Nintendo Revolution: the cheap and powerful alternative...

[Ford Prefect]

Who gives a shit about KOTOR 3? the second one soured the whole damn barrel. I'd rather see what Mass Effect is like, an original property, like the very fun Jade Empire, but promising character freedom like the old Baldur's Gates.

You too? That's one of the games I want to grab a hold of, along with Too Human and Gears of War. Original stuff that's looking pretty damn sweet.

[Mad]

Yeah, I got that and one 'lol nintendo is a kiddy console' reply.

Shh! Don't tell that to the college students in my University game room! The three most popular games are: the GameCube's Smash Bros Melee, PlayStation 2's Soul Calibur 3, and the X-Box's Halo. Each of them seem to get about equal playtime. If only they knew a third of their time was wasted on a "kiddie console."

[Xon]

2D games are considerably simpler in design than 3d games. Most 3d games have sometype of physics, and 3d physics is orders of magnitudes harder & complex than 2d physics.

Nonsense. 3D physics adds (surprise!) one more dimension to 2D physics, but does not necessitate significantly more complexity in any other respect. We're only talking about extremely basic kinematics here, and 3D vector math is not much harder than 2D vector math. Do you know what "orders of magnitude" means? I'd love to see anyone who seriously has 100 or 1000 times more trouble with 3D vector math than 2D vector math.

While the maths isnt that different between 2d & 3d, it is the implementation that counts. 2d games can often get away with integer maths instead of floatpoint, and the "physics" involved in most 2d games are just moving integer positions and having some timers count down.

3d games can feature the full gauntlet of physics, but they are all iterative maths. The simple order of which the calculations are preformed in will dratrically effect the numerical stability of the system.

It's the graphics where 3D engines require a lot more power, and that's because they render things in a totally different way, ie- with real models instead of just moving sprites around.

There is also processing hit detection (the 3rd dimension adds a fair amount of checking todo, also more complex shapes too) which is more complex and thus slower.

[Mad]

While the maths isnt that different between 2d & 3d, it is the implementation that counts. 2d games can often get away with integer maths instead of floatpoint, and the "physics" involved in most 2d games are just moving integer positions and having some timers count down.

3d games can feature the full gauntlet of physics, but they are all iterative maths. The simple order of which the calculations are preformed in will dratrically effect the numerical stability of the system.

There is also processing hit detection (the 3rd dimension adds a fair amount of checking todo, also more complex shapes too) which is more complex and thus slower.

That's going to drastically affect processing time, but will not drastically affect the size of the executable code. None of that has anything to do with your original claim: "The cartridge size puts a hard cap on the size of the content & data which inturn puts a hard cap on the overall complexity of the data and thus the game engine which uses the data."

Of course, you don't need 3d graphics to be complex. Text-based games can be sophisticated, too, without the need for any graphics at all.

[Vendetta]

You too? That's one of the games I want to grab a hold of, along with Too Human and Gears of War. Original stuff that's looking pretty damn sweet.

Too Human is looking ace. It's been too long since Eternal Darkness, and whilst Twin Snakes was nice, it wasn't the kn dof new and intriging thing that Silicon Knights should be giving us.

I'll always prefer a new IP over a or franchise, even if they aren't the "safe" decision.

[Dooey Jo]

While the maths isnt that different between 2d & 3d, it is the implementation that counts. 2d games can often get away with integer maths instead of floatpoint, and the "physics" involved in most 2d games are just moving integer positions and having some timers count down.

It is true that games, which run on platforms that do not have floating-point support usually resort to simple bounding sphere and rectangle collision modeling, and sometimes collision maps, because the more accurate (well, technically, the collision map is as accurate as one can get, but I digress) vector math is too slow. However (personal anecdote warning!), I'm actually now working on a game that is 2D (in appearance. It's for the PC, BTW), but has a physics system that is exactly the way Mike describes. To make it work in 3D I'd only need to add a coordinate and change a few functions. Now that's awesome But. (And I feel like I'm sort of beating a dead horse now, so please don't think that I'm picking on you or anything, I'm just trying to make a point about game design ) it doesn't really add any complexity to the game and game play, just superficially decreases the complexity of the code...