What is 3d and what is not..

[J B Wood (Zumwalt)]

I have been playing around more with the idea of a side scrolling game (amongst my other projects), What I have discovered, is that it is really easy to do a 'slight of hand' in Aurora.

Conceptually this is very easy, you only need 3d objects for your main system, but 2d objects (or lack of a better term, sidways planes) for your backdrop and menu.
Here is the deal, your menu system will work on a 2d interface, thus giving you controls to use your mouse coordinates and screen coordinates to work with the menu easily enough. You create a single flat plane for the backdrop and just duplicate it switching out its texture ever so often giving the illusion you have many backdrops smoothly seemed together, but in fact you will only have 3 flat planes where you drop your images on.

(or a single plane duplicated )
Here is a still shot of my helicopter (3d object), it is infront of a flat plane with a rendered backdrop, and has a 2d navigator system on the screen ready to use.

[kryton9]

Looking good Z.  I guess you could go this route if you don't have too many objects on the screen. But if you were to have lots of action, that is probably where sprites would come in, but with video and computer hardware where it is and where it is going, I don't know the limits anymore. I don't know if you saw that video, I don't have the link to paste, but it was from a quad core cpu and directx10. All I can say is wow, true volumetric lighting incredibly vast areas in incredible detail. So with that kind of power there is no reason why everything couldn't be 3d.

[J B Wood (Zumwalt)]

Actually there are reasons why I would go this route on a side scroller. Don't have much time to go into it at the moment. I did see that video you are talking about with the tornado etc.

Its interesting to say the least, you have to remember, its not the CPU power that is helping, its the video card with its on board cpu's and memory that is for the render. The detail can be spoofed so that it looks fabulous, what they are braging about is the interactive environment, with school I haven't had time to record a good video demo yet, but I will see what I can come up with.

I started this project while I was waiting on the d3d library to be increased to support sprites in d3d for smoke and explosions, that and I need to script the tank and robot getting damaged and destroyed.

[Ionic Wind Support Team]

Kryton,
Pushing the envelope is fine if you only want to target 10% of computer users out there.  There isn't a machine in my house that is over 1 GHz currently.

Eye candy in a game is not nearly as important as game play and performance for the widest number of users.  What good is volumetric shadows and rain that looks real if only a small % of people will be able play your masterpeice?

I like the way zumwalt is going with this because it does show you don't need to take 100% of the available GPU power in order to have a good looking game with acceptable game play.  Then again I don't really play games .  Quake III Arena is still installed on my machine and it is good for venting frustrations 

[kryton9]

Game play is most important, I still love starcraft broodwars and have been playing it since it came out. But I am sucker for eye candy, need to see it as much as I can and am willing to build systems to see them. Can't wait to have a game like the one in that demo, The new unreal coming out sure looks like it could be it.

What Z is doing is awesome, can't wait to see it.

[Steven Picard]

This is cool!  I like the direction you're taking.

[Barney]

I share your views about game play being more important than eye candy but if one wants to sell his/her game this turns upside down. Most (if not all) of the available data shows that people are purchasing games based on the eye candy. If that was not so, big game companies would not spend that much money on graphics but on game play, which unfortunately in some games is very, very low.

Barney

[J B Wood (Zumwalt)]

In a fast paced side scrolling arcade game, are you going to notice if the building in the backdrop is truely 3d if its a rendered scene or not?

[J B Wood (Zumwalt)]

Forgot to mention, on your flat planes that you are going to use for the backdrop scenery, make sure you set the EnableLighting(false); I forgot to do it in the game before taking a screen shot. I've done it now and it make a world fo difference.