux and iOS. Making a 2d game work across several different platforms is simply put easier than making a 3d game work on multiple platforms. What may look fine in openGL may look completely broken in Dirext X, etc. A rendered frame will always look like a rendered frame, no matter the platform! (well you could run into platform-specific blending issues but they’d be nothing compared to the potential headache of what you may run into with realtime 3d.)

* More complex environments. Granted, you could make a game look prettier with realtime 3d characters, but that would also require a lot more work. Realtime characters are going to need realtime lighting and shadowcasting for full effect. While indeed that stuff is awesome, it’s still something that needs to be done and that will take up more time and resources.

Again, I’d like to point out though that I personally by no means visually prefer either technique. I think both can yield amazing results, and I’d love to try out featuring realtime characters in an adventure game at some point. Preferably some point where there’s a good established pipeline and toolkit ready for it, however.

Well maybe I’m not really the right person to speculate on this, but I’ll give it a shot!

1. I think that’s mostly from tradition. Console games have always shied away more from UI and thus games that tend to target console+desktop will be more checkpoint oriented and less manual-save-focused. So I don’t think there’s any good technical reason for this tendency, really.

2+3. Interactive points become A LOT MORE complex in a dynamic environment. If the room is static, hotspots can easily be designed not to interfere with one another and not to ever be too obscured from the player’s eyes. But once the camera starts moving around this becomes really, really complicated. What may seem like a good design from one camera angle may be a horrible design from another. Essentially you’ve got more states to worry about, and more states require better design and more rigorous testing.

So this goes hand in hand with the fact that having an inventory and using 2d items in a 3d space often comes off as feeling kinda glitchy. Which I believe is one of the reasons why you don’t see so much traditional inventories in 3d games.