January 6th, 2008
I finished Map project (Part 1, Part 2) in XNA and learned some things while making it.
I didn’t know why every game in last few years is made in 3D. Of course, first person shooters, some first person RPGs and various simulators should be 3D. They were faking 3D look even when there was no 3D hardware, 3D acceleration was made for such games. Programming first person games in 3D simplifies the conversion from game logic to a screen presentation. First person games are programmed with three dimensions in mind and every dimension really matters. It’s clear, 3D allows these games to be better.
But there are games which, when converted to 3d, gain almost nothing. Let say, RTS games. Most of the time they are played top-down, from bird’s eye view. In such mode, they are essentially 2D games. Units, buildings, terrain, interface – everything is two dimensional. Even graphics looks worse. Automatic mipmaping cannot be better then graphics which artist designed and optimized to be seen from birds eye. So why they keep doing it in 3D?
Making a Map project in XNA i learned why: 2D is totally and completely obsolete. They are no tools, hardware, software, tutorials, samples… nothing for 2D. Everything stopped somewhere on surfaces and sprites. It’s possible to make small games like Snakes or Arcanoid but anything complicated and nice looking like strategy games is almost impossible. All image processing is done in the CPU which limits the graphics effects while the new 200$ graphics card has nothing to do. Once you embrace 3D style, you’re staying there. There is no way back.