The Ghost of Christmas Future

[Potjeh]

For the record, it should be said that we really were unsure of whether to go with 2D or 3D for a long time. The main two reasons we went with 3D were that it's much easier to create new animals, character clothes, equipment and animations and similar things; and also that it's possible to do such things as rotating objects and having a height map. Outside of that, there are many things speaking both for 2D and for 3D, but we felt those things pretty much eclipsed all else.

Pre-rendering the models into sprites gets the best of both world - all the ease of creating new art assets with none of the performance concerns.

[loftar]

Pre-rendering the models into sprites gets the best of both world - all the ease of creating new art assets with none of the performance concerns.

It wouldn't be all that swell, though. Maintaining all the various orthogonal dimensions of the resources that we want to be able to have (such as animation, angle, various displayable options, and so on) would require quite a complex system, not to mention a combinatorial explosion of source files (the memory requirements of which may well negate whatever performance gains may be had anyway), while still producing worse results in such aspects as a more limited number of angles and animation frames, lack of height map, more limited drawing options (no dynamic lighting, none of those cloud shadows, no depth fog in the water, &c&c&c), the lack of long and thin objects (say goodbye to wagon gates forever), and many other things. It would also be less maintainable in terms of code, with all the weirdness and strangeness in the current Haven client for trying to compensate for the various drawing order problems that result from using 2D.

It's not as if I didn't consider the option, but I couldn't really take it seriously.

[Potjeh]

Cossacks pulled off 3D terrain with 2D objects without a hitch.

[loftar]

Perhaps, but that's still only one point out of many. ;)

[Potjeh]

I'm kinda opposed to 3D because I get performance issues with Salem ever since I upgraded my computer

[loftar]

Sure, I can see that point, but I hope I'll be able to work them out, quite simply. I do have a few OpenGL optimizations in mind that I think should be able to improve the performance of the client quite a bit. :)

Though it does seem a bit strange that you're having performance problems in Salem with an upgraded computer, to be honest. I haven't personally seen it perform all that badly.

[Potjeh]

Yeah, the weird part is I just upgraded my CPU and RAM. I did switch from Intel to AMD and from XP to 7, though.

Anyhow, I get like 30 second bouts of like 3FPS.

[Kaios]

edit:

[painhertz]

Why u kill sekret forum Jorb? The raw majority of us love the new screenshot!

[Headshot]

Hey. And what about steam greenlight Loftar? Do you plan to use it?