Comments on: Is There Any Reason To Use Pure 2D Engine Any More?

By: TomQS

TomQS — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:06:03 +0000

I have been developing a 2D engine for a couple of years now.
By engine I mean the code, various editors and an overall refined workflow for building games.
And only now I am able to prototype a high quality side scroller in 3 days, by writing only a 100-200 lines of C-ish code and doing some little work with my editor.
If I had the ability to work on it full time, the time could have been probably halfed, meaning maybe 1-2 years of a single man development.
It is not easy to roll your own engine, but the pleasure and rewards are high once it reaches more mature stages of development.

By: Spunkmeyer

Spunkmeyer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:03:49 +0000

I use my own engine based on OpenGL most of the time. I don’t know how long it would take to program such an engine fulltime with experienced coders around. Maybe some months?

By: Juuso

Juuso — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:52:49 +0000

@guy: Jake (whose comments you can see for example in this blog post) has done that more than once. From what I know he did not approach BFG as “what if I get ripped off?” attitude. He has published several games with them and ended up getting hired by them.

I think BFG might have pretty standardized terms for developers. I think the “rip off” part is not the first thing to worry about.

Back to the original topic…

… what engines are you guys using? Libs?

By: guy

guy — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:55:35 +0000

@Fili:
I think you misunderstood Juuso’s original comment. He means that you could render any 2d graphic with a 3d engine(just using two polygons and put a texture on top to display the image plane).
Also the graphics-cards compatibility is not really an argument against 3D engines. It always depends on the feature-set the engine uses. For example if the engine would use the Fixed Function Pipeline rather than shaders(where you have compatibility issues with the different shader models: SM 1.1, 2.0,3.0,4.0, …) to render stuff then it’s pretty much guaranteed to work on older hardware too.

btw. anyone feels like answering my other question above?

By: guy

guy — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:37:50 +0000

well, I use DirectX9 only no other stuff but it takes like a year minimum to even build a small engine. So if you need some special feature in your game that other 2d engines won’t give you writing your own engine is always an option.

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:14:18 +0000

Great comments. It’s definitely opened my mind back up to 2d a bit. Coming from doing a particular game written in C in 2d (Amiga) and then trying to (sort of) remake it with a 3d engine (JME) I find a lot of the ‘challenges’ I faced with 2d aren’t there so much (animation, movement, etc).

However — all the comments got me thinking that I’m really comparing 2d tools and apis (and I use that word lightly) of the 19xx.. well we won’t say exactly when :) with today’s way of doing things and available libraries.

So, out of curiosity, what 2d frameworks/libraries do some of you build off of?

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:01:37 +0000

scope. KISS.

By: guy

guy — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:46:50 +0000

yeah I was more referring to 2d polygons that can be deformed

By: Kris

Kris — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:12:34 +0000

This is assuming we want to use models for 2D games… all my games are pixel art-ish and created in Photoshop. I have no need for a 3rd dimension… why complicate things?

By: guy

guy — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:12:58 +0000

I wrote my own 3d engine together with a pal and now we’re only doing 2d stuff with it. I think it’s better because it’s not sprite based and you can render and deform polygons(don’t know if that is possible with most 2d engines).

But I have another question, it’s not really related but since the forums are closed I didn’t know where else to post it(maybe someone can give good links for some indie forum for general questions such as this one?):

Say you made a game. Say you want it to
sell on a portal like BFG. You sent them a mail and
they are interested. I never did anything like this before
so how do you manage to get out a good deal and not being
ripped off. So for someone like me this is entirely new
territory and I don’t want to take them advantage of that.
So how do you do it?