when we'll see wesnoth 3D?

[Prometheus]

As the focal distance goes to infinity, perspective rendering converges to isometric.

There's no such thing as focal distance in computer graphics hardware. You're thinking of an actual camera, which needs a lens to redirect light rays for rendering on a flat surface. There is no need to focus computer geometry.

[zaimoni]

No physical focal distance. But it's emulated, all the same. What computer graphics doesn't naturally have is things like chromatic and spherically aberration; what it does have naturally is everything you'd want a lens for physically, and then some.

When the emulated position of the camera is "grossly far away", with a correspondingly "huge" magnification, there is no humanly visible difference between isometric projection and perspective projection. E.g., taking a view of the battlefield from a spy satellite.

And that does require a (perfect) virtual lens for the magnification; a camera obscura won't do magnification for you.

[notarikon]

Benefits of a 3d system you may or may not have thought of:

- 3d rendered tiles are faster
- You could use procedural textures for some/many of the tiles to cut down on final filesize
- Realtime shadows and/or dynamic lighting - no more hand drawn shadows, keeps and villages could radiate light at night, caves could implement a dynamic LOS for that spooky feel
- REAL day and night modes, and everything in between, without having to draw multiple versions of sprites and their animations
- Speedtree (Just kidding, but imagine it...)
- Particle engines for spells, fire and smoke effects
- As mentioned, 3d models for the characters in the dialog boxes (or anywhere else you'd like)
- Each 3d hex tile would be composed of 6 triangles - this means you could have up to 6 units and/or terrain items per hex

Just my 2c

[zookeeper]

Benefits of a 3d system you may or may not have thought of:

All of that is pretty much self-evident...except of course the few that didn't make any sense.

[notarikon]

Only a few didn't make any sense?

3d rendered tiles are faster
I threw this in just in case some people thought that a conversion to 3d would make the game more intensive and *slower* - not true

You could use procedural textures for some/many of the tiles to cut down on final filesize
Procedural texturing is when you use a mathematical equation to generate a texture such as grass, stone or dirt rather than saving a large picture file. At the expense of a couple of extra seconds on initial load, the textures can be created automatically and save download bandwidth and hdd space.

Realtime shadows and/or dynamic lighting
At the moment, any shadows are drawn into the sprites, with realtime shadows, you could create these on the fly and a) reduce the need for artists to add them, and b) have the angle, length and darkness adjusted on the fly depending on the time of day and environment. Buildings such as keeps and villages could emanate light during night from their "windows", areas such as caves or dungeons could be restricted to a realistic, flickering radius of light depending on the strength of the torch/lighting magic/item that the player's unit possesses.

REAL day and night modes, and everything in between, without having to draw multiple versions of sprites and their animations
Rather than a bright tileset for daytime, and a dark tileset for nighttime, have one set that has its gamma adjusted for any hour of the day or night. Saves a lot of artist workload, and provides a gradual fade through dawn & dusk.

Speedtree (Just kidding, but imagine it...)
SpeedTreeRT is a C++-based library designed to provide access to SpeedTree data for real-time applications. SpeedTreeRT loads the procedural definitions (.spt files) created by SpeedTreeCAD (a stand-alone Windows® application), converts the procedural definition into 3D geometry, computes LOD and leaf billboarding based on the camera position, handles wind effects, and performs numerous other tasks via a well-organized, easy-to-use API. As the SpeedTreeRT library uses no calls that tie it to any particular rendering engine or operating system, it is cross platform and applicable to almost any situation where high quality, three dimensional trees must be rendered in real-time.

In other words, realistic, unique trees that move in the wind and draw FAST. Oh look, procedural too, so nice & small As used in Oblivion, NWN2, Gothic 3, Fatal Inertia (PS3), Saints Row, Project Gotham Racing 3 ... and more

Particle engines for spells, fire and smoke effects
Pretty explosions, dazzling spell effects, etc. Self-explanatory this one, I hope.

As mentioned, 3d models for the characters in the dialog boxes (or anywhere else you'd like)
Rather than the static cartoon image present whenever dialog is initiated, we could use either a static or animated 3d model of a head or bust instead. Warcraft 3 springs to mind.

