Hi guys, I am wondering if panda 3d got any support for sprites to use in 2.5D game? I couldn’t really find much on the manual, should I just manipulate pictures?
Thanks in advance.
sprites, as in real-true-100%-hardware-sprites … are a thing of the last millenium. since sprites where introduced in the early computer age to allow hardware-accelerated blitting without putting extra-load on the cpu (which was too slow back then). since those times computing performance literally thousand-fold and noone bothers to use real hardware-sprites anymore. with the exception of cursors (depending on your OS).
so what the average game-developer would do is, creating a flat surface as 3d-geometry and let the gpu deal with that.
sometimes you’d want to automatically rotate them to face the camera. in this case the thing you’r looking for is called “billboards”. i believe there are a few sentences about that on the manual and the animated-texture example should feature this too.
I’ve actually been wondering about this too. I don’t know anything about how it is actually done, but Blitz3D does support sprites that are a LOT faster than a regular two-polygon mesh. (It is possible to have over a thousand of them on screen at once without any big slowdown.)
I don’t know if these are the hardware-sprites that Thomas is speaking of, but if it is, why would nobody want to use them anymore? Even if computers ARE much faster than they used to be?
That’s particles. You can do that in Panda most easily using the particle system, but all of the “sprites” have to have the same texture image.
If you want to have thousands of these things, each with a different texture, then you have to be prepared to write a fairly sophisticated shader.
David
My idea was to use sprites to develop the game faster, I found some info on a topic in panda forum (a pretty old one). I don’t think I will have time and the artistic talent to use 3d models =)
Well, thanks for the replies.