Julius {l Wrote}:It is a major undertaking to add a 3D engine to your 2D game and you don't want to have the heavy OGRE dependency just to render some simple models.
Prerendered sprites (or 3D models) also usually don't fit very well into and otherwise hand-drawn/pixelated game.
Edit: what you could do is have a look at OpenRA http://www.openra.net/ and their current work on getting the Red Alert2 voxel units into their otherwise 2D RTS game. That looks quite ok as it blends in better with the pixelated look.
Edit: have a look here: http://www.ppmsite.com/ there seems to be open source tools and sample code on that side, but I can't find the actual license info right now.
Regarding OGRE being heavy - you mean performance impact?
eugeneloza {l Wrote}:I've heard this is called 'pixel art shader' http://initialsgames.com/main/?p=1360 However, never tried anything like that...
I think it's rather adding a whole engine to the game with all of its dependencies and libraries... If the game is built upon the engine it'd be fine. But in case it's just one function to call...
nnesse {l Wrote}:I believe it's important to understand the code you're using. By the time you realize how little OGRE is doing for you in this use case you'll realize how much simpler it is to write the handful of OpenGL calls needed yourself. Engines become more important when you need to manage an entire scene or multiple effects passes, especially from a first person perspective. That said there are a lot of challenges in writing an OpenGL program for the first time. I'd be happy to contribute some starter rendering code for this if you could describe what you want more specifically. Feel free to PM me.
andrewj {l Wrote}:Depends a lot on how the normal 2D graphics are drawn -- if it is via OpenGL, then rendering a 3D model will be fairly straightforward, but if it is purely software rendering then it is rather more difficult.
Julius {l Wrote}:Yeah, it is really a lot more complicated than it looks at first.
Did you have any luck with the voxels? That at least looks very nice in the later Westwood 2D RTS games.
nnesse {l Wrote}:I believe it's important to understand the code you're using. By the time you realize how little OGRE is doing for you in this use case you'll realize how much simpler it is to write the handful of OpenGL calls needed yourself. Engines become more important when you need to manage an entire scene or multiple effects passes, especially from a first person perspective. That said there are a lot of challenges in writing an OpenGL program for the first time. I'd be happy to contribute some starter rendering code for this if you could describe what you want more specifically. Feel free to PM me.
mdwh {l Wrote}:Another option though, if the game is still fundamentally 2D (fixed camera position), and it's just that using 3D models is desired, why not pre-render them? Whether done from Blender, or a standalone custom tool.
Although reading in a 3D mesh, rendering with shadows (especially self-shadowing rather than just projective shadowing), handling animation, or supporting things like bump mapping are all things that I would say are far from trivial, and are things that an engine could potentially help with.
It may be worth checking out libraries to help, such as Assimp for reading meshes.
I'd certainly gladly ditch it for something better, but I'm not sure what else there is around.
mdwh {l Wrote}:Two reasons basically: making it possible to adjust scale changes on the fly, and to make it easier for humanoid characters to have different equipment without needing a completely different spritesheet just because a character changed a shield.
Julius {l Wrote}:'Voxeling' is quite fun and fast if you don't overdo it with the amount of voxels... it's more like 2D pixel art. But yeah, like pixel art, nice animation etc. is a pain to do. In the westwood games they used it for cool vehicles with simple animations only.
Julius {l Wrote}:Nice
Here are some examples for easy to use & open source voxel editors:
https://github.com/guillaumechereau/goxel
http://sproxel.blogspot.com.br/
These seem also cool, but I could not find the source code:
https://ephtracy.github.io/index.html?page=mv_main
https://blackflux.com/node/11
Julius {l Wrote}:You could also have a look at the Red Alert 2 branch of OpenRA which should also have voxel rendering on a 2D background already:
https://github.com/OpenRA/ra2
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