Crimsonland Interview - Robotron Indie Gaming? 14
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a HomeLan Fed article interviewing the creators of Robotron-inspired PC arcade-action title Crimsonland. This retro-styled shooter started out as a freeware game from the small Finnish developer 10 Tons Entertainment, and was picked up by Reflexive Entertainment after the unofficial help of fellow Finns and Max Payne developers Remedy. As for Crimsonland itself, according to developer Tero Alatalo, "..the game uses features of modern 3D accelerators to draw good old 2D graphics. So you'll need to have a 3D card to run a 2D game, but basically you couldn't get the same smoothness, effects and frame rate with traditional 2D drawing methods."
3d vs old specialized chips (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad you can't draw with opcodes anymore
Re:3D rendering of 2D? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that he is talking about the effects that the game uses. It would be slower if he had to write his own 2d lighting routines for example.
Pretty much any modern computer can display pre-rendered bitmaps at 60 fps without breaking into a sweat.
Re:3D rendering of 2D? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a fairly arbitrary number entirely dependant on the player's ability to perceive frames at a certain rate of speed, and the monitor's ability to display them (also a factor is whether the player games with the lights on or off, and the frequency of those lights if they are on).
In theory, you want the raw framerate to be roughly 1.5 to 2 times the refresh rate of your monitor, and then enable v-synch to lock it at the refresh rate (preventing various problems caused by vertical refreshes when the card is midway through drawing a frame).
The most important part, though, is to make sure game logic is affected by framerate as little as possible (if at all), which some game developers (id comes to mind) seem to have a lot of problems doing.