2D VS 3D : buildings subjected to aging

[Coconut Kid]

I fear the original thread may be was deleted because of personal insults.

We do not need to have 8 different renditions since we are in 3d. In 3d we have 1 object with its specific orientation. This problem exists only in 2d games.

I can not defend El_Malo's understanding of the number of renditions as required by 2D and 3D.

All I know is that all the hipe about 2D vs 3D flows over my head. What I see on the screen looks the same. I am not seeing steroscoptican.

Therefore I conclude that somewhere there must be a description in layman's (not computer geeks) terms to tell what is the difference.

I haven't found it yet, but I am deducing that it revolves around the capability to deal with plane vs solid geometry upon the users PC. Please note, I struggled in my HS class with the hurtle of visualizing solid objects drawn on a flat surface -- which is all we had without sending down to the wood shop for models. No one has to cope with that anymore. I doubt anyone studies solid geometry anymore either - why bother since the computer solves the problems (oh, who wrote the program?).

The highly touted 3D program uses "solid" objects rather than "plane" views, I think.

That leads to the "MODS" that El_Malo has been promoting.

If my mental picture is correct, the 3D program has a base of "solid" geometric figures and each has a variety of "skins" which is attached by the programmer's magic. "Skins" is a magic word poorly understood by most PC users.

Therefore, if the game "code" is open enough, users who have the skill to draw solid geometric pictures can substitute or add new "skins" to the basic figure.


The topic of having buildings show age and/or exhibit advancements based on new technology came up.

El_Malo asserted that would involve a great deal of extra art work because of the number of renditions required; and it would be hard to pack into the game with little benefit. That quickly devolved into an argument about the difference between 2D and 3D in computer technology.

Posters wanting building icons that show a progression of time, have not fully thought this through.

[Lyubo_Haemimont]

The other thread is closed, so I'm posting this here instead.

While el Malo is not right by saying there have to be different renditions of the building, that does not mean that he is not right in the fact that this will mean extra art which could be better used somewhere else and will add little to gameplay.

[Coconut Kid]

I hope assen will not object to a snip of a quote from the Kalypso board:

El Malo is right, this is a lot of work to be thrown away on a feature which doesn't affect gameplay. And if we want it to affect gameplay (e.g. old buildings function worse), it snowballs into all areas of the game - e.g. you need to be able to "repaint" buildings, which adds an element of micromanagement not very typical for Tropico (a.k.a. the "click each building every five minutes or the city stops working" feature).

Part of the point is that commentary on suggestions may appear negative at first glance, but upon reflection are intended to be helpful in picking out the really workable ideas.

I think this reinforces Lyubo's post.

[el_malo]

All I know is that all the hipe about 2D vs 3D flows over my head. What I see on the screen looks the same. I am not seeing steroscoptican.

Therefore I conclude that somewhere there must be a description in layman's (not computer geeks) terms to tell what is the difference.

Yes, would someone provide a "layman's" explanation as to how 2D and 3D differ.

I suggest using the shadows projected by the T1 art-work as your example.

A different rendition was required for each facing, so shadows would always align in the same direction.

How will 3D solve this issue, using only a single image for all facings?

[Timo]

How will 3D solve this issue, using only a single image for all facings?

Shadows can be computed dynamically based on the position of a virtual "sun" or any other light source. It is a complex mathematical calculation that uses quite a bit of processing power, but the end result is a very realistic appearance of your island.

[el_malo]

It is a complex mathematical calculation that uses quite a bit of processing power,

Does the 3D method require more "processing power", than using multiple sprites/icons/images... as in T1?

[Coconut Kid]

As a layman, I would speculate the three issues involved are latent storage, CPU through-put, and the size of the Random Access Memory (live storage) available. Somewhere in that are issues of how the visuals card and the sounds card handle the secondary processing of their special items as called by the main program.

I suspect your question would require comparison of things as different as the the gasoline American LaFrance twelve cylinder, dual ignition fire truck engine of the first half of the 20th century with the Cummings Diesel engine popular in the Crown Coach fire engines of the second half of the 20th century.

They both work well if maintained, but no one builds either one any more. If you catch my drift.

 

[el_malo]

Where is Weeds, when we need him 

I bet he could explain it 

On the surface, the 3D renderings of sprites, only seems to benefits the actual artists.

How does it improve game-play for the players?

What is being sacrificed in game-play... for some "purty pictures?"

[Coconut Kid]

... On the surface, the 3D renderings of sprites, only seems to benefits the actual artists.

How does it improve game-play for the players? ...

Moving into the world of pure speculation -- cough, cough !!

It seems to me the artists still have to work their butts off maybe more so. For the artists under the 2D system, lots of stuff could be copied and mechanically enlarged or reduced for the flat shot - especially easy for buildings. For 3D the game changes. For moving figures like Laura Croft, they have to stay whole and not have their crotch split up to their boobs as they make some moves.

So far as I can guess, the only one who gets a break is the manager of storage. The visuals are greatly reduced but the code to manipulate them increases (well, maybe - it sure changes).

