need help about 3D Platformers
Hello polycount i need some help about making 3d platformers games 
i have few questions :
1- How can i start blocking the level in a 3d platformer , is it just by placing platforms , or i need to place everything that can be included inside the scene ?
2- Is ther better game engine for 3D platformers ?
3-
Can someone tell what techniques used here for texturing and shading ,
is it hand painted texture aplied to a simple gouraud shader ?
thank you !:)
i have few questions :
1- How can i start blocking the level in a 3d platformer , is it just by placing platforms , or i need to place everything that can be included inside the scene ?
2- Is ther better game engine for 3D platformers ?
3-
Can someone tell what techniques used here for texturing and shading ,
is it hand painted texture aplied to a simple gouraud shader ?
thank you !:)
Replies
2- UNITY has a lot of built in functions that are platformer friendly, and platformer example tutorials.
3- Yes. Most of the objects have a LOT of self illumination, so the texture shines through a lot and the shading is applied relatively little. These textures are also displayed without any kind of Filtering (which blurs pixels together).
is it ok to place self illumination everywhere and if "yes"
do we still need to place light inside the scene ?
The image you provided is of a fairly old game, and 3D tech has come quite a way from back then. So, it all comes down to what kind of target you want to put this on, and that will dictate what you need to do technically to push the performance.
As for the tech itself, self illuminated + really low res + unfiltered textures is what its all about. You want as few textures as possible at a very low bit depth (32 colors maximum, but normally 16 or fewer) and/or vertex colors. Gourd Shading, like Joseph Silverman said, is applied at a very low value on textured surfaces, or can be more powerful on vertex-only ones.
If you really want to go old school then make sure any mesh with moving parts has them separated at the joint, only use direct parenting to bones. Crash Bandicoot had some vertex animation allowing for the characters face to be warped to create different expressions, but it was an anomaly for its time and had to be written mostly in assembly to pull that off.
Most alphas back then were 1bit which made it very easy to use a ton of transparency effects. PS1 could do hardware transparencies but the Saturn couldn't, so keep in mind if you want to emulate the look of that system you'd probably want to go with dithered(checker) alphas.
yep your right this game has about 18 years since its launch in 1996 , its one of my favorite platformer games :poly121:
im not trying to use those old techniques but i realy need to understand how they did it back in the days so i can make my own platformer with the todays technology that has the feel of an old school
one..... but its a liltle bit hard to much the new stuff with old stuff .......:poly122:
do you have any idea how to achieve that ?
this an image of Crash Twin Sanity , released on 2004 , still old but not too old
what do you think about the techniques used here :