[offtopic techie rant]

AI accelerators are a pretty stupid idea if you think about it. Graphics accelerators work because output to the screen is a one way operation - the game tells the card what to draw and the card goes away and does it. The game itself doesnt care what the outcome is. Advances like TnL and programmable shaders enable more stuff to be done on the card without the app needing to know about it. Note that if you ever read stuff back off the card, you get massive slowdown because the upload bandwidth across the agp/pci bus is so crap. Also note that if you run a demo with just graphics (no AI/physics or anything) youll find that hardware TnL is actually slower than software TnL - you only get a speedup in games because offloading it to the card gives the CPU more cycles to do other stuff like AI and physics etc, and ultimately less data needs to be sent across the bus each frame.

AI on the other hand, is a two way thing. The game needs to give the AI engine inputs and then needs to read the outputs. There is absolutely no point in a AI card because the bandwidth problems, memory latencies, download and upload speeds, etc. are going to prove far slower than just doing it in software. More hassle than it is worth, at least with conventional computer architectures. The best we can really hope for is some specific opcodes coded into CPU's to make standard AI functions easier, a sort of AI Now! feature in cpu's.
[/offtopic techie rant]

Anyway, back on topic, there are a number of reasons for the move towards 3D...

1. Marketing: publishers pretty much decide what games get made and what games dont, and many publishers have 'decided' that onnly 3D games are marketable. This is a BS reason, but alas, it is something the developers have to live with.

2. Development: In some ways, using 3D is easier and more efficient than 2D - I suspect this is part of the reason Warcraft3 is in 3D. In any iso game, you have to have at least 8 views of any unit (ideally more) Multiply this by the number of different resolutions you support and you wind up with a lot of image data, and that is before you have even animated the damn thing. Just for one shitty unit. In 3D, you just load a model, a texture or two, and you can view it from any angle and any resolution with any light source and it looks fine. Also terrain is much easier to generate, you just fill an arrray with some random values, run a one liner cosine interpolation routine on it, and blam - you have a nice map full of rolling hills. Far easier than faffing about with tile numbering and stuff like that. IMHO this is a perfectly valid reason for choosing 3D over 2D.

3. Gameplay: This is the rarest reason for making a game 3D, but the best. Basically, sometimes a 3D view results in the best gameplay. See Quake for an example.

Edited by - Sandman on July 5, 2001 9:19:16 AM

Sandman, I completely agree with your analysis that 3D makes development easier sometimes. I wouldn''t have any problem with it if that is what it were always used for. But it''s not! 3D is abused, misused, and overhyped.

I''m making a 2D game right now, but I''m using OpenGL for it. Why? So I can have hardware accelerated texture rotation, this way I don''t have to draw 500,000 frames for every sprite (this game is topdown view, imagine drawing 360 degrees of frames.. with animations for each one = OUCH!). I''m also using it for Alpha Blending, to add some effects. I don''t think there should be no effects in games, but they shouldn''t be the game''s focus or selling point.

it''s pretty simple really.....not everyone can do a 3D game.
2D games aren''t going anywhere. if you know how to do a search
you''ll find tons of them being released. just because you don''t
see them overcrowding the shelves doesn''t mean that the genre(2D)
is dead. would you rather spend all your effort, time, and money developing one 3D game that may never see the light of day much less a space on some shelf somewhere, or take that same effort, time, and money developing 5 2D games that could generate you a following? think about it.

as everyone else said. Some ideas are just BETTER presented in 2D than 3D. Doing it in 3D just confuses you if it _doesn''t_ need to be 3D.

I don''t care what games come out.

Street Fighter 2 for the SNES is _BETTER_ than ANY! 3D fighting game out there! Sure, Tekken 3 is fun. But SF2... Fighting is just more fun when the characters don''t go sideways =P

}+TITANIUM+{

I think 2D is more fun. Unless the game has some kind of special AI. Then it should be 3D.

quote: Original post by Kwizatz
I agree that diablo 2 has outdated graphics, but not because of the 2D Aproach. . . but the reason I think the graphics on diablo are outdated is because they used a video mode of about 640X400 (I am not sure) with 256 colors, I think all computers now can at least run 800x600 and 16bit, thats the only thing I didnt liked, and that I think might give anyone the idea of outdated graphics, why did they do it? I dont know, backwards compativility with PII 300mhz ??? maybe? . . .

Time to straighten out some details:

The original Diablo runs in 640 x 480 at 256 colors.

Diablo 2 runs in 640 x 480 at 65,536 colors (16-bit colordepth.) I''m not sure if the sprites are stored as 8-bit or 16-bit, however (I couldn''t a Post-Mortem that included this information.) Orignally they had planned to do 800 x 600 set of graphics which would occupy the same physical space on screen (so all players would see the same ammount of the game map.) The problem was that they had already taken so much time to create 640 x 480 renderings of each frame, "cutting" them manually, and redoing them when they didn''t look right. A higher resolution set wasn''t feasible to do in the time left.

With the Diablo 2 Expansion, Lord of Destruction, Blizzard decided to take a stab at 800 x 600 again, providing an option to use the same 640 x 480 graphics at the higher resolution, giving players the ability to see more of the game map.

As for the outdated graphics argument, I never understood it. Color and lighting transitions are smooth and the dynamic lighting around obstacles (which doubles as a Line of Sight indication) is outstanding. The reviewers never opened up the options panel, it seems, else they would have found the "Perspective" option which provides a 3-D paralax-like effect for those using Direct3D or Glide accelleration.

2D will be around for quite a while yet, I believe. There will always be a place for it as far as I''m concerned until virtual reality is a reality. 3D is seriously overkill for some games. Our company will still be doing 2D games for as long as our clients want it.

Breakaway Games

On this note, have you guys seen this article?

If you''re thinking about going shareware, this is a must read. The point of the article is that many gamers and would be gamers out there are running some pretty crappy machines, with either poor 3D support or no 3D support.

That means that trying to sell to the gamers with souped-up, 3D machines is almost crazy, because EVERYBODY is trying to do it.

Sounds like too many dollars chasing too few customers.

--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

WOW, what an eye opener. Great article Wavinator! Thanks!

Just a few points. The reason most people give to make 3D games with high requirements is that "gamers" have good hardware. But this is often circular reasoning. I can''t call myself a PC gamer, because my PC won''t run most games. I *would* call myself a gamer if I could actually play something other than Starcraft.

About 3D graphics in general, anything you can do in 2D you can do in 3D. You can have a fixed camera in 3d, or use textures similar to sprites, and just throw in a 3d effect here and there. For example, newer Capcom fighters have 2d presentation of characters and combat, but have 3d backgrounds and some special effects that are easier to do with 3D hardware.

At this stage in time there are still a lot of problems with typical 3D games. One is that they are almost always FPS, racing or fighting games, although this is changing over time. Another is that some of them are games that should be 2d, either in look or play, but are made 3D just to be 3D. A third reason is that 3D graphics, until recently, tended to look very boring and un-stylized. The low poly-count makes things look very conservative and bland, for the most part. As 3D hardware gets better, the characters can look more like they are supposed to, rather than like carrot-stick men.

I don''t have any problems with 3D graphics OR 3D gameplay. I just have a problem with bad 3D graphics and gameplay, and I enjoy hand-drawn art as well as 3D graphics. Sculpture didn''t make painting obsolete...