Hiya ! Just a quick question for gba (game boy advance) developers...I just wondered how many polygons you would allow a main character to have in a 3d gba game...? And in term of texture budget...? Thanx in advance, bye thibcour

errrr... actully. i wouldnt use 3d at all unless you want the game to chop like a mofo. the gba has a "3d processor" but its barely adequete for making games with. better to stick with the 2d engine that its actully designed to push.

I think the character in THPS2 and 3 is a 3d model, and not prerendered. Same with tekken3, no? I cant really remember, but I dont think they were textured at all, just flat shaded. There is also that starfox-like game where everything is 3D, but again everything is flat shaded, no textures. The models seemed pretty low poly to me, maybe 20-30 polys at most. I dont think the gba would have enough power to support textures in a polygon based engine, unless the poly count was very low or there were very few operations other than the rendering.
There are many GBA games that use some kind of 3d techniques, and they dont ''chop like a mofo'', so I think that statement is a bit un-fair.

note: I am not a gba developer, just thought i would add what i know .

You are right, that statement was a bit unfair. The gba has proven that it is possible, but I have seen some tests of textured model on gb ahardware that used the direct x 8 test cube that chopped HORRIBLY. I dont know how much faith i would put in the gba''s 3d ability after that. but its not like im gonna discourage you from trying. it might work, and if the characters in tony hawk were 3d, then it has been proven.
Iridion 3d uses the same theories as starfox but more mounted sprites.

Thanx for your answers.
I kinda thought there was basically no way to have any textures, I mean to have a correct result, but concerning the number of polys, I thought the gba could cope with a bit more than that, 50-100 polys for a main character.
I can''t remember if the characters in ''pyro the fireman'' were full 3d or pre-rendered but they looked like they had quite a fair amount of polys...
Oh well...

Cheers anyway,
bye

Tekken Advance

THPS 2 Advance

Star X

So, tekken and tony hawk are definatly 2d, not 3d as someone claimed above. Star X looks like flat shaded 3d, but extremly low poly. Texturing? Well unless you only have one thing on screen then forget it. The GBA is optimised for 2d effects, not 3d. You''ll get better quality with old-skool psudo-3d (mode 7 etc.).

The Tony Hawk game for gba uses 300 poly characters (according to my game magazine).

Heres a quote from ign.

"The developers pulled off a polygonal engine for the skaters in order to preserve all the thousands of frames of animation at every conceivable angle, all while prerendering the skate park at a high color depth"

When I played thps 2 or 3, cant remember, im sure it looked like a poly char. If it was prerendered, then they should have made the quality of the model a bit better

That was the one, Star X, even when there are several ships and buildings on screen, it still runs fine. The gba can handle well more than a cube if its coded right .

Thing is, even if you could have characters with 100+ poly's, you wouldnt be able to see em all on the low res gba screen, unless your character takes up like the whole screen.

I think the statement about 300 poly characters was just another marketing con, theres probably 300 poly's between all the models in the game, not 300 per character

[edited by - Tylon on May 28, 2002 10:03:46 AM]