Hi Charles, It is not so much if an engine can be made to do both as it certainly can be done. It is more a question of over head that may or may not be used. For example, a 3D engine would likely use 3D buffers to better represent the 3D environment. The down side 3D buffers use much more hardware and software resources to reproduce that audio where as a standard buffer with pan control uses much less resources. A good example is in the Alchemy demo of Monty James North was using 3D buffers. The audio was spectacular, but was overkill for a 2D game. It also resulted in unnecessary extra load time of sounds between levels, used more hardware resources than were necessary, and a hole bunch of undesirable results when the technology was unecessary in the first place. In the Monty engine I wrote it simply uses a standard buffer with pan since that is all that is needed for 2D platform games. All you are worried about if the object is left, right, or centered. As a result Alpha 6 has extremely fast load times on levels and files, hardware resources aren't taking such a beting, and I have actually decided to load effects in to memory directly so that seek time on them are quicker to access. The only cost then is you need lots of ram to store the files, but that is not a problem on todays computers. Again we could look at math. Monty is a simple trig based engine uses basic Algebra and trig formulas. A 2D engine doesn't require anything more complex. A 3D engine could be based on trig, but isn't as exact as if we used Calculus. If we use Calculus to calculate 3D vectors etc then we are venturing into new levels of math that are again overkill for a 2D platformer. So bottom line it can be done, but overkill if all you want is a 2D game and you are using 3D stuff. Why unnecessarily waiste memory, hardware resources, etc if you don't need it.
Charles Rivard wrote: > I prefer side scrollers because, well, how many of them are there for us? > If you upgrade the engine, could it be used to produce both types of games? > If so, I think that would be the way to go. I do like the side scroller > games due to their ease of navigation. > _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. Gamers@audyssey.org To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.
