Xenogears style

Hello everyone,

I am seriously considering investing my money in this fine piece of software...but I have a couple quick questions that you guys should be able to answer, considering you actually have the software.

Note: I have no been able to test drive the demo software yet, as I am on my new Macbook Pro and have not installed XP on here yet.

I want to make a game...well, me and some other people...and I want to know if it's possible to create an RPG in the style of Xenogears. For those of you that are not familiar with the game, it is basically a sort of isometric view with a 360' rotating camera, fairly simple 3d environments (think SNES tiles but 3d), and the characters are sprites.

Is it possible and/or viable to create a simple 3d environment with sprites? The characters would also be small...like in SNES rpgs.

Oh, and can you IMPORT sprites?

heres a screenshot from the game i'm talking about

I HAVE SEEN THIS GAME BEFORE ITS A JAPANESE PSONE GAME RELIESED IN 98 , AND IT CAN BE DONE BY 3DGS

WHY DO YOU HAVE TO SHOUT!?!?!?!?!!!!!
I CAN ALSO WRITE IN THIS STYLE IF YOU WANT TO!!!!!!1111

There was a forum member a couple of years back that built a 3d enviroment and used a 2d sprite for the main character. i don't remember his name...and the link to the thread is buried, but ill try to find it, but to answer your question...yes.

it will take alot of work...but be for warned...making a rpg is some tough work.read plenty of tutorials and don't be afried to get some negative feedback if something needs to be fixed and ask plenty of questions

Ok Ok we hear ya.

To answer the question. Yes! Sprites are easily imported as one entity type. It's essesntially a bitmap placed in the 3D environment and is easily animated.
The sprite itself can be an animation, and it can itself be animated: be moved, scaled, change transparency, color, whatever you like. You can also easily interact with the sprites in your 3D environment, for example the mouse can detect if it is over a sprite (or model) entity, etc.

I think this software would work out well for you.

cheers,
tindust

Wow thanks guys!

Luckily I have two other guys right now on my "dev team" and we're looking into which medium would be the best for creating this project...and we ruled out programming our own engine.

We came down to two options:

Make a 2d game using the Chrono Trigger engine (editing the ROM), or
Make a 3d game using 3d Game Studio.

If it's as user friendly as it seems, I think I'll give 3DGS a shot!

Will I be able to edit sprites within the program, or do the sprites have to be fully created and then imported?

The sprites themselves are bitmaps you have to create in a graphics program like PainShop Pro or Photoshop etc. The file format used are bmap, pcx or tga (tga can have an alpha transparency channel). To make an animated bitmap you put a series of images side by side into one image file. These images themselves cannot be edited in 3dgs. But their overall appearance can like size, ambient color, transparency, direction etc.

Best way to find out how it works is to get the trial version, play around with it a bit and read the manual. These can be downloaded from the download page.

cheers,

Quote:

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...and we ruled out programming our own engine.

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You made your first good decision.