Howdy Folks, I''ve played a few of these new 3d rts games such as wc3 and empire earth, and i was wondering why they would go to all the trouble making it 3d only to severly limit the camera rotations. Is this to preserve the genre''s style, or due to some technical reason? If it''s not due to a technical reason, I can''t fathom why they would place these restrictions. Being able to rotate in any direction would make the game far more immersive. -stilltjack

When you turn the map, you can actually lose the orientation. North becomes south, and so on. Yes, it''s spectacular, but about as useless gameplay-wise as zooming in on an individual unit. (Notice the "in on an" - what a wonderful alliteration!)

Probably the main reasons for the move to 3D is that it makes the developer''s life easier.

Every time you create a new unit in 2D, you need to create a high poly model, texture it, animate it, and then render each frame of animation from 16 different angles. This gets even worse if you want the players to be able to choose different resolutions to play the game in. The result is a ridiculous amount of content that the developers have to create, and the player has to have sitting around on his hard drive.

With 3D, you just need to create a low poly model and texture it. Animations can often be shared between many different models. Not only do you have to do less work to create it, but it looks good from all angles, in all resolutions, and you get to take advantage of things like animation blending.

In an fast paced, competitive RTS game like WC3, having to wrestle with complex camera controls would totally kill the gameplay. The rotation and zoom features are really just bonuses, things you get for free when you have a 3D engine, rather than essential gameplay features.

Actually, the buildings in Empire Earth only have one side rendered. You can see this in the map editor, which allows you to rotate the camera. The buildings always face you, just as the corpses in DOOM.

---------------------------------------------
How many nukes could a fat duck duck if a fat duck could duck nukes?

my rts im adding a nifty feature that lets you diretly controll a unit and view the world from that units eyes think of it like this you send all your tanks up to the enermy base and the take control of a commando letting you use the units to its full ability no body steal my idea please as its coyrighted to bullshit inc.

Kapru: check the game Dogs of War... it was an rts game and you could go into first person mode...

::aggression is the result of fear::

A nice gimmick, but little practical value, I think (unless you could control the individual unit like in an FPS; that would be somewhat interesting)

A while back a Star Wars RTS (was it Rebellion??) had a free floating camera and it really sucked. I could never tell which way I was sending my guys.

Force Commander?

quote: Original post by kapru
my rts im adding a nifty feature that lets you diretly controll a unit and view the world from that units eyes think of it like this you send all your tanks up to the enermy base and the take control of a commando letting you use the units to its full ability no body steal my idea please as its coyrighted to bullshit inc.

Actually, I''m not sure if you''re aware of this, but you cannot copyright ideas. I''m not going to steal the idea, but I just thought you might want to know, for next time you want to post an idea you don''t want to be stolen. I doubt you''ll have any problems anyways, but you never know.



Divinus Entertainment
Land of Relics Art Director
http://divinus.net