when we'll see wesnoth 3D?

[Noyga]

This might be done someday.
However this would need a major rewrite of the graphical engine, and perhaps redo most of the art, which is unlikely to happen in the near future...

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

EVERY GAME DOES NOT HAVE TO BE 3D! Serously, Wesnoth is looking pretty dog-gone impressive as it is. Why do we need or want 3d?

[Flametrooper]

Plus we've got all these good graphics as it is, all Jetryl's hard work (plus even a bit of mine, and that of countless others), would just be wasted.
Anyway, although IF a 3d Wesnoth game out, i would approve, it its very unlikely that will ever happen at all, the universal consensus is basically no, so someone who can please lock it for bandwidth saving.

[Dragon Master]

This should be locked as it's no question that Wesnoth will not be 3D, EVER. I really don't want Wesnoth to become another Sonic.

[Ken_Oh]

First of all, most of you guys need to lighten up. I've seen more-than-decade-old games like Ultima 7 go 3D with a volunteer open source dev team, so it's not entirely out of the question for this one either.

I'd like to point out that it's possible to use 2D sprites for units in a 3D game.

Depends on how much freedom you have to move your camera. If you can move it to look directly from above, then existing 2D sprites will not help. If the camera must look at the same "angle" as now, it can only rotate left and right, then we could use the existing 2D sprites for units, but would have to make new sprites for some terrains (trees, villages,...) - something like splitting them to "surface" part and "profile" part.

That's exactly right. If anyone here has played Ragnarok Online, then you will immediately know how this is done, at least for unit sprites.

[JW]

This should be locked as it's no question that Wesnoth will not be 3D, EVER. I really don't want Wesnoth to become another Sonic.

Calm down pseudo-mod.

btw, Tactics Ogre had a 2d, non-rotating perspective on a 3d environment and 2d sprites.

OMFGZORZ NO WAI!!!!

So yeah, the art could stay and an entire new dimension could be added. - literally

[freim]

Making Wesnoth 3d would be no major problem graphically. Basically you just take the existing art and stand the units up perpendicular to the map, and rotate them as billboards toward the camera. The effect would be much like Medieval Total War.

The map art would have to be redone however. The Mountains in particular are in the wrong perspective for 3d. The villages would have to be replaced by 3d models, but this wouldn't be too difficult, there are many free models of huts around the web.

SDL image system would have to be abandoned and replaced presumably by OpenGL, in other words a total rewrite of the graphics routines.

The real problem though is the Wesnoth graphics code is scattered throughout the codebase. This makes it impossible to do something as basic as page flipping. All the graphics code would have to not only be rewritten, but ripped out of the current functions and completely restructured. Really this should be done anyway, but it would be a big job.

I encourage you to browse around on sourceforge.net some day and look at the wealth of game projects there with the following in mind: how many projects do you see with good art that lacks coders vs projects which has lots of coders, but look like crap.

You will quickly see that the latter completely dwarfs the former. For every competent artist willing to contribute to an open source game you will get 100 coders willing to contribute. The bottom line is that for a number of reasons artists are way harder to attract to open source projects than coders, so your assumption that the art would be trivial to replace and that the main challenge lies with the code just shows a severe lack of insight into the matter.

The same goes for this 3D idea in general. To trow away virtually all the art of one of the few open source game projects which has actually managed to atract quite a few artists would be extremely unwise, not to mention that we use 2D because we actually prefer it over 3D for this type of game.

[Mille]

First of all i want to make clear. I think Wesnoth should stay 2D. Its best for this kind of game and i like to see at least one pixel art strategy game to develop further, and if Wesnoth will develop further this way, one day it will be the best pixel art strategy game ever.
I have really enough of this 3D enthusiasm. Personally i won´t ever play a 3D Wesnoth, beside i don´t think there will be ever a good version with good art.

That doesn´t mean that there isn´t any use of 3D artist for Wesnoth i think.
There are a lot of possibilities for 3D Art. But for what. Here are some ideas, what you can really do better IMHO, if you use 3D Art developing without changing the style of Wesnoth:

1) Isometric Actions.

