@Ratchet
Why not simply using LOD? Cause making characters 2D and their animation will perhaps be a too much amount of work (even in coding)!
Did you watched the video? The playfield is almost 90% visible all the time and there is not much depth in the scene. So, LOD changes, if too hard, are very visible to the eye. I don't think that doing the sprites is much work, though. In fact I would also do a 3D character with shading and all the fancy stuff. A tool must be indeed made, that takes the model, a fixed viewpoint and a schedule of how fine the angle degree and what animations should be capture at which speed. Then, all possible states will be rendered and cropped automatically. This is a pretty straightforward task to create such a tool, not really hard to do.
All your other points depend on scenes with a very dynamic viewpoint. Mine is somehow restricted and some kind of fixed, so it doesn't apply to my case. The engine argument is a good one. Though, I am very familiar with Gamestudio so as long as I think I can do anything with it, I'll do it! :-)
Lot of ennemies is really needed ? try to make less ennemies to fight also perhaps it will be a really easy way.
more enemies = more blood = more fun :-)
@BoH_Havoc
Belive it or not, but 400 cubes, just scaling/moving dropped my fps to ~70fps. And i had NO effects, NO shaders, NO nothing. Just the cubes, moving around.
This is exactly the same thing I experienced.
However, as you are thinking about using sprites, you might want to code yourself a simple instancing algorythm.
In that case, I would ask JCL if this will come into the engine in the near future or I would pay someone who is able to this in a decent manner.
Or maybe you can "hack" the particle functions and create your 2D characters out of particles, as these are instanced in A7 Pro and you can render hugh amounts of it.
Yeah, I have particles in mind, too. Though, I have to check the sorting first. I will most certainly use 1-bit alpha masks and need no rotation, so this will might work. I don't think that I will have a speed boost due to instancing because of the many frame states a character can have but for grass, foliage and flowers this might become a reasonable advantage.
@somebodynew
Where do you pros know all those things from??? *bibber* plz don't say from experience
From experience :-) yeah, there are certainly some rules of thumb in general for games, 3D games and special situations but most certainly you have to get intimate with the things you are used too like in real life to know the weaknesses. If I would do an indoor shooter I wouldn't be frighted because I could take advantage of BSP tree compilation for instance (just to name one rule of thumb).
I'm just interested if anybody ever tried this with Gamestudio? Though, I am suprised in a positive manner from your replies!!!
Cheers -- and have a beer!
- Christian
