That approach (using renders to generate gif sets used in a 2D game) is certainly promosing for a lot of application genres, and allows a nice progression in investing in a game: - flat 2D implementation to prove game mechanics, playability - Invest in 3D renders to give depth and movement. - If the game is taking off, provide a full 3D experience. I have a couple questions for hte vets out there though. Is this at all effecient, or does the move from 2D->3d involve such a large port that one either has to either re-write the app on a new framework, or start with a dumbed down 2D implementation on a 3D framework? The other question I have is for RPGs where the clotes and equiptment are dynamic. it seems like there are good models for this in both pure 2D and pure 3D. I'm assuming for a "rendered 2D" solution this would be a problem, or at least more work than worth. Is it? I loved what GTA: Chinattown Wars did with their overhead 3G. It's a nice improvement over a fixed isometric or pure overhead.
Thank you for your answers. We created a test 3D human modell, 286 polys, and then made a load test. After 15-20 pcs on screen it started to be slow. Now we will try the 2D (2.5D) variations.
Thanks for this example, just bought it and the thread was also very useful for me regarding look and gameplay balance.
Sorry to have to correct you, but this is not true. Zombieville USA, Pirates, and this Ninja game made by MikaMobile all use a 3D engine (Unity iPhone). They simply map predrawn textures onto quadpolies in 3D. Together with a sidescrolling camera without perspective (orthogonal camera) , this gives the impression of a 2D sidescroller. This way they have all the 3D hardware acceleration available and can make use of many features available in unity. They even use Maya (one of the top 3d packets in the industry) to map and animate the character parts, and then export the animations directly to Unity. Unity in turn can read those anims and geometry via the FBX fileformat. Trying to do this vector based in realtime (like Flash vector graphics) would be far worse in performance and would'nt make sense on iPhone's limited hardware anyway....
Just a little tip about making human models. To speed up the process you can use a program called make human(http://www.makehuman.org/) to make a human model and load it up in your 3d modeling tool to use it as reference. This way I only use around 1 - 2 hour to create a human model(around 500 tris), and I am new to modeling
Thanks spacefrog that is actually educational and actually accounts for a lot of little things I was wondering about. oioioi wow, being a 3d modeller myself, that will be am incredibly useful resource for a quick baseline, thanks!
Few months back we wrote an article about character modeling for our iphone game; ironfist boxing http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?threadid=36581
Very good article. The information about draw calls and single surface meshes is pretty useful, thanks for that, too. For our game iSmashem Galactic we used 2d graphics instead of 3D graphics, due to two reasons: 1)Lack of experience with 3D on iPhone 2)2D graphics dont max out the hardware per content As a matter of fact, You have to consider several factors, things like download size, controls, content creation speed. If You use 2d , You can pretty much load anything into the game pretty easily.Model creation and texturing is quicker, more forgiving and You can use all the material attributes like reflection, specularity, transparency, sub surface scattering, hair etc. The problem is that 2d costs more ram and gives larger filesizes. Especially when rendering those sprites at different angles, things add up. For iSmashem Galactic, we needed 20 MB filesize for the animations of characters and backdrops, although we used some clever looping and mirroring tricks. 3D is MUCH lighter on the space requirements, so if You aim at something that can be downloaded OTA, 3D is the way to go. Its also much better for animation.Rotating a 2d sprite in Iso costs exactly that number of single sprites per facing direction. In 3D, You just rotate the model, and this is for free The problems come with creation, as texturing is a limitation, because You want those characters look good and readable, without becoming a mess of pixels, which is a danger with such low res textures and the small display size. So You would actually go for bright and distinguishable textures and exaggerated animations. This also depends on the distance to camera. Also, if You paint the lighting into the textures, it will always look rather static, as there are no traveling lightsources or shiny metal effects.
