are you making non moving objects static?
Yes I do but there were less objects static than you might think. All grass, plants and trees are for example animated (GPU, CPU). I also converted my originally bone animated entities into vertex animated entities. I spent a fair amount to get it running on my laptop that time. It actually run on it with ~24 fps and I originally intended to improve on the graphics much more... Everything that happened frustrated me, though. By the way, I am NOT considering taking the old codebase and project framework for the renewal.
yeah, I think of that time when there were a decent amount of games made like that was great. Stronghold was very good-looking, and those 2.5D games or even completely 2D games looked way better than the full-3D games of that time
The original motivation comes from the Settlers 3/4. BlueByte managed to make only with 2D and a 3D Terrain a vivid, wonderful world with lots of animations without trying to drive on the wave of coolness other strategy games drove on taking it to 3D. I would also have to do the assets in 3D and make an automatic tool that creates from it from certain angles a frame series of animations. Could be tricky to mix everything together (animations, angles, appearance states like blood splatter on the face when nearby some flesh has been chopped off.. ya know).
I guess the framerate drop isn't the amount of 3D entities, but the amount of vertices being animated on the CPU. jcl expressed willingness to add a flag that allows for animation on the GPU, and hopefully that comes out soon.
I actually noticed a HUGE drop when using much bone animated entities (like 75-200 characters visible at the same time). So I would always prefer vertex animation when you can use it. Though, a GPU processed animation could indeed speed things up.