Each 3d hex tile would be composed of 6 triangles - this means you could have up to 6 units and/or terrain items per hex
Draw a hexagon. Now draw six lines from the centre out to each of the joins/corners of the outside of the hexagon. See the six triangles? These are how the graphics card sees the hex, as triangles. While we'd see a 6-sided hex with the relevant texture, we could take advantage of this to centre either units or terrain objects such as trees or rocks within each of the six triangles - no more one unit per space limitation.

[turin]

REAL day and night modes, and everything in between, without having to draw multiple versions of sprites and their animations
Rather than a bright tileset for daytime, and a dark tileset for nighttime, have one set that has its gamma adjusted for any hour of the day or night. Saves a lot of artist workload, and provides a gradual fade through dawn & dusk.

Um... why exactly would this be possible in 3d but not in 2d?

In fact, I think we already do this (and we're currently 2d, if you hadn't noticed).

[Dave]

REAL day and night modes, and everything in between, without having to draw multiple versions of sprites and their animations
Rather than a bright tileset for daytime, and a dark tileset for nighttime, have one set that has its gamma adjusted for any hour of the day or night. Saves a lot of artist workload, and provides a gradual fade through dawn & dusk.

Um... why exactly would this be possible in 3d but not in 2d?

In fact, I think we already do this (and we're currently 2d, if you hadn't noticed).

We do it by caching, which is memory intensive. Doing it as the screen is rendered each time is too expensive in SDL. Doing it in 2D using OpenGL is possible though.

[DDR]

Try giving the 2d wesnoth graphics (pict at x,y) 3-d quards (pict at x,y,z). When viewed from above, it looks the same, but moving the camera down would make it so that the map looks like it's on a plane, and the units are standing up. Start Simple.

[Viliam]

Oh, this thread is a few months old, please let's not start it again.

Doing 3D graphics is difficult. By "difficult" I mean:
* no volunteer to rewrite Wesnoth to 3D
* probably no 3D user-generated content in future

Because production of Wesnoth is completely based on volunteers, the fact than we have none for 3D remake, should be enough to stop discussion. Or we can go around for month saying "Someone should do this!" "Yes, someone really should!" but nothing will happen except people being annoyed by the idea. Look how old is this thread... and the number of 3D models contributed so far is... zero. And we would need hundreds of them.


Surely there exist some free software developers with good 3D engine-writing or modelling skills. But there is very few of them (compared with those who do 2D graphics). And they have other projects to participate. I guess it is more interesting for them to work on a real 3D game, instead of doing a 3D view for a 2D game which does not need one.

Really, Wesnoth does not need 3D. The only reason why people want 3D in Wesnoth, is becaused they have seen this in other games. (Which is essentially the same reason why people who play much Warcraft sometimes want also Wesnoth to use gold and lumber, though the game does not need it.) That is almost like adding 3D to Chess... yes, you can do it, and it looks nice, but it does not improve the game. (Yes, there are commercial 3D Chess games, but those people are paid for doing 3D models. And Chess has much less units than Wesnoth.) People able to do good 3D models are very rare compared with people who can do good 2D pictures. We would have problems finding them.

[Elvish_Pillager]

and the number of 3D models contributed so far is... zero.

Actually, a few 3d models of Wesnoth units have been posted in the Art forums over the years.

[Odineye]

I have the answer.

http://unity3d.com/unity/

Make a clear box with an image on it of units. Use the land tiles to make a map. It'd be all manual but it could work. All the images are there already, just need to be assembled in 3D.

Possible cool things
Add terrain hieght. It could be completely decorative. It could be done by laying a hex grid over a 3D generated landmass. The imgs would be the same, just lumpy. Or it could be multiple "Flat" layers of the default images. (i.e. =-_) Where = is say a mountain; - is some grass; _ is deep water. It would be viewed from Wesnoth's unique just-off-plum view in used in current Wesnoth. Terrain could have advantage. Maybe +5%

An effective test run would be to recreate a campaign. With the general 'newness' of Unity will be a large factor in the quality production the Tutorial campaign. It will be a decent judge of Unity's capability.

[Gambit]

Please don't revive old, dead threads.

The developers have zero interest in making Wesnoth 3D. Locked.