Darque said:
[While I don't have a preference, I think you have a point.
FOT showed that you have to make changes to accomidate this (such as spaced out enemies) in a system that uses both combat styles.
FOT's AI was also purely for real time as well. If you start shooting people at random in Fallout or Fallout 2, notice that everyone on the map will pretty much freak out. If you start attacking someone in a location like Navarro, enemies will travel all the way across the map to get you. In Fallout Tactics, you can use a sniper rifle and plug an enemy from maximum range without anyone else noticing unless they're very, very close to you.
That's one of the big problems. They say they'd err on the side of turn based, but if they did that, real time would be impossible just because of little things like that. You fire your gun, and you get fifty guys after you in real time - you're a dead man.
Legshot said:
John Carmack is a gamer designer. He designs engines for games. Don't argue about words here ... He is just an example that people who actually design and program games are in most cases different and know more about their stuff then the average gamer.
Oh, is this the way you plan on slipping out of that little bit of idiocy? By saying, "OH! IT'S SIMANTICS D00D!" I've already explained what the job description of a
Game Designer is, I even used small words to do it. There's a big reason why they divy up the credits and put people like Carmack in the section called
Programming while Antkow is in the section called
Game Design. That's because that's what the titles are.
So what's your freakin point there? Where's the problem in stopping pre-rendering and using those 3d models rendered in real time in the game egine. Where should there be lost in style or athmosphere? I tell you, there is none. There will be a gain in athmosphere if they can real time render their models and have cool lightning and stuff on it
OH. MY. GOD.
Okay, here's the problem. The number of polygons. There's only so many polygons you can push through the pipeline of a card on your average computer. With a pre-rendered model, you can make a tile that has billions of polygons to make nice rounded spheres, smooth corners, and so on. You can make a sprite that's also contains billions of polygons, as much detail as you want. In fact, with pre-rendering, you don't even have to use polygons! You can use NURBS, mathematic spheroids, quads, and so forth. In real time 3D, you're stuck with triangle polygons and a limited amount of those if you expect a decent framerate.
This amount of detail can shine through in a number of areas. The biggest one that comes to mind that you'll be able to understand would be death animations. If you're using prerendered sprites, you can put as much detail in to a death animation as you want. Little pieces of ribs and guts when you blow out someone's side, for example. You can detail each rib, every single little organ flopping around while the person is falling, and so on. With real time 3D, you're stuck with dividing along polygonal edges, then stuffing in new models and then animating those within the engine. You end up with square looking intestines, jagged, squarish looking holes in the side, and so on, because you're dealing with lots of rather straight lines here.
As far as lighting and shadows go, you can do very nice shadows in 2D because in DirectX, sprites and things are now D3D flats. You can easily map shadows for these things in real time. You can have dynamic lighting around pillars and other obstacles pretty easily. Harbinger and Temple of Elemental Evil both show off this possibility. Hell, you can even bumpmap flats in 2D with D3D for even more lighting possibilities.
StillLife said:
What he said is right on target actually.
Only if you can't read for comprehension or know exactly zilch on the subject at hand.
)
