Would it be possible, in a game like Rollercoaster Tycoon, to make all the people little 3D models, with very few tris, and use them in "real time" (ie not pre-rendered). They probably don''t need much animation (in my game, at least), and would only need simple colouring. Is this feasable with the hardware available today?

Of course it would be easy, and hardware probably wouldn''t have many/any problems with it. The only problem you''d run into is that you would have to write everything in Direct3D, or whatever 3D library you''re using. From my understanding, I don''t think you can have DirectDraw AND Direct3D running at the same time. (am I wrong on that? i don''t know.) But to answer your question, I don''t think hardware would have any problems.

ColdfireV

Direct3D uses the Direct Draw interface.

Kind of off the subject, but Direct3D and DirectDraw can run together. At least drawPrimitive anyways.

see the game "Total Annihilation"...

I don''t think you can make any DDraw calls in between BeginScene and EndScene, but other than that DDraw will work with D3D. Also, SimCity 3000 uses Direct3D to draw the buildings and cars, I''m not sure about people though.

Thanks for the info!

One last thing... to make it feasible for a game of say 500 little models (static), and a few big models (with keyframed animation), what would be the number of vertices to stick to? And how would I do the coloring?

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P.S. I''m NOT using DirectX :-P

NOT DirectX ?

That sounds cool! Did you get your hands on some next generation game programming API.

If so please tell me - -I''ll keep it a secret...

- Sleepwalker