[MUD-Dev] Re: Alternate UOL's

[Adam Wiggins]

On Wed, 5 Aug 1998, D. B. Brown wrote:
> From: J C Lawrence <claw at under.engr.sgi.com>
> >UOL comes with a nice collection of reasonably attractive tile-based
> >artwork ready and ripe for the picking (as long as you ignore
> >copyright concerns).  Additionally tile-based graphics are easy to
> >program and do supporting client protocols for (esp compared to full
> >3D), and are at the level that college students or amateur programmers
> >can be expected to have mastered with reasonable competancy.
>
> From my analysis, 3D is really the only way for a small group to go.
> Yes, the engine will take more time to complete, but with wonders such
> as OpenGL and related APIs, the base tools are availible.
> 
> The real savings is the artwork -- once you have a good 3D model of
> a human, with little modification, you have everything you need to
> display.  Instead of a tile for every frame of animation for every
> character displayed, you need the model, textures, and animations,
> and typically the model and animations can be shared across multiple
> characters.

As a person who has worked on a number of titles, some using tiles and
sprites, and some using realtime 3D, let me assure you that the above is
false.  Realtime 3D, even starting with a rendering API like OpenGL, is
much more difficult in the long run, for reasons not immediately apparent.
The most prevalent of these is a general design factor: once you raise the
bar on your world's fidelity, you cannot undercut it.  In terms of 2D
versus 3D, it means you can't every "fake" anything in the second, whereas
in the first it's pretty easy.  This may not sound like such a boon now,
but trust me it rears its head plenty often, especially on a project with
a set deadline.  In particular, the last project I worked on combined the
two, which looks very nice (see
http://www.eidosinteractive.com/revenant/art_screens.html or
http://www.cinematix.com/screenshots.htm) but is an absolute nightmare.
And even though 3D comprised only a very small percentage of the total art
(only the characters and spelleffects are realtime 3D, the rest are
bitmaps), it occupied a large quotient of our time.

What 3D *does* do is allow you to model a much more believable and
interactive world with very dynamic data sets.  It's a lot of extra work,
but it can be worth it for the right kind of game.  (IMO the industry
right now is *way* to hyped over 3D - games are made 3D "just because"
instead of for a real reason.)

Adam