I'm working on an isometric indie project and I'm torn between going down the 3D route or the 2D tile route. Something's struck me as I've read up on everything, though, particularly in relation to RTS games - the landscapes in the 3D ones look considerably better than those in the 2D games, even using the same camera viewpoint. This seems odd to me. I know that there are inherent advantages to terrain generation in a 3D landscape, such as more variation in the undulations of the map, but the overall quality of the landscape just seems higher with the 3D games. Let's take, for example, AOE3: http://games.softpedia.com/screenshots/3-427_3.jpg I know it's a AAA game, but it illustrates the point well. The ground in that screenshot is essentially flat and it looks amazing. 2D games never seem to approach that quality, either going for the cartoony/pixel art style or going 'realistic' and ending up with tiles that look significantly worse. Why is this? Couldn't you apply the same texture to a tile and put them in a 2D game? I know those in AOE3 are probably lots of textures stacked together, but bearining in mind you're only going to see them from one angle in a 2D isometric game, couldn't you just take an image of the final appearence of the stacked textures and use that? Have I missed something enormous :/ Any info would be appreciated. Thanks for everyone's time.

The terrain in the screenshot posted has perspective, so the rocks in the top right corner of the image, for example, are smaller than the ones near the bottom of the image. If the same artwork were rendered isometrically, you would probably notice a big loss of realism.

Apart from that, I can't see any other reason that the same artwork would look any worse in an isometric view.

Lighting, thats a big reason there.

You should have a look at the Commandos games. I think these have the best looking 2d terrain I've ever seen.

Quote: Original post by CBaker
I know it's a AAA game, but it illustrates the point well.

That *is* the point though - it's really, really high quality art that makes that work, not anything fundamentally 2d or 3d. AoE is a big budget game, with corresponding art budgets (both in terms of production quality and memory budgets). By comparison there's very, very few big budget 2d games - they're usually confined to smaller indie efforts or ones of mobile devices with constrained memory and resolution.

2D when done with as much time and effort can look just as good, but other than a couple of

">notable exceptions those games just don't exist.

Quote: Original post by Aardvajk
The terrain in the screenshot posted has perspective, so the rocks in the top right corner of the image, for example, are smaller than the ones near the bottom of the image. If the same artwork were rendered isometrically, you would probably notice a big loss of realism.

Apart from that, I can't see any other reason that the same artwork would look any worse in an isometric view.

I would also point at perspective as the culprit - as a 2D artist it came as a bit of a shock to me the first time I was asked to deliberately create game art that had 'wrong' perspective, and realized that most 2D games do not have their art in correct perspective because the programming of it is quite difficult. It is possible to implement a correct 3-point perspective in a 2D game because I saw another poster in this forum do so, but it adds a lot of complexity because further-away sprites need to be scaled smaller and moved closer to the center of the screen (assuming a chessboard perspective, which is like isometric except side-on, not point-on).

Randomness is also on the side of 3D - every tree can be a little different, while most 2D games only have one sprite of each kind of tree; at best you might get two or three minor variants which you can mix to make a less cookie-cutter forest. The same applies to patches of ground making up a field.

All those points are good ones, and certainly food for thought, partiuclarly the one on the perspective. I'd also forgotten about the Commandos series of games, actually, which are very much the look I'm going for in my own game. Been nice to be reminded of it.

I tend to believe the opposite -- that 2d often looks better than 3d.
(But I'd say that because I'm both a 2d artist and a bit of a curmudgeon!)

Partly, the shot you chose there is a contrived promotional shot; of course it looks good. The camera is at an optimal view distance from the ground, the settings are all cranked to the highest; no jagged transitions, no blurry textures, no objects clipping through each other, no broken ragdoll limbs bent back on themselves, no shadows acting up...

What I like about 2d is that it can allow for a much more intentional artistic experience. With perspective and zoom locked, the art can be tuned to look perfect for the one and only viewpoint the player is going to be seeing it at. I'd give the example of Braid here for an example of clever and very intentional 2d art direction. With 3d, the angle and zoom change all over the place, so the art has to be made merely good-enough for any possible viewpoint.

Or, at least, it is much more expensive to populate and polish (and render!) the assets of a 3d world with sufficient detail to give such a consistently intentional experience. Amazing the things that can be done there days, of course ...

Another reason why most 2D tiled games do not have the look of the screenshot you posted is because they are limited to the images available in the tileset.

The 3d terrain can have textures "painted on". You can actually layer dirt and grass and whatnot and paint it in a way that makes it look more diverse. With a 2D tiled game world, you're putting one premade tile into a tile space. I'm sure that with some clever layering and such, you could achieve the same sort of look using a 2D tiled world... however, it would take a lot more work.

3D terrain texture doesn't have to snap to any sort of grid. You can paint some grass on the terrain at xpos 16 ypos 16, and then paint some more grass at xpos 20 ypos 25. But in a tiled 2D engine you're not going to be able to place tiles at any x/y location. You're restricted to (usually) 16x16 pixel increments. (or 8x8 or 32x32, etc)