(This post could probably fit into design philosophy... Or even as a reply to that "3D on byond" post in creations...but I figured the safest bet was to put it in here)
There's been some talk of 3D capabilities of BYOND... There's been some claim that a certain game has "3D" elements in it...
Here's the bottom line... A "3D" game in my definition consists of totally 3D space filled with totally 3D modeled characters and objects... Think Zelda 64 or any FPS game out there for an example...
A game is not 3D if it simply has 3D looking graphics... You can't take a picture of a wireframe modeled figure...use it as your 2D mob icon and call it "3D"...
There must be an actual virtual (hmmm...interesting oxymoron there) three dimensional space in which your character can travel...and the character itself should have three dimensions (not just different icon_states for front, back, and sides...)
And with this definition...I stand by the claim that BYOND just can't do it... I'm positive that it's possible to create an engine for handling the game in BYOND (nothing more than keeping track of points, line segments and the polygons that they create that make up each object)...but no way of adequately displaying the results... And even if there were...it would be extremely inefficient (if the average computer could run it at all without soaking up all of its resources...lol)
So until I'm proven wrong on that...3D will remain one boundary that I don't think BYOND can cross (yet, anyway)...
ID:193139
 Mar 17 2002, 8:32 pm
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Mar 17 2002, 8:34 pm
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Nadrew
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The problem with your "looks 3D" statement is that all games that are 3D only look 3D because a screen is flat and the 3D is just a visual effect.
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Not really...
I mean, you're obviously right about that fact... But a true 3D game doesn't just look 3D because they use 3D-looking graphics... It looks 3D because everything in it is treated as a three dimensional object in a three dimensional space... Or course the resulting display is never anything more than a 2D picture (which BYOND can handle, of course)...but the workings underneath it all are handling 3 dimensional spaces and objects... Which is why I say that BYOND is fully capable of handling the underlying engine... It would be fairly easy to write a program that handles everything as if it were three dimensional... But it simply can't display the proper outcome... Yes, I've already stated that BYOND can handle displaying 2D pictures... But can BYOND use that 2D output to display a 3D modeled world with 3D modeled players wandering around in it? Actual wireframe models with skins placed onto them? Actual depth and perspective? Can it display a tree model that grows larger in my view as I get closer to it (as in the real world and in a true 3D game) without having to resort to displaying different icon_states of a 2D picture with every step you take? No, it can't... You could probably rig something up that came fairly close...but even then it would be WAY too inefficient and processor unfriendly... You'd need WAY too many changes in the display going on all at once with every single movement that the player made... Essentially, to fake 3D, you'd need an entirely different 2D view given to the player with every change in what he sees... That tree would need to take up more and more of my view as I walk towards it... So with every step...you need to display a new picture with a larger tree on it... And what if I turn away from my path? That tree needs to move out of my view but remain at whatever size it needs to be for the distance that I am away from it... The BYOND display just can't do that (as of this point)... Now, if you could design your own output program that could handle the 3D display requirements...you could very well code a 3D game in DM... | |
Read your post again "They're all 2D which BYOND can handle" You know what that means? If you wanted to put some work into it, you'd be able to made those 2D objects be handled like 3D objects all it is is visual that's all you have to remember.
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But what I'm saying is that to get the proper visual effect, you'd need to send a particular player way too many 2D pictures to make it look 3D... A new picture for every move they make... The entire screen has to change with each and every move...
What this would mean is that the engine would have to generate these 2D pictures at runtime... BYOND just can't do that effectively... [Edit:] I keep adding "effectively" or "efficiently" because I can actually see a number of ways that BYOND could do the above...but none of them would run smoothly and not soak up every last ounce of processing your computer had...lol You could make the display so large that each tile corresponded to a point... A skin for a model would be a huge sheet of tiles that you would have to assign parts of to wrap onto the polygons of your model... (basically the way a skin works in true 3D games) However...this method would take IMMENSE maps and objects... The number of turfs needed would be huge and the player's view would have to be WAY more than the max of 21x21... Not only is that not possible at this point...but even if it were...it would be way too computationally intensive... Another method would be to have the program draw the models pixel by pixel (spanning multiple tiles in most cases)...and redrawing those tiles with every movement... This also is WAY too processing heavy... I'm sure there are other workable ways of doing this...but none that I can think of that would accomplish what needs to be accomplished and not put a huge strain on the machine... | |
I've been into the 3D scene for a long time now, also dealt with voxel mapping and vertex rendering. If you can draw a line in BYOND dynamically realtime then you can have a real 3D rendered enviroment. A very old game called Merchants did this and I'm talking back in the Mid 80s. All you have to do is account for where the vertices are and their relationship to each other all the while fixing it to a center point. Move the center point and your object moves in virtual space. Move the vertices with lines drawn between them and you can turn and rotate that object around. So if you had say a cube, you'd need to account for 4 vertices made up of (X,Y,Z) virtually. Not talking BYOND map coords here. With some offsetting of the tiles, being able to realtime draw, and attacking everything to a center point, I think you can have Virtual Lines 3D graphics. Now texture, bump, voxel mapping is another story. If your going that route I'd say just drop BYOND all together and code your own Engine in C/C++.
LJR | |
SuperSaiyanGokuX wrote:
There's been some talk of 3D capabilities of BYOND... There's been some claim that a certain game has "3D" elements in it... You'll please notice that not once do I ever claim "certain game" was 3D. This misconception was started by some people, and touted by others. Yes, "certain game" does look 3 dimensional, and yes, you will be able to explore the depth of an area.... This by no means makes it a 3D game. I do wish "certain people" wouldn't allude to "certain game" at the mere mention of 3D... ~X | |
I'd really like to toss in 2 cents into this discussion, but I can't read your whole post without having an aneurysm.
Lummox JR | |
You could probably get vaguely reasonable "actual" 3D for a single-player game in BYOND, but the question is why you'd want to bother. Other than that, sure, BYOND can't do "actual" 3D... what people have been talking about are merely first-person perspective and prerendered 3D graphics. If you want real 3D, you'd have to build your game with a radically different engine, such as, say, Lego blocks. Those are 3D.
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Leftley wrote:
You could probably get vaguely reasonable "actual" 3D for a single-player game in BYOND, but the question is why you'd want to bother. Other than that, sure, BYOND can't do "actual" 3D... what people have been talking about are merely first-person perspective and prerendered 3D graphics. If you want real 3D, you'd have to build your game with a radically different engine, such as, say, Lego blocks. Those are 3D. Reminds me of the board games I used to make in Lego, actually. That's how I used to play out battles in MechWarrior 2nd Edition (the BattleTech pen-and-paper RPG system) by myself (my friends weren't into that sort of thing... darned unenlightened infidels =) ). The best part about building combat environments out of Lego was the fact that everything -- ranging from a simple vehicle to an office building -- was almost completely destructible. If that high-performance sportscar got a bullet in its tire, RIP! no more tire. There was a website that actually makes a game out of Lego, called Lego-wars or somethingorother. I had it in my favourites a long time ago -- it had a list of weapons on it, and even though that was dry the game itself was just freakishly unique. | |