Quote:
Originally Posted by The Stinger
The problem, IMO, is that the enemies and other objects are(most of the time) realistic.
The enemies are real photos of people, and not cartoonish like in Duke Nukem 3d.
Point is that if you want them to look good you need a damn good 3d modeler and skinner.
Which brings you to the 3d model to sprite process. It would be a waste to turn such a model into sprites, too much work has to be put in to make such a mode.
Further more, turning every angle and motion into a sprite would take a whole lot of space.
The standard soldier has 91 sprites, which translates into 23mb in high quality sprites.
A 3D model would have around 1mb for the skin(that's really high quality) and 200kb for the model and animations. That's more than 19 times smaller than a good model.
And an other huge problem is that each sprites needs to be loaded into the memory, which takes up a lot of loading time. With a 3D model this would be a lot faster.
So overall, a really good quality 3D model is IMO recommended, it saves loading times and space.
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I suspected this, which leads me to another crazy idea I had.
This will probably never happen any time soon (if ever), but imagine a revamp of ROTT's sprite system where: a live human steps into a room with 32 cameras recording from 32 different angles, dressed like a generic ROTT enemy; he goes through all the motions (i.e. dying, firing, getting hit by a bullet, running, walking, crouching) and there could be many variants on each factor (especially dying); instead of being photographs, this is recorded as film; the film is then chopped down to 8 frames per second, and compressed using the same compression technology that is used for compressing traditional movie files.
You could then add algorithims for gibs, blood, stains, bullet hits, bullet holes in walls and sprites, for an infinite 2d variety. There could also be a filter where certain colors on the sprites can change to different hues, maybe even mix and match simple things like faces, hats, hair, to create a large pool of similar but distinct enemy characters.
It's basically the same motion capture method they used for ROTT, on steroids. Instead of 8 different angles, there's 32. Instead of 2-4 frames per second, it's 8-16. Instead of one animation death for each enemy, there are dozens, based on how they are shot and with what weapon.
With today's computers being having exponentially more memory and space that they did back in 1994, this could theoretically be possible.