help me make game

[Robomaniac]

Not to put anyone down, but to prove a point about prerendering.

Look in any game on your computer you have. Look in files for a bunch of .jpg's .tiffs, any image files. I bet the only one's you'll find are textures.

Point Proven

I don't know what the future of prerendering is, but for now, i don't know of any game that does it besides myst and adventure like games, most of which also do not use it.

Cutscenes can be made from them also, but that's all i can think of

[Masdus]

I really think we need to define some terms here. Normally in the games industry prerendering refers to the process of generating an entire screen during the game design process, as opposed to generating the data on the fly. Prerendered scenes are usually stored as a 2D image format such a bitmap, png or tiff, with each screen requiring a seperate file. The technique was commonly used at the begining of the "3D era" when the detail of 3D models was pretty poor. In many cases either the entire game invloved moving from one pre-rendered scene to another as in the Myst Series, or prerendered backgrounds were used like in Final Fantasy VII. Games which use 3D models for their levels and model are not pre-rendered. In Unreal and quake the jpg and other files store the textures which are applied to the 3D models. As Tyn said in such games each frame of the game determines what can be seen and generates the scene from the 3D models.

Now we move to billboards. These are a popular object in 3D games as they produce resonable looking objects with the overhead of 3D models. They are often used for grass, trees, particle effects and as a LOD technique. These are pre-rendered graphics that are rendered as part of the scene.

Before claiming that Unreal is pre-rendered ask yourself a simple question. What is the point of 3D if every possible screen is already pre-rendered in 2D??

[Domarius]

I found myself still wondering what those two guys were on about! Unreal is pre-rendered???!!?!

I can still only think of one explanation - they were talking about the pre-compilation of the BSP data, in a roundabout way...

So I did a search on a term HohesC mentioned, "SpeedTreeFX". (Which turned up NO results for Google, till I re-entered it as "SpeedTree FX", and even then it only turned up results for "Speed Tree".

Eventually, this is what I found.
http://www.idvinc.com/html/speedtreert.htm
Basically, it's a new technology for rendering beautiful and complex trees, in real-time 3D.
And this page; http://www.idvinc.com/html/speedtree_for_unreal.htm is news that it has been implemented in the next version of the Unreal Engine, so we'll be seeing some pretty cool looking plantlife in games soon.

Now, from what I can gather, this is just an SDK that has really cool algorithms for LOD, wind effects, and other details, that operate really fast, and in the end, the resulting information is passed to your rendering engine (to be rendered in OpenGL, Direct3D) in REAL TIME.

There is NOTHING pre-rendered about this, from what I can tell. (Please correct me if you feel I'm mistaken, anyone.)

It's fine to fantasize about some day where all possibilities are pre-rendered with bitmaps, but then I have to wonder exactly how many changes the user could make to that world - imagine a game like "Magic Carpet 2" where your spells cause the actual terrain heightmap to move in real time, so you can create mountains, canyons, craters, in REAL TIME - how would you pre-render that??

It's my opinion that pre-rendering is a field for the Myst type games, and always will be.

It's all very well to make statements like

...they will tell you're wrong! Don't believe them! You are on the right way.

without backing them up.

I'd really like some further explanation on how you'd make a game like Unreal by pre-rendering everything.

[Unarekin]

I can still only think of one explanation - they were talking about the pre-compilation of the BSP data, in a roundabout way...

Surely you've also thought that they aren't being serious, right?

I, for one, am having severe difficulties believing they aren't just fooling around.

[Domarius]

Heh - actually, that's a more likley theory. I'll go with that one.

[ACE Drink]

Of course they are not serious... their posts are full of irony, theres no question about it. Its funny so many people tried to argue with them... .)

[Domarius]

Well now that you mention it...

Granini: I would like to agree with HohesC - but I would like to suggest to chose the TIFF or Targa picture format since they blow up the amount of memory used. This will qualify your game as one of the big ones!

I must have missed it first time around

[Unarekin]

Hehe, seriously, anybody making claims like this thread has got to be A) joking or B) Severely mentally handicapped.