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But is 3D needed at all?But is 3D needed at all?Posted Feb 18, 2006 13:59 UTC (Sat) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793)Parent article: Toward a free metaverse
Sometimes I think 3D is overrated. People were playing 3D games before there were 3D cards. They simply weren't full 3D, but enough to give the "impression" of 3D.
I see a lot of games requiring 3D that don't need it at all. They have a fixed camera and an isometric perspective of the world, meaning it all could be done with simple "sprites" animation and screen rotation techniques (which with modern PCs are just blazingly fast!).
Maybe we just need to go back to basics?
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But is 3D needed at all? Posted Feb 22, 2006 21:22 UTC (Wed) by amikins (guest, #451) [Link] Techniques for 3d models of entities have progressed to the point where it is actually more effective and efficient to define a simple 3d model with textures and animate accordingly than produce the numerous single frames needed for 2d "sprites". The quality of image and smoothness of animation is increased even with a fixed camera angle.Interestingly, with certain situations, it's possible to achieve similar quality to prerendered 2d sprites with an overall -lower- memory footprint; with pre-rendered images, if you have a sufficient number of possible options, you've got a lot of rastered images to throw around. With a 3d model, all you have to worry about is the model itself, the textures for the model, and the animation definitions. The use of 3d for what traditionally was 2d is not that senseless. That's not to say 3d isn't used inappropriately at times -- I, too, have seen many games using 3d hardware as essentially a blitting mechanism -- but there -is- value here, used correctly.
But is 3D needed at all? Posted Feb 25, 2006 18:40 UTC (Sat) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link] Thanks for your very good and informative answer.I stand corrected.
But is 3D needed at all? Posted Feb 28, 2006 1:40 UTC (Tue) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link] That's not to say 3d isn't used inappropriately at times -- I, too, have seen many games using 3d hardware as essentially a blitting mechanism -- but there -is- value here, used correctly.Wait. Are you saying I can use the 3D hardware for more than just glslideshow and the "mplayer -vo gl" driver? (ducking) It isn't just games--there is an internal project at my employer which uses 3D hardware to alpha-blend photographs together (just that--there is some geometric transformation and scaling, but that is done in software). Hardware alpha blending is frankly not that much faster than a software implementation, but it doesn't work at all on non-GLX-capable X servers. :-P
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