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GarageGames Announces Torque 2D Support of Tiger
GarageGames writes "GarageGames, creators of the popular indie-focused Torque Game Engine, announced at MacWorld 2005 that their new Torque Game Engine will support Apple's OS X platform, Tiger. Torque 2D is all about rapid development for games. It takes care of the technology, and the developer can focus on gameplay and art. By extending the current Torque Game Engine platform, indie developers will have a powerful tool to compete in the exciting and growing arena of 2D gaming. In addition to Torque 2D's support of the upcoming Tiger OSX, other GarageGames products like the Torque Game Engine 1.4, Dark Horizons: Lore Gold, Torque ShowTool Pro, Zap! and many more will also be supporting Tiger."
Have we come full circle now? 2-D was how gaming began, since vector/geometry based imaging wasn't really feasible in the 70's and 80's. While 2-D had a brief renaissance in the late 90's thanks to the fighting genre and games with photographic imaging, is there something in 3-D gaming that's "hit the wall" with regards to gaming evolution I don't know about?
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compete in the exciting and growing arena of 2D gaming
Now, don't get me wrong, I like a good 2D game just as much as the next guy, but I'm not necessarily sure that it's a budding new market.
even the trolls aren't touching this story.
is 2D really that dead?
or are all the Apple fans/haters already in the Mac mini story posting "omg this is a dupe!"?
I love 2D gaming... but lately the only way to get has been throug the GBA or the spare title here and there that might end up on the XB/PS2... this should be interesting.
In answer to the questions about why 2D matters, 2D is used a lot now for indie games, which is Garagegames's focus. 2D gaming is growing because indie gaming is growing. You may never see a game in your local CompUSA that uses 2D, but there are a lot of new 2D games being produced and sold over the Internet. Furthermore, by using 3D acceleration technology for 2D, you can make much better 2D games than used to be possible. Rotating sprites, per-pixel alpha blending, and additive blending are all now easy and fast. Search the indie gaming sites and you'll see that there's some great stuff out there.
I think a lot of the people who have posted here already forget the fact that irregardless if the game is 2D or 3D if its a good game its a good game.
The option of having something like Torque 2D will definately allow us to see a revivement of many of lost genres such as adventure games as well as give indies an easier method of making puzzle games and more. So personally I think this option is great to have since it will allow me as a developer to do my work more productively.
Probably, we have hit a considerable wall in 3d game design. The amount of effort it takes to build characters, textures, and the like is incredible. Within 2d, game authors built up a substantial set of tools to automate and reduce the effort of building a game. As an example, Final Fantasy Legend 3 appears to use metatiles to store its towns and levels. This way, you can simply design one house, put a sign above the door that indiates "Items" or "Inn" and your work is mostly done. Certainly, its not perfect, especially for artists who fight against repetitive graphics.
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Ease of Use
Well, for the most part, 2D is a lot easier to play. You have an entire dimension that you don't need to worry about.
In 2D, you've got decisions that you make based on: X +/-. Y +/-. At any one point, you're adjusting in one of four different directions.*
Once you enter "true" 3D into the equation, it just gets more complicated. Now you need to think about X, Y, and Z. Things are now automatically twice as hard.**
This creates a couple of problems: Games requiring a higher learning curve, especially the first time you play a 3D anything. Control needs to be more precise - bad controls make it impossibly frustrating (think Tomb Raider or being in a firefight in GTA3). To some people, these problems outweight the benefits that 3D brings along.
That's why a most RTS games are still 2D (Warcraft III is ~2D, it is just presented as a 3D world). An exception is Homeworld, which, as far as I know, never got really popular.
In my opinion, fighting games are still better in 2D. I'd rather play any Capcom fighting game as opposed to Tekken. DOA is an exception, but DOA has boobs.
FPS, however, are really a whole different animal. FPSs, I would argue, are not really 3D For the most part they are what I would call "2.5D". The interface by which you interact is 2D. You move your cross hair in an X-Y set of planes. Sure, your character moves on all three dimensions, but your trigger isn't moving forward or backward. You are.
Movement is handled in 3D, but most movement in FPSs is very easy. Running and jumping is about it. There's no elaborate hold-on-to-the-railing, spin off the pole kind of moves. At most you have elaborate hopping, like in the first Half-Life or any of the new Halo 2 multiplayer maps.
What's harder? Hopping across a trainyard while shooting foes in an FPS or doing the same in an over the shoulder shooter? The FPS wins. It breaks shooting/aiming into a 2D process (X,Y), moving into a 2D process (X,Z) with occasional use of Y (jumping). In effect, the FPS is two different 2D interfaces that form a 3D game. That's why PC gamers LOVE the keyboard and mouse. It breaks down the tasks very easily.
Nostalgia
Another answer for their popularity is nostalgia. This can be its own mega-essay so I won't dwell on it for too long. But consider these points:
The jury is still out on whether people will be nostalgic for Jet Moto, Battle Arena Toshinden, and Mario 64 in 5 year's time.
Art
I'm going to go right out and say it: I think most 3D games look exactly the same. For the most part, you're emulating a "real" 3D world. If you were playing Half-Life and suddenly a bad guy from Unreal showed up and Lara Croft ran in from the side, it would only be jarring considering the characters and who they represent.
To contract, imagine playing Ninja Gaiden (original) and seeing Yoshi pop out, followed by Pac-Man and a Demon from UO. That's jarri
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Oops, my bad. I didn't mean vectors as in "Asteroids" but more in terms of later games like "I, Robot." I should have said something like "polygon" or "face shading." The current mind set of most graphics programmers now-a-days is segregated into "3-D vectors vs. 2-D rasters" and completely overlooks the history of 2-D vector imaging.
Though, at the time, 2-D vector images required their own separate display technology. Attempting vectors on a standard CRT wasn't possible at the time, the control circutry for the light guns in standard raster displays were just too low resoution. You needed special hardware to change the light gun behavior from scanning to directional placement. This was similar to the old distinction between plotters and dot matrix printers.
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