Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
Textures being a power of two is dependent on your graphics card.

If you're doing 3d models for 2d games then surely you're wasting your time! If you have an orthographic projection then these models will look the same all the time so what's the point of having the model?

Well, pre-rendered 2D graphics have disadvantages that can be solved by switching to 3D. One of the reasons I've started working on a hybrid 2D/3D engine (2D isometric map, 3D characters) is to get around having to use up 4 or 5 MB of texture memory to hold all of the animations for a character. Walk, run, attack (3), cast spell (3), stand idle, die, react to hit... all pre-rendered in 8 or 16 facing directions for an isometric adds up in a hurry. Not to mention, even 16 facing directions looks strange when the character is walking along certain vectors; this problem disappears when I can simply rotate the character.

My take on the situation is that every day there are fewer and fewer reasons not to use 3D, even for supposedly simple 2D games. One of the things that held me back for so long from 3D was the necessity of reducing polygon count, and thus character detail, in order to achieve acceptable framerates, but this limitation is quickly disappearing. Techniques such as normal mapping can make even low-poly models look damned good, especially in an isometric-ish game where you never view the character up close.

Another benefit my hybrid engine receives from drawing things in 3D is the fact that many of the tricky drawing-order problems of a standard 2D isometric are gone. I can draw models and objects now without any regard to back-to-front sorting, and still have correct overlap of objects. In an 2D isometric game, large multi-tile objects sort badly and are difficult to draw properly without getting wierd overlap. In my hybrid engine, that is no longer a problem, since I can use depth sorting. I have to perform some strange techniques to render the map using 3D transformations but still retain the exact appearance as the 2D version, but in the end it all works well.

Component-based character equipment systems is yet another area in which 3D shines compared to the dull hacks required to make it work well in 2D. 3D skeletally animated systems lend themselves nearly perfectly to composition of character appearances, whereas with a sprite-based system you have to tackle messy and inconsistent drawing orders, exponentially bloated memory usage, significantly more difficult artwork creation, etc...

Finally, most professional 2D isometric games these days use characters and objects that were modelled in 3D then rendered to sprite images for import into the game. So you're probably going to be making 3D models anyway, thus that isn't wasted work there.

However, 3D does come with additional complexity, at least to start with. You need a stronger foundation in mathematics, and there are some tricky concepts that need to be tackled during the learning stages, but this is true of a lot of things.

Quote:
Perhaps if you're doing some kind of real time lighting maybe... But then you're really doing a 2d projection of a 3d game.

Heh. Well, considering the fact that all 3D games are simply doing a 2D projection of a 3D game, I don't really see the problem here. Until they come up with fully 3D holographic displays, a 2D projection is all we get.