Buildings and architectures are a good thing to develop in 3D. Wesnoth would greatly improve with more of this graphics i think, but the final results would still have to be 2D graphics for the map.

2) Portrait graphics.

Actually all portraits are in cartoon style. Personally i like this VERY much. But if you want to have more realistic heads and characters they can be done in 3D. Look at Poser to get an idea of what i am talking here. Even if you want to have cartoon style graphics this can be of use. One improvement that can be get out of this additionally are talking animations. This will be much easier to do with programs like poser.

3) Sprite animation

Personally i think even sprite animations can be improved using 3D tools. There are some tools that allow to make moving animations out of the box. The good thing is, that some of them recognize the central of weight in an animation automatically. This is goodway to learn at least how animations look naturally.

4) Story line Graphics.

One good thing of Wesnoth is, that you can do really nice Storylines in Wesnoth. Actually Portrait graphics and maps are the good graphic things in story telling art of Wesnoth. Even here 3D artists can be used to get some landscape backgrounds for example. Look at Bryce for an example what you can do.

What do you think of this?

[irrevenant]

Thank you, Mille. Just as I was thinking of locking this thread, you've managed to move it in a useful direction.

Personally, I don't think Wesnoth 3D will ever happen; or if it does it will be a different game to Wesnoth. But it's not appropriate to moderate based on personal opinion. However, if you're going to discuss this, be more specific. "Make Wesnoth 3D" is far too vague an idea to be meaningfully discussed.

[Toadhead]

Nah a game like this isn't meant to be 3D. Also it'll require a much better computer to play which is not wanted. The game looks beautyful now so why change it?

[Dave]

Wesnoth could work nicely enough if it used a 3D engine instead of a 2D engine. Some things would be worse.....some would be better.

However, Wesnoth is 2D. That's what it's built on, and that's what three years of effort has been invested in. Re-engineering it to use 3D would be akin to building a building and then deciding it would be 'cool' if the building was built using a different type of material and rebuilding it from scratch.

If someone is going to put that kind of effort in, I have a suggestion: why not write an entirely new game? That way, we can have two decent games, one 2D and one 3D, instead of having just one game that possibly has 2D and 3D options.

David

[JW]

If someone is going to put that kind of effort in, I have a suggestion: why not write an entirely new game? That way, we can have two decent games, one 2D and one 3D, instead of having just one game that possibly has 2D and 3D options.

David

I actually really like the idea of having 2 different Wesnoths. As long as mainline gameplay would remain the same between the two I think this is a great thing to be doing.

ps, turin: no need to roll your eyes, I was pointing out the obvious flaw that needed to not go unsaid.

[turin]

I actually really like the idea of having 2 different Wesnoths. As long as mainline gameplay would remain the same between the two I think this is a great thing to be doing.

I wouldn't mind having a 3d Wesnoth either, as long as I could keep playing the 2d one and the quality of the 2d one did not suffer from having a 3d version*. But I think it is a better idea to make a whole new game; Wesnoth, although awesome, is not the only possible game that is fun to play. I would really like to have more (decent) free TBSs.

*: Which is really unlikely - we would end up splitting graphical talent and both would progress only slowly.

[irrevenant]

If someone is going to put that kind of effort in, I have a suggestion: why not write an entirely new game? That way, we can have two decent games, one 2D and one 3D, instead of having just one game that possibly has 2D and 3D options.

Presumably this will work best if the code is refactored so that all the non-visual code (combat, unit specs etc.) can be shared between games?

I wouldn't mind having a 3d Wesnoth either, as long as I could keep playing the 2d one and the quality of the 2d one did not suffer from having a 3d version [Which is really unlikely - we would end up splitting graphical talent and both would progress only slowly].

I don't actually think that's true. IME, there's not a huge amount of overlap between 2d artists and 3d modellers. Both take a lot of time and effort to learn, and require a different set of skills, after all.

[JW]

What Irrevenant said, but I have to point out something that almost everyone is ignoring:

You can use 2d sprites in a 3d environment!!

(Tactics Ogre
Final Fantasy Tactics
Ogre Battle
etc)