Hey, folks. I've recently been made forum mod for Visual Arts. Seems dbaumgart is busy, busy these days. So there is a new sheriff around, and I'm looking to clean up this town. Going forward, I'd like to clean up a few of the stickies that are lurking around up there, maybe try to consolidate some of that into a single sticky or two, rather than the half-page that we currently have. So if any of you have any suggestions on what we want to keep, I'm all ears. There is some good stuff in there, but there are also a boatload of dead links. Thanks.

Josh

I change my mind about stuff more often than the wind changes direction. In effect, my journal is sort of like a barf bag on a bumpy airplane flight. The stuff in it is all different colors, all mixed up, and often you can't tell exactly what it is you are looking at. I haven't completely discarded the idea of 3D yet. I've written back-ends for three different 3D libraries for it. My problem is that I just can't seem to find a good fit. Everything is either extremely heavy-weight or awkwardly engineered, and lots of them such as Ogre and Irrlicht are hanging on to kruft from the early 2000s, and are in serious need of a good overhaul to improve their cache-friendliness and reduce the god-awful amount of OOP they're burdened with, before I would ever consider them a good fit.

Still, though, 3D definitely has its allure...

I haven't completely discarded the idea of 3D yet.

You could combine the best of both worlds. First off, a isometric, grid based game is cool, and what is more important in my opinion, more interesting, because it is an overlooked niche (in other words, dispose the hex-approach, keep it simple'n'stupid).

As far as I know you render your art in blender, why not use depth,normal sprites and create a g-buffer from your sprites. This way you could approach your "2d" rendered game like a deferred shaded game adding dynamic lights, DOF, SSOA and other depth dependent effects.