Thus spake "b5mith": > It may seem far-fetched Joel, but the option alone to fly around a > game in 3D would be accepted very well! > > The only requirement would be to use the 3D accelerator card if the > user has one. Probably doesn't matter if it's OpenGL or whatever, the > speed gains and memory savings would be huge. And given such a large > percentage of gamers have GPUs installed, we could do some really > really cool stuff. It would open up some exciting possibilities.
Virtually every computer worth using these days has a 3D-capable GPU. On many machines, Java already uses the 3D pipeline to render 2D stuff, if the user has enabled that. I don't see how there would be any memory savings, since if you're mapping textures onto 3D objects, you have to have the textures stored in RAM and the frame buffer (in video RAM), plus some scratchspace. I think this is doable, but I'm not going to be the one doing it, at least not for quite a while. I have enough 2D performance and usability issues queued up that I think should be fixed first. If you want to have a go at it, though, please do. It would mainly involve replacing the drawing methods in all of the classes which draw to the map. -- J.