I speculate that the move from 2D to 3D in visuals is analogous to the change from batch processing file/record updates to random access, current time updating of individual files/records in the text oriented business world. Batch processing was punch card oriented. It took a lot development of new "languages" in a hierarchy of levels to move to pure electronics.

As far as game play goes, I suspect it depends on the game. It certainly makes it easier to program the FPS and magic games which rely mostly on the visuals with little running "behind the scenes". IMHO it makes city builders a snap for the programmers while the artists slave and sweat.

Tropico is a challenge for Haemimont because of the moving units. Since I have to picture all this in my mind without professional confirmation, I am not sure if 3D adds to Tropico game play or not. Certainly the artists could concentrate more on coordinating the buildings as to scale.

However, we have to see if they can escape the mind set (which is also evident among the posters on the Kalypso and other forums) that the person avatars are not simply animations to support the buildings.

It is one thing to build a game within a highly evolved visual format which delights the players with the "eye-candy" (I hate the term) that so many consumers have become habituated to. Crank out one or two a year on a theme to keep the cash flowing.

It is quite another to build a game centered on independent units rather than the buildings. The coding to "operate" the units has to be running in the background in addition to the coding to run the static visuals.

If I make so bold as to suggest that the screenies so far released of T3 "in game" play show buildings capable of supporting 1,000 to 2,000 units!

IMHO, I'm not sure how 3D visuals support game play with that number of units.

[Unsigner]

Wow, lots of stuff in this thread, where do I start?

CoconutKid is somewhat right in his understanding that 3D games such as Tropico 3 use "models" draped with "skins" to visualize objects; the more common words for these are respectively "meshes" and "textures".

If we were to introduce deterioriting (aging) buildings, we would most likely do it by changing the texture only.

Some games allow users to replace textures and/or meshes or even introduce their own, in "mods". Unfortunately, Tropico 3 will not be one of them. (The issue of allowing mods is orthogonal, as programmers love to say instead of "independent", to the issue of 2d vs 3d; you can have mods in both.)

3D games are generally more computationally demanding than older 2D games, but this is not because 3D is inherently slower than 2D; on the contrary, 3D is an optimization that allows us to e.g. keep one model + texture instead of four sprites for the four directions of the building (and eight, if we had to support 45 degrees rotation with a 2D engine). It allows us to display the buildings arbitrarily oriented and arbitrarily lit.

I'm not getting into the argument whether 3D makes games better. Entire genres of games did not exist before 3D: the flight simulator, the racer, the first- and third-person shooters, and CoconutKid's favorite GTA was just a hint at what it might really be. But one of the deepest games in the history of Homo Ludens, go, is played on a plain wooden board with small round stones of two colors.

Whether the game has pretty visuals, is 2D or 3D, is cranked out twice a year with a different theme is absolutely ORTHOGONAL (see above) to having individual unit simulation. I can assure you that we can crank out two games with individual unit simulation a year. Or we can take three years to polish to perfection a game where the units are nothing but animation, a visual effect between the buildings.

There's still a lot of performance work to be done on Tropico 3, so I can't yet say with certainty - but I think eventually we might be able to support cities of 2000 units on a powerful PC. (You know that relative that keeps telling you how any PC is good enough nowadays and you should buy the notebook for $500? Well, he's wrong.) Our current "stress test" city which will no doubt be grown before release has 900 units.

[Coconut Kid]

Orthogonal
Definition - In geometry, orthogonal means "involving right angles" (from Greek ortho, meaning right, and gon meaning angled). The term has been extended to general use, meaning the characteristic of being independent (relative to something else). It also can mean: non-redundant, non-overlapping, or irrelevant. In computer terminology, something - such as a programming language or a data object - is orthogonal if it can be used without consideration as to how its use will affect something else.
In itself, a programming language is orthogonal if its features can be used without thinking about how that usage will affect other features. Pascal is sometimes considered to be an orthogonal language, while C++ is considered to be a non-orthogonal language.

So some of my assumptions were not relevant because the two elements I mentioned were orthogonal.

[Coconut Kid]

3D games use "models" draped with "skins" to visualize objects; the more common words for these are respectively "meshes" and "textures".

My error based on not having a local bar frequented by programmers.

I think I picked up the term "skin" the way I used it from the Trainz forum where I think they discussed "re-skinning" locomotives and cars -- which was changing the paint and logo scheme.

Wikipedia disambiguation:

In computing, skins may be associated with themes as custom graphical appearances (GUIs) that can be applied to certain software and websites to suit its the purpose or topic, or the tastes of different users.

Software which is capable of having a skin applied is referred to as being skinnable, and the process of writing or applying such a skin is known as skinning. Applying a skin changes a piece of software's look and feel — some skins merely make the program more aesthetically pleasing, but others can rearrange elements of the interface, potentially making the program easier to use. Although often used simply as a synonym for skin, the term theme normally refers to less-complex customisations, such as a set of icons and matching colour scheme for an operating system.

