I Need Some Help With My Game...

[cobrajs]

Hello everyone! I am making an adventurish game that involves making deliveries. It is going to be top down and similar to some of the gameplay of GTA (similar as in you can get in vehicles and walk throughout a large map).

The engine is coming along nicely now, but an engine is only as good as its data. Also, I am building this for the community contest.

Thanks for your help!

 

[DTH]

I rather have pixel graphics, 3d graphics will be to hard to code and abstract would be a little bit to simple.

 

[Jarska333]

Yah, pixel. Everything is 3D now, it gets boring.

 

[YakumoFuji]

diablo graphics are hand drawn pixeled, not 3d rendered. diablo is just isometric animated hand drawn sprites.

not sure what you term 'comming along well' if you have not yet decided if you want 2d or 3d considering your asking such a range from asteroids to '3d rendered'.

good luck in the competition.

 

[cobrajs]

diablo graphics are hand drawn pixeled, not 3d rendered. diablo is just isometric animated hand drawn sprites.

not sure what you term 'comming along well' if you have not yet decided if you want 2d or 3d considering your asking such a range from asteroids to '3d rendered'.

I have never played Diablo, but I thought they looked 3D rendered. I thought I read that somewhere too...

What I mean is pre-rendered 3D. For testing the engine, I have made some pretty bad looking pre-rendered 3D graphics. I thought about real 3D, but I would need to build an entire3D engine first. I also considered isometric, but I think that isometric driving games are really awkward.

The only problem I see with pixel graphics is that it is a pain to rotate them and still have them look good. At least, that used to be a problem back when I made games for the Palm Pilot. I have more space to work with now.

 

[___]

I would go with pixel graphics, too. Just looks way more nice and I love the feel of handdrawn sprites. Just adds more love to the game

 

[YakumoFuji]

well, i wouldn't rotate them, id pre draw each cell of the animation, you dont need a car drawn for 360 angles. maybe 16 directions, or 4 cells, and mirror+flip them for the other directions.

you could draw one, have an app do 4 rotations then hand touchup each image...

doing rotation / affine texture mapping wont really look 'bad', the screen is small, and your sprites will be smaller than the screen by a fair bit (my assumption).

 

[Cervante]

3d to prove what the GP2X is capable of

 

[starpause]

3d to prove what the GP2X is capable of

payback? :lol: h34r:

my favorite is hand-drawn pixel, if the artist is any good! so if you have a tallented artist definitly keep the pixels alive!

otherwise do it quick and dirty, 3d costs the least in time, but you don't want to build a 3d engine ... so 2d sprites from 3d rendered objects.

 

[LordFu]

I think Diablo II was pre-rendered. You should have had an all of the above option. I like all three when they're properly done.

 

[Draken]

i.e. abstract 3D rendered pixel art graphics...?

 

[Tobriand]

3D if you can get it at a sufficiently high quality to look slick. Unfortunately, almost all the 3D-pre-rendered projects I've come across tend to look kinda clunky and not actually as nice as the same thing would have looked with classic 2D sprites.

So I'll go with 2D, since they're a lot easier to get *right* I think...

Unless - and I stress this - unless you happen, by chance, to have done model-design for a large-scale mod project, in which case you may have the skill to get the 3D right, and should go for that...

 

[Sofox]

It completely depends on the art style, which you feel more comfortable with, and which you can feel you can excel the best at.
Find what works best for you and go for it.

 

[Claym99]

Go with whatever l_draven did for Legends of Idhuriel. If you get it to look that good, I'll join your cult to.

 

[chipan]

diablo graphics are hand drawn pixeled, not 3d rendered. diablo is just isometric animated hand drawn sprites.

not sure what you term 'comming along well' if you have not yet decided if you want 2d or 3d considering your asking such a range from asteroids to '3d rendered'.

good luck in the competition.

Diablo graphics were made from 3D models modeled and rendered with Autodesk 3D studio R4. The graphics you've seen in Diablo were pre-rendered 2D images of 3D objects.
I voted for pixel-art graphics.

 

[Epicenter]

The GP2X is in no way suited to 3D graphics. Please use sprites. You'll have a much easier time, higher framerate by a mile, and can achieve higher degrees of graphical clarity and gameplay intensity, since you won't need to drastically limit the number of objects onscreen or their level of detail and quality by how many polygons they draw or how much fill rate impacts the rendering job.

3d to prove what the GP2X is capable of

3D won't show what it's capable of. For example, if you draw a 3D scene with 5 or 10 bouncing balls in 3D, you'll be lucky to get 20 FPS. If you draw a 2D scene with nice bouncing ball sprites, you'd have to be a really bad programmer to get less than 300 ... make a real, intense game scene in 2D and 3D, and you'll see the 3D one slow to a crawl. The GP2X's true potential shines through in 2D only.

Also rather than Abstract I'd just call Asteroids' graphics 'Vector'.. That's what they are.

 

[deepmenace]

i love side scrolling games with tiny but well animated sprites ala Lemmings or benefactor on the amiga. the fact you can see so much on one screen is ace for a whole load of reasons.

its a unique and rare look but i think it should be used more, obviously you need some element of vertical travel ( i.e. platforms ) though.

 

[Alex.]

If you draw a 2D scene with nice bouncing ball sprites, you'd have to be a really bad programmer to get less than 300 ...

Simply blitting a 320x240 16bit surface and flipping the screen caps off at ~110 fps for me. Did you ever get such high frame rates with SDL? I'm pretty sure I'm using the HW accelerated one, too.

- Alex

 

[cobrajs]

Ok, I started doing some pixel graphics (a lot easier than I originally thought). It turns out they do look a lot better than my old 3D pre-rendered ones. I am now using 16 directions, instead of 24 like I originally had.

I think I feel a lot more comfortable doing the pixel art, especially since my 3D skills aren't that great. I makes the graphics look very clean.

I'll post up some graphics to show you what I mean later.

 

[Epicenter]

If you draw a 2D scene with nice bouncing ball sprites, you'd have to be a really bad programmer to get less than 300 ...

Simply blitting a 320x240 16bit surface and flipping the screen caps off at ~110 fps for me. Did you ever get such high frame rates with SDL? I'm pretty sure I'm using the HW accelerated one, too.

- Alex

It's going to cap to 112 FPS or so because that's where the LCD will top out. I've disabled vertical sync and had my engine go at around 174 FPS-- and it was drawing way, way more than a few bouncing balls. More like 2 320x240 images per frame for a 2-layer background, quite a few 16x16 and some 32x32 sprites, and there was game logic going on too... the only downside to such high framerate is that >120 FPS or so, the LCD would start to flicker violently. I was writing to it much faster than it could draw.

An important but somewhat predictable quirk is that what SDL Vsyncs to will be the setting for the LCD framerate is. It will cap to 30 FPS if you slide the LCD Settings bar all the way to the right. All the way to the left is ~112 FPS. So your game might run faster or slower based on where that bar is. You could just directly set the LCD framerate when your program runs, though, as I intend to do, and change it back when it's done.