I personally don't like wind-waker's graphics, but you might want to talk to the person who wrote this recently in the art forum:

[quote name='sunandshadow' timestamp='1313960308' post='4852008']
I personally don't like wind-waker's graphics, but you might want to talk to the person who wrote this recently in the art forum:

Windwaker wasn't made of exactly low-performance graphics. The models were decently articulated,and the game made fair use of postprocessing, animations and particle effects. The DS versions on the other hand were quite low-poly. NPR can cost just as much as any other shading solution, they tend to be fairly heavy with processing steps.

Interesting. If i had my choice I'd like to have graphics similar to sims 3. I assumed that the somewhat realism they have would be costly on performance. Would you say that this may not be true?
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Ultra realism is costly on performance, but very few games pull that off anyway. Basic lighting and shadows are quite achieveable on low end hardware, look at the tech that was in doom3 engine (which was ported to iOS3 generation iPhones!).

My point is that NPR is just as expensive if it not more when you go for stylized looks:
- If you want everything cheap, don't light it at all. Or at least, restrict how many lights you have.
- Cell shading costs a fraction more performance wise than smooth lighting per light.
- Shadows will cost the same pretty much either way, its up to the shadowing technique used, not the lighting solution.

Also:
- Poly counts aren't as important these days as number of draw calls / state switches (though the cost of polys does build up due to vertex shader overheads & memory bandwidth etc)
- Sizes of textures wont help all that much, as long as you are correctly mip mapping them. Though cartoony texture can be compressed better.
- Animations can get expensive based on the number of instances & bones in each instance, but a well designed system can accomodate for this by doing interpolation/extrapolation tricks.

Whats your target hardware?
If you are only deving for PC, don't bother targetting low end hardware. You're only holding yourself back otherwise, the recent hardware and API changes are there to be used.
If you are aiming for handheld, don't restrict your vision but be prepared to sacrifice quality somewhere (and have a good LOD system!)

Sorry some type of error occured that made me multiple post. Would delete if I could!

Theres a delete button for any post you create yourself underneath it, where the quote/reply buttons usually are.

Interesting. If i had my choice I'd like to have graphics similar to sims 3. I assumed that the somewhat realism they have would be costly on performance. Would you say that this may not be true?

Ultra realism is costly on performance, but very few games pull that off anyway. Basic lighting and shadows are quite achieveable on low end hardware, look at the tech that was in doom3 engine (which was ported to iOS3 generation iPhones!).

Theres a delete button for any post you create yourself underneath it, where the quote/reply buttons usually are.
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Amazing post Digital, thanks for all of the info. I checked out doom resurrection, can't believe thats running on a 1ghz processor.

My target is PC's but the engine is written in javascript and runs in the browser. I believe that with WebGL's hardware accelerated graphics I'm facing the same GPU constraints as a compiled PC game written in say c++, but I'm worried about the CPU constraints when having an engine in javascript. As there is no game logic yet, my biggest CPUconstraints are intersection tests and setting up my skeleton for animation (interpolating between keyframes). Also, I have to worry about the size of artwork as it all has to be sent across the wire at load time. Thanks for all of the info =)


I tried the delete button and I get a no mod error, not sure =/