New indie old school RPG

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.

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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.

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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.

GothicGothicness said:

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 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.

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Told you, I was young and dumb, and my computer was a battered old 386 laptop, replaced with an equally battered 486 laptop. The 386 didn't even have color (making gaming on it annoying). Now I use C++. I also have a dual core processor with an intel graphics chip that dynamically allocates RAM for video as needed. Needs more RAM though, only got 2gb. I always need more RAM.

A good example of being able to reuse a limited number of tiles to make a gorgeous map is the original Age of Wonders. Some of the maps made for that are simply stunning in their detail, and they use only the relatively small sampling of tiles in the stock game. IIRC one of the better mappers was ArcticWolf.

It's funny that this threat went way off on a tangent on game design and development. I'd blame myself, but it's funnier to blame you... Whichever you wants to take credit for it.