Strides Interactive

Jedi Wing 2 Updates - Sprites are ass in 3DFiled Under: Jedi Wing 2

In 2D games development, sprites are the bulk of trade for representing game objects.

In 3D games development, for hybrids especially, sprites are still important. However, there is a problem. In 3D, we don’t just render surfaces, we render vertex buffers.

Of course, that alone isn’t the crux, but it’s known that we should always avoid switching textures during rendering. That’s when the ass kick into to design of the sprites.

Now, if sprites were individually designed, then we have a problem, each instance of this sprite requires texture switching, which will slow down rendering (due to the transfer of texture in and out of memory, bus is slow here).

Therefore, sprites have to be grouped into logical categories, which causes a constraint to the design of the game. This, is ASS.

This means that we cannot anyhow insert new game objects into the game without consideration for texture arrangements.

Of course, empty texture space, such as using 1024×1024 instead of 512×512 prematurely can help preempt such possibilities, but memory usage becomes a concern then, limiting the number of categories possible.

On top of that, sprites have to be ordered manually, as opposed to what DirectX offered. This is due to alpha testing which in this case, screws up if the textures are loaded into the buffers in the wrong sequence. Since alpha testing is off as well as Z-depth, we’ll need to sort the rendering order manually.

What an ass!

Tags: Jedi Wing 2