Skinning refers to removing skin, usually from a dead animal; it may also refer to:

In computers:

• Surface representation used to draw a character in skeletal animation in 3D computer graphics and animation.
• Creating 2D textures which are applied to 3D meshes.
• Attaching a mesh to a skeleton.
• Act of creating a "skin" (also called "themes") to change appearance of a computer program.
• Skinnable, programs that support skins.

[Coconut Kid]

... Whether the game has pretty visuals, is 2D or 3D, is cranked out twice a year with a different theme is absolutely ORTHOGONAL ... to having individual unit simulation. I can assure you that we can crank out two games with individual unit simulation a year. Or we can take three years to polish to perfection a game where the units are nothing but animation, a visual effect between the buildings.

There's still a lot of performance work to be done on Tropico 3, so I can't yet say with certainty - but I think eventually we might be able to support cities of 2000 units on a powerful PC. ... Our current "stress test" city which will no doubt be grown before release has 900 units.

That is to refute what I said: Tropico is a challenge for Haemimont because of the moving units. Since I have to picture all this in my mind without professional confirmation, I am not sure if 3D adds to Tropico game play or not. ... However, we have to see if they can escape the mind set (which is also evident among the posters on the Kalypso and other forums) that the person avatars are not simply animations to support the buildings.

It is one thing to build a game within a highly evolved visual format which delights the players with the "eye-candy" (I hate the term) that so many consumers have become habituated to. Crank out one or two a year on a theme to keep the cash flowing. It is quite another to build a game centered on independent units rather than the buildings. The coding to "operate" the units has to be running in the background in addition to the coding to run the static visuals.

Well, clearly Haemimont feels not at all challenged by a unit driven game. They can crank out at least two of them per year - given the financing.

Good on them. We'll see how the "performance work" (including balancing I suppose) comes out.

I'll be very interested in the balance between game and simulation that results. I have discussed here a lot of the issues, for example - how long will female units be out of the workforce wearing the "Mother" avatar, three months or three years (three years was the length of the immobile Baby avatar). Three months works for the game, but three years is a reasonable simulation (without child care facilities).

With a powerful PC, the player can build a relatively large population over the entire island of ~2,000 units. That's interesting. I opine that it will take a lot of player mental power to manage a population of that size.

[Unsigner]

Tropico 3 is a challenge for us, yes, just ask my wife about my working hours :-)
It's not just the unit simulation itself that is challenging - we have done simpler unit simulation-based games before (the first two Roman games, but not the third, Grand Ages: Rome, which is building-based); what's challenging is the sheer number of different mechanics: many buildings, many edicts, character traits, mission events - all of them interacting with each other.

To clarify: the performance work I was referring to includes only making sure the game runs fast; the balance work happens in parallel.

Whether the game will run with 1000 or 2000 units is at the moment bottlenecked entirely by the unit simulation code; we would have the exact same problem if the game was 2D. That is, we can display 2000 units, I'm not sure we can simulate 2000 units.

Thanks for the "player mental power" comment; it is very rare glimmer of reason from a player. In my experience, all players want is MORE MORE MORE BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER; bigger maps, more houses, more units, huge cities. And when the city crashes and burns, they blame the game, of course :-)

[el_malo]

Unsigner, thanks for your explanations.

I have found it refreshing that the developers understand that criticism is not always a negative thing... unlike the publisher's staff 

BTW, the publisher apparently thinks of T3 as a "city-builder", not a unit-simulation game.

Kalypso Media have today revealed details of the interface for there forthcoming city building strategy game TROPICO 3.

It is to bad that Haemimont was not able to be both the developer and publisher for T3.

I suspect that a lot of ill-will could have been avoid, if it had been so.

[Coconut Kid]

...
Thanks for the "player mental power" comment; it is very rare glimmer of reason from a player. ...

Oh my word! I'm shocked! My reaction to the more, more, more posters has always been (expressed or not) "what are you going to do with it?" IMHO, the issue is particularly acute with Tropico because the units have so many components which have to be updated as near to real-time / the game-clock as possible.

But then I'm a gaming dinosaur who doesn't jump from game to game according to the latest fad.

I thought the earlier editions of the ANNO series were attractive city building games with only a couple of glitches. I loved the people in the Cultures series, but the limits of the campaign kills replay. I'd still be playing it if it had random maps. There have been several others that I enjoyed but were evidently not intended for replay. A biggie on that list is Virtual Resort / Spring Break -- the lock step "campaign" kills it.

So much so for PC games. They are going the way of the "hula-hoop".

[el_malo]

Whether the game will run with 1000 or 2000 units is at the moment bottlenecked entirely by the unit simulation code; we would have the exact same problem if the game was 2D. That is, we can display 2000 units, I'm not sure we can simulate 2000 units.

Leave it at 1,000 for now.

Increasing it to 2,000 effective units is something y'all can do with an x-pac.

Trying to cram to much into a single game... has lead to more than one disaster.

[Coconut Kid]

Perhaps we are supposed to rely on the early screenies for the rural, pastorial scenes.

Here's one; but I wonder if that is a rural road.