3d and 2D mix. What is your opinion?

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    • 3d and 2D mix. What is your opinion?

      Hi, this is my first post.
      First, thanks for the great book and nice website to the author. After picking up a book at local book store, I could not put it down.

      I am one of those boring application developers and want to be a game developer someday. Recently, I am thinking about deveoping game more and more.
      I like online rpg games and also console rpg games. I want to bring console type characters in the 3d environment.

      I found some of interesting way to mix these.
      I found one of those korean mmorpg games in the beta stage. This game started with 2 programmer, 1 graphic artist and 1 game designer. They made a presentable demo and got funding from a publisher and there's currently about 20 people working on it. It is fourth beta stage.

      mabinogi.com

      static.nexon.co.kr/game/nexon/…gi_3rdclosedtest_300k.wmv

      It is distinctive in a way.you can see in game movie.
      I like anime look and feel of the game. They claim that they used T&L engine extremely and should run fine at low end machine with 3d accelerator.
      How do they do it?

      The post was edited 2 times, last by meowmeow64 ().

    • RE: 3d and 2D mix. What is your opinion?

      Well - I can tell you from the screen shots alone that this is decededly not a 2d game. The "cartoon" style is achieved with a particular kind of pixel shading that is probably going to be shortly overused like crazy called "cel shading."

      I say overused because some game designers choose to use a rendering trick to inject a sense of style in their game when their design seems lacking.

      One game that uses the cel shading technique to great effect is an Xbox game called "XIII" - due out for this Christmas. I played it at E3 this year and was instantly hooked.

      And yeah, this technique requires up to date video hardware on your machine - at least 1.0 pixel shaders that came with DirectX 8.
      Mr.Mike
      Author, Programmer, Brewer, Patriot
    • Originally posted by meowmeow64
      I am really sucker for animation look and I always hated 3d game with boring realistic look.

      Me too, I much prefer games with distinct visual flair over those with a dull "realistic" look. I've always thought that games which have their own visual style are more exciting and age slower than games that aim for realism and inevitably fall short. Mikes right about the potential for overuse though.
      pan narrans
    • Another TOTALLY underrated game with this same kind of look is an Xbox title called Jet Set Radio Future - I reviewed it in my blog, but you should definitely check it out.
      Mr.Mike
      Author, Programmer, Brewer, Patriot
    • RE: 3d and 2D mix. What is your opinion?

      Originally posted by mrmike
      ...pixel shading that is probably going to be shortly overused like crazy called "cel shading."

      I say overused because some game designers choose to use a rendering trick to inject a sense of style in their game when their design seems lacking.


      Yeah I have been noticing it popping up all over the place ever since it was done in Zelda (I'm not sure who did it first though). Personally I don't really like the look, I have heard that it's suposed to make 3D games look like anime while still keeping the pictures dynamic, but I think there is still a long way to go before that sort of look is achieved.
    • RE: 3d and 2D mix. What is your opinion?

      "Yeah I have been noticing it popping up all over the place ever since it was done in Zelda (I'm not sure who did it first though)."

      Actually, the original Jet Set Radio on the Sega Dreamcast was one of the first games to successfully use cel shading to create a distinctive visual style. Didn't hurt that it was really fun, too.

      XIII is using cel shading for a different reason - the game is based on a series of French comic books! They're trying to keep a very comic-book feel for the game, and cel-shading is just one of the ways they are doing it. Another is visual audio cues - if you hear footsteps, you will also see comic-book style "TOK - TOK - TOK" blurbs on the screen, the size and position of which tell you the distance and direction of whoever is making the sound.

      Another thing they are doing is overlaying comic book-style frames over the viewspace for plot elements or cool things (like you hitting someone with a sniper rifle). Also, if you get hit by something like a stun grenade, the screen will shake and you'll see that your entire viewport is surrounded by yet another comic book frame. All of these together do a fantastic job with XIII's visual style.

      If you want to check it out for yourself, there's a demo at 3dgamers.com/games/xiii/ .
      "C'mon, you can't show the player a giant bomb and then not let him blow it up."
      - Gabe Newell, Valve
    • Do you have any words of wisdom on doing true 2d/3d mix though? I am getting sick of cell shading right now, no game has been released that did it right since Jet Set Radio on the dreamcast. I want to design my first game as fully 3d, but love the look of games like Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and Final Fantasy Tactics.
      Building a game and going crazy... same thing.
    • For mixing 2D and 3D the old fashioned way (without cel-shading), It shouldn't be any different from a 2D system. Everything blits to one surface so you should make some base class for all sprites that treats the sprites as 2D objects with a z-order to determine which goes on top of what, then have a 2D sprite class and a 3D sprite class inherit from that base. If you start off that way and make sure that there is a concept of Z-ordering on your sprites, then you won't have a problem making sure that your 3D is always on top of the 2D as in Final Fantasy VII, or if you like, you could even do the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 thing and make 2D always on top of 3D. Think of each visual element as a 2D sprite. Think of your 3D objects as a single object that will draw to a 2D sprite and then be treated in 2D from then on. So a single 3D sprite (like one sprite to represent a 640x480 3D background in Marvel vs. Capcom 2) will actually need to be able to render an entire scene of multiple or single 3D objects onto a single DirectDraw surface for that one sprite... but from that point on, you can treat that one sprite as a single 2D sprite with it DirectDraw surface ready to blit.... just like any other 2D sprite. Of course, each sprite would have and manage its own directdraw surface that gets blitted to the backbuffer for page flipping.

      In a nutshell, you probably already know what you'd do for the 2D sprites, and you should think of the 3D objects as entire 3D scenes rendered onto a 2D sprite... then your engine will only handle 2D sprites.

      The post was edited 2 times, last by Kain ().