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Re: Introductions
KANE Aaron wrote:
I called everyone last night (no listserve since sunsite.dk hadn't gotten back to me yet) and
> your mail was almost a look at the future. The artists plan was to render in 3D and then generate
> images, so you are correct that they didn't care.
Excellent. So you don't have an artwork problem with going to full 3D rendering.
The simulation developers however were still concerned/confused how the simulation will update and draw
> this objects in real time.
That's *easy* with modern 3D hardware.
You could pick up a 3D scenegraph library like my own PLIB or CrystalSpace or OpenSceneGraph or something.
You can load the pre-built models from Blender/Maya/whatever into the leaves of the scene graph and
build the upper layers of the data structure as the game develops.
That's really easy to do - trust me. If you guys have the skills to pull off the rest of the job
(the AI, networking, audio, etc) then the graphics won't be difficult.
In fact, you are relieved of some of the problems with sprite-oriented rendering of the scene because
the Z buffer takes care of a lot of your draw-order issues and you don't have to worry about back-to-front
rendering and all that nastiness.
There might be an issue of performance on very low end hardware - that would be my only concern. However,
people who are serious about gaming probably have reasonable 3D capabilities already.
The saving grace about this genre of game is that people's expectations of update rate are low. So
long as your simulation and networking runs smoothly, they can tolerate graphical updates in the 3Hz
range. It's not like an FPS where anything slower than 60Hz is death to your title.
---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net> WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
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