I look at the current projects and they are all cartoonish, very simple games. It seemed there was a time when there was some more serious games being created with 3DGS.
That's obviously a stylistic choice and depends on the artists, not the engine's capabilities. My game KarBOOM has a kind-of cartoony style, but you can see it also has unique multi-texturing, environment-mapped normal mapping, sharp shadows and particle shadows, too (how many games have you played where the particles cast shadows?). I look at other engines and think how much harder it would be to write the same effects for those engines, and what kind of cost to performance/visuals it would be to just use their built-in effects. Online will be released to GS users soon, and so far everything has gone very smoothly.
Now we are on A8, we was hoping maybe the game would run faster with better bone functions, better shadow frame rates, etc, but the fps is still all the same.
Have you tried mat_bones? On my old PC with a GeForce 9600GT I had nearly 5 million bones-animated polygons on-screen at the same time with diffuse lighting and textures.
I would like to, but not going to mess with trying to improve bone animation speeds in a dll, but obviously going to have to write some shadow code that doesn't drop the fps by 1/2.
What shadow system are you using at the moment? I would not recommend using a built-in shadow system in
any engine. They generally sacrifice performance or visual fidelity for generality, but most games could really benefit from shadows made with the game itself in mind.
Jibb
