GothicGothicness
SasqWatch
- Joined
- October 25, 2006
- Messages
- 6,292
wrote a complete RPG engine once, in QuickBASIC. After hardcoding in much of the graphics (I was young and dumb, so sue me) the source file was almost 5mb in size. It also wouldn't run with 640k, though the same engine would on my 2mb 486 laptop. Too many images being drawn to the screen wiped out the memory, causing it to crash every time. That was just the intro screen; in game, and if I had any effects going using the few animations I had, even my 486 drug to nearly a standstill.
My friend quickBasic is a newbie language, it is not strange it was that slow and had so many problems. At that time you needed to use C or C++ or even turbo pascal but not quickBasic if you want speed and a decently compiled file!
I dfon't think that modern graphics cards are optimized for 2D. They're always optimized for 3D.
I have written 2d engines for modern graphics cards, it works great, there is no problem to get high performance in 2d, most new cards have a good fill-rate and enough texture memory to please most people. You can fit a lot in 1024 mb of graphics ram!
The price depends on the style, if you make tile-based 2d you can re-use the tiles a lot and make a great looking game without costing a lot of money.
However if you want each background to be 1080p hand-drawn picture, it is going to cost a loooooooooooooooooooot to produce that game. Not to talk about hand-drawn animated 1080p scenes.
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2006
- Messages
- 6,292